I remember Terri. Do you??
Posted by Raven on March 30th, 2007
I remember. Do you??
Saturday, March 31, will mark the two-year anniversary of my sister Terri Schiavo’s death by dehydration. Not a day passes that my family does not think of my sister and relive the horrific images of her needless and brutal death at the hands of those who deliberately set out to kill her.
Sadly not a day goes by where many people remember Terri. Or other disabled people just like her.
As hideous as it was, the truth is, long before Terri’s case made headlines, the removal of basic care – food and water – was becoming commonplace. It continues to happen every day across our country oftentimes in cases, like Terri’s, where the patient does not suffer from any life-threatening condition.
Much of the problem that exists stems from a blind acceptance of misinformation that has moved us from a firm belief in the sanctity of life to a “quality of life” mindset, which says that some lives are not worth living.
It happens with 2 and 3 year old handicapped children, right here in America. It happens with elderly people who have no one to advocate for them. It happens to brain injury victims who have no memory.
The sad fact is we have become a nation that spends billions trying to find the perfect body, while ignoring the condition of our collective soul; where altruism seems to be a thing of the past, and moral relativism has become a bona fide religion
And our ideas of beauty and worth are more important than the petty matters of life and death. Since we define beauty and worth together, so often, people with any form of handicap are shunned; we look for excuses why they would be better off dead. We have lost our humanity.
Combined with a popular media selling the notion that killing people in certain conditions is an act of compassion, one can understand why people with disabilities are in danger.
The stories of these people being in horrible dilapidating condition, in uncontrollable pain are the picture media paints for us all. But those of us who work with people, kids and young adults, with disability, KNOW BETTER. We have spoken out. We have blogged. And we’ve been called Bible Thumping Freaks. We’ve been told to mind our own Gods. We’ve been told that it’s inhumane to allow someone to live with media driven misconceptions and out right lies about what these disabilities really are.
My sister’s case is a perfect example. Look how the popular media presented Terri’s story, abandoning any attempt at objective or ethical reporting in their rush to justify her death. In an effort to dehumanize Terri, they repeatedly reported she was in a coma, brain dead, a “vegetable” and that the autopsy proved she was in a persistent vegetative state, all of which are patently false.
All one has to do is watch the videos of Terri to see how alive she was. If that’s not enough, more than 40 medical affidavits stated Terri wasn’t in PVS and/or could have been helped with new medical technology.
The fact is medical people cannot really truly ever know if someone is in the infamous PVS. Because we’ve seen patients “wake up” who we diagnosed with such things- and they tell us something WE already knew: They were never OUT. Terri was awake; her eyes followed people, voices, conversations. She hummed to music. She laughed appropriately at jokes and humor. And she cried when she was in pain; she cried when she had infections her husband refused her doctors permission treat. Terri slept; she had nightmares and dreams; she smiled, she frowned, she flinched when she felt intense pain. She was not brain dead. At all. Her only life support was a G Tube. She wasn’t on any breathing machines; she wasn’t hooked to vents and IV’s and other devices. A tube. In her stomach. Nothing more.
The media-
Completely unaware of their own hypocrisy, they commended Christopher Reeve’s wife, Dana, and rightly so, for her dedication in caring for her husband, while vilifying my parents for wanting to do the same thing for their daughter.
I always felt the pain Terri’s parents must have felt. Only a parent can understand this. To have no control over the life or death of their child, who is in a dire state, is the most terrifying and forlorn experience.
They chastised former Gov. Jeb Bush for doing his job by trying to stop the two-week dehydration death of an innocent disabled woman, but praised him when he placed a moratorium on death row executions after a lethal injection went 15 minutes too long.
The life of a rapist or a murderer is more valuable than the life of someone who has a disability. It took Terri 17 days to die; no one from the media cared about THAT. But boy those 15 minutes the inmate spent were the cause of an extreme uproar.
They justify the destruction of embryos to produce stem cells (ignoring both the success of adult stem cells and that embryonic cells have produced no cures), reporting that their use will improve the lives of the disabled, and at the same time they work to convince the public that it is OK to kill the very same people they say this research could cure.
Heh. The total hypocrisy of so many people, especially those who scream and yell for stem cells and who demand the right to abortion for women, never hear the screams and yells of voices that cannot speak. Like Terri’s. Or the unborn babies. They’re all nothing more than vegetables; globs of cells, right?
And, finally, they paid more respect to and had more compassion for a racehorse than they did my sister.
Yes, they did. Many people did. It shows what matters in society. And what doesn’t matter.
To this day, every story in which a person emerges from a condition similar to Terri’s, or an advance is found to help the severely brain-injured, is an opportunity for the media to remind us that, of course, “this is nothing like the case of Terri Schiavo.”
