RIDE FOR LIFE EDITOR'S NOTE: Please see update to this story below

NASHVILLE - Erin Brady Worsham, a 44-year-old artist paralyzed by disease, is drawing a squiggly line on a computer screen by arching her dark brown eyebrows.

A tiny wire taped above her eyebrows runs to a keyboard on her wheelchair and allows her to manipulate the image on the screen.

The process is excruciatingly slow, but Worsham is patient. The artist, who can neither move nor breathe on her own, will spend about 250 hours creating another of the colorful, bold modern illustrations that are gaining national attention.

Worsham - a mother, wife and quadriplegic - had spent her waking days and nights at the computer, secure in the thought that she could continue her life's work in her home until her body no longer will let her. Until now.

The state-subsidized private nursing care that takes over while her husband and primary caregiver, Curry, sleeps at night is scheduled to end as part of cuts in the Tenn-Care health coverage program for the poor, uninsured and disabled. When the funding stops, it will leave the family without the around-the-clock care Worsham needs.

"It would drastically change our lives," Curry Worsham said. "We would do everything we could before we would resort to the nursing-home option, but that's something that always looms there."

Worsham's fear is that the ventilator she uses to breathe will stop suddenly in the night, and no one will hear her gasps for air.

In whispered, slurred words that her husband strains to understand and then repeats aloud like a game of charades, she says, "It's only a matter of time before my husband is so exhausted he doesn't hear my ventilator alarm."

Worsham was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in 1994 after she noticed a weakness in the muscles in her feet and ankles that caused her to plod around the house with a thud.

The news was crushing. Besides being a professional artist, she had been a dancer and actress in regional and dinner theaters. Framed photos of her in "You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown," "Oklahoma!" and "Fiddler on the Roof" line the walls of her home.

ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease for the New York Yankees first baseman who suffered from it, attacks nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord, progressively stripping the brain's ability to control muscle movement. In most patients, the body becomes paralyzed but the mind stays sharp.

(PHOTO CAPTION: Nashville artist Erin Brady Worsham, left, talks with her husband and caregiver, Curry Worsham. Almost totally immobilized by Lou Gehrig's disease, Erin Worsham faces the ominous prospect of being dropped from the rolls of TennCare, which would be a disaster in her case because she needs the help of a ventilator to breathe and requires around the clock monitoring.)

"I mourned every time something disappeared or went away," Worsham said of her ability to move her legs, arms, toes and fingers.

Most of all, she dreaded the day she would no longer be able to breathe on her own. At first she vowed she would rather die.

But a day after her diagnosis, after six years of trying to have a child, she conceived what she calls a "miracle baby" and wanted to live more than ever. She's been on a ventilator since Thanksgiving 1997.

"I have stopped questioning why this happened. I just want to live and do my work," she said.

Her illustrations, which she conceptualizes in her mind then draws and paints on the computer, have been displayed in hospitals, universities, publications and at festivals. The Society of the Arts in Healthcare selected them for a traveling exhibit that will appear in hospitals around the country.

With few places left to borrow money, the family is teetering on the edge of financial collapse and can't afford the kind of private duty nursing care Worsham needs.

Curry Worsham quit his sales job years ago to take care of his wife and son, 7-year-old Daniel. The family survives on Social Security, credit cards, loans, help from relatives and commissions from Worsham's artwork.

The nurse comes to their home five nights a week, from 11 p.m. to 11 a.m., giving him time to rest. A sitter stays the other two nights.

The nursing service was supposed to end Jan. 1 because of cuts in the state's $5.3 billion expanded Medicaid program known as TennCare. The state wants to remove 200,000 people from the rolls and split benefits into two parts.

The uncertainty is painful for the Worshams, who have written letters to the governor and to newspapers.

"It's a source of great trepidation that this could go away," Curry Worsham said. "The sooner it gets fixed, the better."

The irony, he said, is that nursing-home care - which his wife would qualify for if she lost private nursing care - is more expensive than what she has been receiving.

"It makes no sense," he said. "Her quality of life and quality of care is much better here. She has been able to have a remarkably full life."

Ride for Life Editor's Note:

Erin Brady Worsham wrote and illusrated an article for MDA's Quest Magazine in June 2001 called "LIFE ON THE VENT: The Other Side of the Mountain."

You can view Erin's art work at http://express.anne-t.com/gallerin.htm

NASHVILLE - A federal appeals court panel Thursday issued a stay of a lower court's order to reinstate TennCare enrollees and set a Jan. 8 date to hear arguments from both sides.

On Dec. 18, U.S. District Court Judge William Haynes Jr. ordered the state government to re-enroll those it had cut from TennCare during a re-verification program that began July 1.

Advocates for TennCare users have said from the beginning that the re-verification process was badly flawed and resulted in cutting eligible people from TennCare, a contention that Haynes upheld with his court order.

But Tennessee Attorney General Paul Summers appealed Haynes' decision to the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati, where a three-judge panel granted the state's motion for a stay of the lower court's order.

Haynes' ruling would do "untold damage" to the state, costing it as much as $250 million and creating widespread confusion among Tenn-Care enrollees, Summers wrote in his motion for a stay.

In a statement issued Thursday, Gov. Don Sundquist said: "We are pleased that the 6th Circuit has granted an emergency stay and look forward to an objective review of the case. "We are hopeful the stay will be made permanent and that ultimately the state's appeal will be successful."

TennCare spokeswoman Lola Potter said the state had been prepared to mail re-enrollment letters this weekend to those who had already been removed from TennCare.

The $5.9 billion joint federal-state program provides medical care for the poor, the disabled and the otherwise uninsured.

"We were hoping for a stay," Potter said of the appeals court's ruling, "and we got one."

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