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The irony is that dogs get a nice little injection and die like sleeping beauties... people have to starve to death.Quote:
I think it's cruel to let her wither away a slow death when it could be ended quickly...if it has been decided to let her die...then kill her and get it over with.
Dear God, I pray that this is not true. For if it is true, then what an evil are we now accountable for.
Affidavit of Terri Speaking
http://www.terrisfight.net/documents/032505weller.htm
http://www.terrisfight.net/documents/032505vitadamo.htm
Neurologist Dissenting Opinion
http://www.terrisfight.net/documents/032305cheshire.pdf
My understanding is that those that have feeding tubes removed they are given morphine until they die. Not something I'd want to put my family through personally.Quote:
The irony is that dogs get a nice little injection and die like sleeping beauties... people have to starve to death.
The problem that I have with the affidavits is that they allege that this took place on March 18. However, they didn't bring this "speech" to light until 7 days later. Now, it seems to me that if I were her sister, and I was trying everything in my power to keep her alive, I would have run screaming out of her hospice room, put the first reporter I could find in a head-lock and not let go til he agreed to put me on TV. What actually happened though was that all of a sudden, after a solid week of being on TV everyday, her sister came up with this story and this affidavit that she'd spoken a week earlier, on the day her feeding tube was removed. I don't buy it, period. It was a last ditch effort to garner media and judicial sympathy.
hey Spy - the links to the affadavits are now dead. got new ones?
Google Cache of 1st AffidavitQuote:
This website www.terrisfight.net is currently unavailable due to exceeded monthly traffic quota. Please visit again later.
Not sure about the others. In another twist, the Toronto Star had this report:
Additionally, I've seen recent reports that the husband has asked for a full autopsy to prove or disprove how badly damaged her brain is/was. I don't know if that will finally resolve anything...Quote:
What's going on in Schiavo's head?
OAKLAND ROSS
FEATURE WRITER
PINELLAS PARK, FLA.—For 15 years, Terri Schiavo has lived in a private purgatory that is neither life nor death, but something in between — eerier and more troubling.
Yesterday, the brain-damaged 41-year-old Florida woman entered her 11th day without food or water, the result of a court decision handed down on March 18.
Doctors began administering morphine, not for the relief of pain but to ease her breathing — a sign that her death is likely no more than a day or two away.
Or did Terri Schiavo actually die upwards of a decade and a half ago?
Did her life effectively cease soon after that grim day in February 1990 when her heart briefly stopped beating, depriving her brain of oxygen so that she lapsed into a coma, from which she has never recovered?
Leon Prockop, a professor of neurology at the University of Southern Florida in Tampa, believes that this is exactly what happened, and he is not alone.
Prockop said he would "use the term `coma vigil,'" describing a condition that other neurologists have labelled a "persistent vegetative state."
"It's the state of being in a coma, but the person appears to be awake."
Prockop has looked at Schiavo's CAT scans, and he harbours no doubt whatsoever. "Her death occurred some time ago," he said in an interview yesterday. "That's my opinion."
It sure isn't everybody's.
According to Prockop and others, Schiavo's parents — the Schindlers — and family are seeing what they deeply want to see: a daughter and sister whom they love and who loves them back.
But they also say that the family are the victims of cruel illusion — the physical presence of a woman who is awake but not aware.
In this South Florida town, the debate about Terri Schiavo rages while the world watches, but really there is no debate at all.
Schiavo's sad plight has raised a welter of confounding moral and medical questions. But perhaps none of them is more troubling than the debate over what precisely is going on in that poor woman's head.
There are at least two sides to the story, and they are worlds apart.
Prockop may state his position more forcefully than others , but his view nonetheless coincides with the vast preponderance of expert medical opinion on the subject of Terri Schiavo.
She once was a woman with hopes and dreams, likes and dislikes, foibles and regrets, but she is not that way now, she hasn't been for years, and she never will be again.
"She has lost all frontal lobe functions," Prockop said. "In her case, there is a severe absence of brain tissue. This is not guesswork."
Understandably, there are those who wish fervently that it were not so.
Day after day, the woman's father, Bob Schindler, has appeared on camera, speaking about his daughter as if she were a thinking, communicating human being with feelings and opinions and a determination to live, even as she slowly sinks toward what yesterday seemed to be an inevitable, court-ordered death.
`She has amazing endurance. Don't give up on her. We haven't given up on her.'
Bob Schindler
"She's responsive, and she's responding to me," Schindler said early yesterday after visiting the woman at the Woodside Hospice in this Tampa-area suburb.
Again, he pleaded for someone to intervene and stop his daughter's death. "She has amazing endurance. ... Don't give up on her. We haven't given up on her, and she hasn't given up on us."
Lawyers and advisors associated with the Schindler family have used similar language in speaking of a woman whom they insist is conscious and aware of her surroundings. They say she communicates with gestures. They say she tries to speak.
Last week, a Florida neurologist named William Cheshire endorsed this view in an affidavit he swore out on behalf of the state's Department of Children and Family Services.
Cheshire, who is on staff at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, drew his conclusions after observing Terri Schiavo in person and reviewing her medical history. He said she was alert and possibly capable of recovery, although he did not conduct an examination of his own.
But the courts have concluded the very opposite and, on March 18, Judge George Greer of the Pinellas Circuit court declared that the woman's feeding tube could be removed, in accordance with what Michael Schiavo, her husband, maintains were her wishes, expressed before she lapsed into unconsciousness 15 years ago.Cheshire is not willing to talk to the media about the case, and the Mayo Clinic where he works has distanced itself from his opinion on the matter, declaring on its website that "the standard procedure for the evaluation of a comatose patient includes ... the performance of a comprehensive neurological examination."