Those of us who work with these people DO know this is just like Terri. We see the similarities and we feel the pain, of so many who have been killed, via compassionate folk who just KNOW better. And we want to bitch slap these doctors who DON’T know. But who chose to speak as if they do.
Should we be surprised with what is happening when we have so easily bought into what our popular media is promoting? Or that even people like Bill O’Reilly, who claim to be both conservative and Catholic, can be so ignorant on this issue as to raise the idea that if someone “costs” taxpayers too much money, it should be OK to kill them?
Ahh the Europeon solution to the Terri’s of the USA. Just euthanize them; they drain the system and give nothing back. They’re a waste of money. It has little to do with religion, in my mind, and everything to do with ignorance and total arrogance.
Terri’s been gone for two years now. I think about her often. I see death a lot at my work; I see it, deal with it as it’s happening and I react to it after. It’s not as personal for me as it is for Terri’s family, obviously. It breaks my heart to read her brothers words here. He speaks the truth and it should hurt a lot of people. But sadly it doesn’t. People have their lives to live; they have appointments to get to and a job to tend for; a family to worry about. Life goes on. But someday, the Culture of Death may sneak up on any one of us. And try to take a loved one from us like they did to Terri. Put yourself in the shoes of her family; no, better put on Terri’s shoes. Imagine how you’d feel. Hopeless. Scared. Panicked. We have to keep fighting this culture. If we don’t it will eventually kill all of us. As we weed out who holds value in our self made society, we reap what we sow. Stand up for life. Remember Terri.
March 31st, 2007 at 6:44 am
Ive seen the CAT scans. I am no neurologist, but I can tell the difference between ‘brain’ and ‘empty.’ Her head contained almost nothing. Every medical expert ive heard comment on the issue agrees with this.
People sometimes do recover from a diagnosed PVS. But noone has ever recovered from one so severe as Terri’s. And it just cant happen. There was nothing left of her to recover.
Its amazing there was enough left of her brain to keep her body alive. With a great deal of medical help. There certinly was no hope for recovery.
Personally, I would have cut her up for parts. Her brain was destroyed beyond hope, but the other organs may have been of use to save someone else.
Her mother remains, as she always was, in denial. I suspect at this point the stress is getting to her. Terri did not laugh, talk, or follow people around the room. She did move in response to pain - because that reflex is in the spinal cord, not the brain.
All the claims of laughing, or crying, of talking or humming, or of following movement, are nothing but wishful thinking. If you want more evidence of this, find the videos in which Terri’s mother claims to have proof she was responsive, and watch them yourself. They show Terri in bed, doing nothing.
March 31st, 2007 at 7:56 am
SR you’re not a doctor; you’re not even a medical professional so stop trying to pass yourself off as such. You wouldn’t know a Cat scan from an MRI. I have watched the videos and I’ve spoken with nurses and aides AND doctors who worked directly with Terri. My experiences with people who have the same DX and those who have worse DX give more credit to these issues than you have.
I’m refusing to react to your obviously biased and totally disrespectful comment here about Terri. I’m pretty saddened at your words too. But then again you live in Europe, where things are vastly different and the value of life isn’t appreciated.
March 31st, 2007 at 1:03 pm
Oh, of course Europeans cant be fit to comment on such matters!
By all means call my credability into question - I am not a doctor, as you said. You rank higher than me in that regard - a nurse, if I recall correctly? But still not a doctor, and certinly not a specialist.
I have seen that scan - http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/98/Schiavo_catscan.jpg if you want to look. It doesn’t take an expert to recognise that there is clearly quite a lot of brain missing.
Still, CT scans are subject to interpretation. Sometimes you just need to open the head and take a look - oh, the autopsy report is publicly available. http://www.abstractappeal.com/schiavo/autopsyreport.pdf
Skip ahead to page 12 - everything before that just describes minor problems, some of them due to her prolonged period of physical inactivity.
“At autopsy, the brain weighed 615 grams.” - About half what it should have been.
The microscopic damage is quite impressive - page fifteen onwards. I cant understand most of the technical terms, but it doesn’t look at all good. Lots of parts with obscure names are described as either atrophied, or severely damaged. For several pages, its nothing but a long list of things found to be abnormal. Again, I dont need to be an expert to tell that this is a very bad state for a brain to be in.
Well, I cant follow it at all well. I will feel much more confident trying to interpret something a bit more my level, like those videos. I am going googling in search of them for a closer look, and shall return with my conclusions shortly.
