Girlfriend in a coma

>> Accusations fly as mother, lover battle for motionless woman

by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

Amid a storm of hurtful accusation and vicious invective, Carolyn Royes lies in a bed at St. Mary’s Hospital, motionless except for the occasional eye movement. The 27 year old has suffered in silence since July 2000 when an operation to remove her gall bladder went wrong.
Royes, already frail from chronic sickle cell anemia, was allergic to the morphine that doctors administered during the operation and was further damaged by improper intubation, according to her medical chart. “When they put the ventilator down her throat they put it into the wrong side of the esophagus, in a way that caused her to lack oxygen to the brain for 15 minutes,” says Ura Greenbaum, of the Association for the Defence of People and Property under Public Curatorship. “They caught the error but too late.”

In her sad state, Royes remains popular. “You can tell by her eyes whether she likes somebody or not,” says Nadra Nagee, Royes’s 24-year-old girlfriend, who says that up until the botched operation she was rarely apart from Royes, whom she met through a telephone dating service three years ago.

Now Nagee’s chance of being able to sit with her Valentine has been reduced following a recent decision by the Public Curator of Quebec to award Dorrel Reid, Royes’s mother, custody of her daughter. “Her mother never accepted our relationship and never accepted that Carolyn chose me over her,” says Nagee.

Royes, who spent part of her youth in a group home, was placed under government curatorship following a meeting on February 2001 in which Nagee opposed the suggestion that Royes be returned to her mother. Caught in the crossfire, a perplexed provincial bureaucrat opted to place Royes under public curatorship.

Nagee says that Reid left several hostile messages, complete with racist epithets (Nagee is of East Indian descent), on her answering machine in the months following that decision and once—with a vigorous swat—physically curtailed Nagee from holding Royes’s motionless hand. Nagee has reported these incidents to the police and a decision on whether Reid will face charges is expected March 13.

Conversely, Royes’s mother has also complained to police about Nagee, who once urged doctors to take the once-comatose girl off of life support. “Carolyn once told me that she never wanted to be kept artificially alive with life support. I had the right to tell her doctor,” says Nagee.

The gay divorcée

Royes’s mother has been unavailable for comment but curator watchdog Ura Greenbaum has taken up the Reid case. “Documents prove,” he says, “that Nadra Nagee is a fraud.” He notes that Nagee claims to have cohabited with Royes from January 1999 to July 2000. But in divorce documents filed last year Nagee testified that she lived with her husband Gurmakh Singh in an apartment on Côte-Vertu from October 21, 1998 to October 21, 2001. They divorced last fall after Nagee sponsored Singh for immigration. “If she’s a lesbian how come she’s married to a guy? If she’s in a fake marriage then that’s immigration fraud,” says Greenbaum.

Nagee insists she was with Carolyn throughout: “Carolyn’s name is on my lease. I was always with her since the day we met.”

Greenbaum also accuses Nagee of illegally collecting welfare while her husband was gainfully employed. He also says that Nagee laid charges of harassment against her janitor last year and then attempted to use it as grounds for a rent reduction.
And Greenbaum thinks that Nagee’s intervention that kept Royes from being returned to her mother’s care should never have happened. “She’s not a relative. She has no business in a family council only open to family members. She infiltrated that meeting,” says Greenbaum.
Nagee considers such information as “an effort to defame me,” and notes that she has nothing to gain from the struggle except time with the person she loves; a difficult situation for a lesbian whose girlfriend’s mother won’t accept her. “I often show up at Carolyn’s bedside and put flowers or new pillows or put her in new pyjamas and when I return I notice that somebody has had them removed,” says Nagee.

Nagee also fears that Reid is unequipped to deal with Royes, who is currently being weaned off a respirator. “She cannot be placed in a private home, her medical condition alone is too complicated,” says Nagee. But Greenbaum notes that Reid is an experienced caregiver who has long run a home for mentally disabled, for which the Douglas Hospital commended her last October. :