Cheshire conducted no such examination before reaching his opinion.
"The problem is that this case is political," said Walter Bradley, chairman of the neurology department at the University of Miami, who flatly disagrees with Cheshire's conclusions, as apparently do most neurologists familiar with the case.
Still, the disparity between these two views has persisted, day after day, so it often seems the two sides are talking about two different women. Yet they are both talking about the same Terri Schiavo. Whether she should be allowed to live or to die — that is one question. Just who, or what, is doing the living or the dying — that is another question. "Families and friends want desperately to see something that is volitional," said Prockop.
And in Terri Schiavo, they genuinely believe that they do: Her eyes rove the room when they are present, and sometimes her gaze seems to fix itself on them. She starts at sounds. She responds to light. She moans, as if trying to speak. When they hold her hand, she tightens her grip. At night, she closes her eyes and falls asleep. With the morning light, she awakens again.
But, said Prockop, all these activities are merely mirages of sentience rather than the real thing. They are automatic reflexes to stimuli and are controlled by primitive portions of the brain.
For people in the Schindler's position, the result is agonizingly seductive, not only because they keenly want to see sense and feeling where, sadly, there is none — but because this is so very easy to do.
"This is exactly the difficulty," said Bradley. "Even trained medical people have real difficulty."
Prockop agreed: "The first time I saw a coma vigil, I, too, thought the patient was responding."
Prockop and Bradley have examined Schiavo's CAT scans — electronic readings that detail the physical condition of her brain — and they agree on what is there and on what is not.
"She has approximately 20 per cent of her (total) brain tissue left inside her skull, and the remaining tissue is damaged," said Prockop. "The tissue that controls the higher brain functions is gone. It's disappeared."
This, he said, is what typically happens in such cases.
After Schiavo suffered her heart attack 15 years ago, and her brain was starved of oxygen, much of her brain tissue became scarred and then necrotic — in other words, it died.
What remained was interpreted by her system as foreign matter, and it was slowly flushed away, to be replaced over time by cerebro-spinal fluid, which has the appearance of water.
According to Prockop, this is the same miserable fate suffered by elderly people in the advanced stages of Alzheimer's disease. In Schiavo's case, he said, the damage is severe and, as in all such cases, irreversible.
"Her CAT scan shows a greater degree of brain damage than I have ever seen in a living person," he said. "That brain tissue cannot come back. It never has, and it never will."
But neurologists do not rely only on high-technology tests to make their diagnoses. They also examine a brain-damaged patient, testing for a wide range of reflexes. The neurologists who have had the opportunity to examine Schiavo have concluded that she can neither think, nor remember, nor feel — and that, sadly, she never will.
This thing must be huge or something. Google's cache of it is gone as well. Mrs |ce was looking for a copy this morning - and found this link which crashed 5x when we tried to load:
www.earnedmedia.org/mele.htm
So still no luck. Ah well, I read them yesterday and Mrs |ce has gone off to the office, so not needed so urgently now - we'll try again later.
Just had another thought to add, so pardon the edit which begins here -
Terri's husband is taking one hell of a gamble to prove he's right - if they autopsy and find there wasn't as severe brain damage as is currently believed, he's screwed. The civil litigation can go on for years after (which the media, I'm sure, will love, and the rest of us will quickly tire of.)
I've said it before in this and one other thread. It's not a matter of how brain damaged she is in my mind - it's a matter of her quality of life. Sorry, but no matter how you slice it, living in a hospital room with no chance of leaving alive, *ever*, is enough to drive even the most sedate person insane. If Terri is mentally capable enough to understand her circumstances and be aware of where she is and why, I'm quite sure she's wanting this too - just faster. If she's not mentally capable of understanding, then this makes her mom's affidavit grossly incorrect and proves her husband's case. Either way, the death of Terri S is the best route for her. It sucks to say that, but after putting myself in her shoes and weighing out as many sides of the coin as I have access to, that's the conclusion I draw.
Aside from what people on both sides of this case argue - here is one of the side effects:
"Schiavo case sparks Net interest in living wills": http://news.com.com/Schiavo+case+spa...3-5632528.html
"More people writing living wills": http://www.cnn.com/2005/LAW/03/23/living.wills.ap/
"Schiavo Case Puts Living Wills in Spotlight": http://my.webmd.com/content/article/102/106650.htm
And as the legal options dwindle - emotion is starting to rule and the government is starting to catch it: http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/...o-inside_x.htm
I thought this was of particular interest:
And this:Quote:
If Gov. Bush wants to be the man that his brother is, he needs to step up to the plate like President Bush did when the United Nations told him not to go into Iraq," Randall Terry, a protest organizer, said of the governor. "Be a man. Put politics aside."
The "funny" thing to me is that Scott Peterson, a convicted murderer on death row, is being treated "better" being fed, watered, clothed and housed by our government, while this woman starves. By the written law, it works, but it is apparent that maybe not so in action. I realize that these are two extreme cases, however, with our sensationalized media - it's hard not to get caught up in the chaos.Quote:
Among the messages on protest signs Sunday: "Barbara Bush: Are you proud of your sons now?" "Stop the American Holocaust!" "Send in the National Guard!"
While traveling and catching the latest on this case, I was flipping around the tv channels, trying to find something at least a little funny and instead ran across this:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/h...troduction.stm
I didn't feel any better.
I agree with Terri's husband on this issue, i dont think she would want to live like this although i cant be certain but, what i dont agree with is how they are just starving her like this.... they should just give her lethal injection. they do it to common criminals.
Just thought I add this to the debate.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/29/po.../29donate.html
Looks like Debwalin had a point.