March 31st, 2007 at 1:19 pm
“a great deal of medical help” suricou raven? Since when is food a “great deal of medical help? If that is the case then babies receive a “great deal of medical help” when parents feed them.
I was about to say “with all due respect you are completely mistaken” but after reading the drivel you left two comments above and taking into account the fact that I am up early and cranky and in no mood for civility let me say that you are simply being an ignorant bitch and you really, REEEAALLLYY need to wring out your drool bib and go pray to ST. FU!
I am at this very moment sitting in my house ON my dialysis machine taking my daily treatment.
This machine is MUCH MORE of “a great deal of medical help” than is a g-tube……..so should I be starved to death? What a bitch you are, and a cold hearted one at that, and if anyone in my life held such ignorant thoughts you can be sure they’d get smacked upside their thick head while being told to never darken my step again.
March 31st, 2007 at 1:23 pm
Here we go,
http://www.sacramentolifechain.org/schiavo.html
Video 1:
Terri is exposed to flashing lights, presumably in an attempt to produce a reaction. No reaction is forthcoming. Father speaks of her ‘lazy eye,’ again Terri is unresponsive. After some further talking, Terri twice makes brief sounds similar to laughter. Shortly after she makes a longer, drawn-out noise similar to a moan.
This is the most convincing evidence I have seen in the videos for any form of higher function, but it is unclear if her noises are induced by her stimulation, or if she is able to comprehend the words or only reacting to the sounds.
Video 2:
After the first one, a less impressive show: Terri sits in bed, unresponsive. She is spoken to, and has her position physically altered. Throughout this she remains unresponsive. Particually noteworthy is her lack of eye movement - she blinks, but her eyes remain pointed directly ahead throughout.
Even with her mother directly addresses her, she is unresponsive. This video shows no response from Terri under any of the considerable stimulus given.
Video 3:
Terri listens to music. At first, no apparent response. Terri blinks, but blinking appears to show no correlation to the music. Part-way through, Terri makes some movement and a sound which seems vaguely similar to a laugh, but distorted. No apparent cause for this response.
Video 4:
Terri is visited by her mother again, as in clip two. Again she is unresponsive, throughout both speech and physical contact. Her eyes do move at the start, but as only her head is shown at this point its unclear if she is following movement.
Video 5:
Terri is instructed to open her eyes. Four times. After a delay of approximately ten seconds her eyes do slowly open.
This would be rather more impressive if not for the missing ending - Terri is instructed to close her eyes, and the clip ends. Given the source of the clip, this suggests she didn’t. Also, as blinking reflexes are visible in all other clips, these two facts suggest that her opening was not a response to the intruction.
I dont know what you see, but what I see here is a tiny fragment of a mind. She has basic reflexes, clearly. She is capable of making a few sounds, and may even be responding to auditory stimulous. But other than that… nothing. No evidence she is comprehending the words spoken to her, no movement other than blinking and unidentifiable noises. Lights are flashed in her face and her head is shoved around, and she doesn’t do anything. Even her blinking is irregular.
Response to sound, and nothing else. My sister’s pet fish can do that. The fish can respond to touch and flashing lights too. And this is the best that could be produced from probably many weeks spent filming in the hope of capturing something more convincing?
March 31st, 2007 at 1:26 pm
Hmm… I seem to have misplaced a comment. I made one before that commenting on the autopsy report, and arguing that some medical information is so clear, I dont need to be an expert to get a rough idea from it - such as a CT scan with a big hole in it ( http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/98/Schiavo_catscan.jpg ) and an autopsy report which states the brain had half the normal mass for a woman of her age, and goes on for several pages listing microscopic damage. ( http://www.abstractappeal.com/schiavo/autopsyreport.pdf ).
March 31st, 2007 at 3:29 pm
SR it has been said that the videos you share here are of Terri in a drugged up form. I can’t watch the videos here from work, but I recognize the URLs as ones I have watched from before.
Have you watched the videos linked at Terrifight.org??
She’s a totally different person.
March 31st, 2007 at 3:34 pm
SR- also, based on YOUR videos and your impression, you consider Terri’s life to be meaningless? Worthless? Is the fish’s life as important? What would it take to convince you that ANY life is valuable?
You are the very essence of the Culture of Death SR; everything Terri’s brother wrote of, above in quotes, IS YOU. Do you see that in yourself??
March 31st, 2007 at 8:08 pm
Raven: I am realistic. I dont see life as a mysterious, magic, mystical force which must be protected for its own sake. I need to see a reason to protect it.
I rank life. Human lives are valuable, but not infinatly so. The fish life is not worthless, but its worth much less than a human life. An embryo is worth nothing on conception, and nothing until its brain first achieves some level of basic function - and then increases over time from that point until a point some time after birth.
Terri ranks somewhere between the fish and an intact adult human - but closer to the fish. My estimation of the value of a life includes measures such as inteligence, memory and individuality. Terri had little of the first two, and no capability to express the last.
This is the ‘culture of death’? I find it far prefable to the ‘culture of Life at All Costs’ in which even thinking in comparative terms is forbidden.
Here is a question for you Raven: Given a choice between sacrificing one 60-year-old human and a newborn, which do you choose? You are having a very hard time, I would guess, because you are incapable of sacrificing either one. Your high-horse moral system locks up at the dilemma. While I have no problems - the newborn goes, because while it posesses the qualities I consider protected, the 60-year-old has them in far greater quantity.
And how convenient that those videos show her in druged form. Do you have any evidence for this, or is it only rumor? As the website was devoted to campaigning to save Terri, I would have thought they would have mentioned this fact.
Terrifight.org appears to be nothing but advertising. It appears the domain has, like Terri, expired.
April 2nd, 2007 at 3:27 pm
I would certainly urge that we err on the side of life when these questions arise, especially when we’re talking about minimal intervention (i.e food and water).
What makes this case so wrenching for me to think about even two years later is the non-medical components, the dispute over who should speak for Terri, and behind that, the horrendous breakdown in relationship and trust between and her spouse and her parents that ensued. Not to mention the pathology that preceded her oxygen deprivation incident, and the uncertainly surrounding her oxygen deprivation that casts a retrospective shadow of distrust on her spouses.
As I followed the case, I found that the intensity surrounding this case was only partly on the life or death issue, and that as much or more of the emotion arose from people’s judgments as to the motives and character of the principals. That is…
Many people on the life side were claiming that Michael was an evil person who wanted to do away with his diabled wife for some ignoble purpose - such as that she was an inconvenience to his sex life or that he wanted her money - coupled with suspicions that he had been an abusive spouse and/or her injury was the result of his trying to kill her — and that her parents were saintly people devoted to their daughter.
Many people on the death side were claiming that Michael was nobly trying to fulfull Terri’s wishes, and that her parents were uniformed about her wishes and in denial about her condition and possible bulimia.
In the absence of convincing evidence to the contrary, I would refuse to condemn any of the principal players as acting with evil or criminal intent and would as a default presume that her parents and her spouse were acting in accordance with genuine belief and non-malice - mixed with pride, stubbornness, and other primal human traits. Tragically, the public polarization of positions over the question of whether she should have been allowed to liver makes it too easy for us on the outside to choose a villain rather than deal with the complexity that arises when we assume that both were acting in good faith (by their own convictions) towards Terri.
I for myself, and I think all of us, would earnest beseech that we not find ourselves in such a situation.
April 2nd, 2007 at 5:40 pm
I had to stop commenting on this post because I was at work. And didn’t have time to think…
SR- you’re comments weren’t purposely held up…we have set it up here so any comment with a link is moderated. We were getting some blog spam that was huge in volume.
You said:
Raven: I am realistic. I dont see life as a mysterious, magic, mystical force which must be protected for its own sake. I need to see a reason to protect it.
Why do you need a reason to protect life? Life is a gift. Everyone should view it as such…it’s not a biological accident or result. And if you believe it is such, it still deserves to be protected.
You also said:
I rank life. Human lives are valuable, but not infinatly so. The fish life is not worthless, but its worth much less than a human life. An embryo is worth nothing on conception, and nothing until its brain first achieves some level of basic function - and then increases over time from that point until a point some time after birth.
This is a perfect example of the EuropeOn thought process, the ranking of a life. A life has to meet certain standards in order to be considered worthy of living; a life must meet expectations of others and not the living person (animal) whose very life is being “evaluated: for such worthiness. Who gave you and people like you the power, the authority to do these things? Of course you can have your own opinions…but to push this into justification to end someones life is walking across a line of ethical proportions. Europe is not only crossing this line, it’s drawing it.
You said:
Terri ranks somewhere between the fish and an intact adult human - but closer to the fish. My estimation of the value of a life includes measures such as inteligence, memory and individuality. Terri had little of the first two, and no capability to express the last.
THAT is just pathetic. Using your standards, newborn babies rank low on the deserves-life standard. Using your standards, a person with Alzheimer’s disease ranks as low. Using your standards, someone in a coma doesn’t deserve any time to heal and go on living.
I totally disagree with your standards. And I really hope you don’t have a stroke or get into an accident some day where your own standards will come back to haunt you. Ask many stroke survivors– they will tell you…YES, it was hard to not remember anything for awhile. It was hard to lose all the education they got, but regained enough skill to live for decades after recovery, as a productive member of society. Ask a veteran of this war, who was brain injured…and in a coma with half their head gone…ask them how they can walk now, drive a car, go to work, earn a decent living for their family. Going by your standards, they would met the criteria for being a victim of euthanasia.
As for Terri and others like her…why do your standards only involve the three measures? Have you ever spent any time with someone like Terri? Until you have, I really don’t think you have any business judging whether they deserve life or not.
April 2nd, 2007 at 5:57 pm
CT- Terri’s death hit home for me. Because I work with people just like her. Who are often DX with PVS only to get up and walk one day…only to sit up and speak…miracles happen for sure, but proper medical treatment and therapies go along way in their battle.
Terri was placed into a therapeutic program shortly after her “incident: that led to her condition. But it was costly. And her husband took her out of that program, a rehab center and admitted her to a nursing home where therapies didn’t happen. He did this in an effort to make himself look “poor” enough to get her on the Medicaid roll. All this, as he prepared to sue the hospital. After he got the money, he placed Terri into a hospice type nursing center. He promised Terri’s family he was going to use the money to get her treatments and therapies and every test in the world- to help her become as least dependent as possible. He never allowed even ONE test…the results we all see were court ordered.
Her husband:
Took away her wheelchair and demanded she stay bedbound
Refused to allow nursing staff to reposition Terri every two hours, or even 4 hours, which led to bedsores and muscle contractures.
No dental care was allowed. Which led to tooth decay and cavities, which led to teeth falling out and gum disease. No oral care was allowed to be done either.
Terri would get UTIs and other infections. He refused any antibiotic treatments and would call to see if she was near death YET…many times. The nurse (RN) who blew the whistle on this was fired from the nursing center (which was owned by the very Judge who signed the order to remove Terri’s g tube) The aides who were forbidden to talk about this stuff were written up and later fired when they voiced concerns to the state inspectors who came by on the yearly visits.
Her husband also tore down every picture on the wall of her room; insisted the shades be kept closed at all times; no music. No TV, She was not allowed to participate in any activities the center (by law) had to provide for all it’s residents…Terri was not allowed to be exposed to any sensory stimulation. At all.
Terri’s parents had to get her husband’s permission to come visit their own daughter. Same with her sister and brother.
Her husband remarried and started a family shortly after Terri was admitted to the nursing center. He wasn’t allowed to spend Terri’s money on anything except services for her…once he saw this in writing on the court order, we started hearing how Terri wouldn’t want to “live like this” and would not “want to be on life supports”…6 years AFTER her initial incident. 6 yrs.
His actions spoke and continue to speak much louder than any word.
I’ve followed Terri since 1997. It’s been a long road and two yrs ago I blogged over 50 posts in one month about Terri…overall, 109 posts in the three months prior to her death. It made me sick. While we can take away from this the heart wrenching saga of her family, her husband has no heart and never did. For him it was all about the money.
April 4th, 2007 at 8:15 am
I’m glad to get a detailed accounting from someone who has followed the story far longer than I. You’re giving a very different picture than what I’d had in my mind.
The portrait I had drawn from what I recall reading about Terri’s saga was that after Terri’s “incident”, Michael went to nursing school so that he could take care of Terri himself, which gave me the impression that he was being a devoted husband. I then surmised that at some later point, he despaired that Terri would not recover, and at that point the breach between him and Terri’s parents developed, which then progressed over the years to become an abyss. This rendition was the source of my previous comments.
In your indictment above, you have presented a damning (in the Biblical sense of that word) bill of particulars that is totally at variance with that rendition.
Did I read wrongly, or did I encounter someone crafting a rewrite of history?
May 1st, 2007 at 10:30 am
Anyone who says that an embryo is worth nothing shouldn’t talk about not yet developing a brain. If you’re pregnant, it’s still a human life. Dumb, stupid, ignorant! That’s how I describe those comments. That includes the comments about Terri. I saw the same videos, how she acknowledged her mother. That wasn’t wishful thinking. That was Terri communicating to her family. That poor woman was fully aware that her demonic husband and his attorney were going to murder her. I still cry about it. My little boy is almost 6 years old, he has severe CP, feeding tube & artificial airway. They told me he’d never do ANYTHING! He blinks, he has tears, moves his extremities, opens and closes his eyes on command, nods his head to simple questions, knows what it means to “go to sleep”, he doesn’t like the word “hospital”, “bath” or the mention of certain doctors. So, if I were you, I’d sit down and shut up, because it’s quite obvious to those of us who have experience with these things that you have absolutely no blazing clue what you’re talking about!