Sheepville

Terri Schiavo died in 1990, not today. Anyone who believes otherwise should do some research or talk to any medical doctor. I read a handout that’s a Q&A written for caregivers of patients with brain injuries from the Swedish hospital here Seattle. One of the things it noted was there were no confirmed reports of someone fully recovering from a permanent vegetative state after more than a few months. Terri was in that state for 15 years. She has had no improvement, and would never have had any improvement. Maybe years from now we will have the medical ability to restore brain function to people like Terri, but not anytime in the next couple of decades. Ironically the one thing that would probably lead us to that medical possibility, stem cell research, is the same thing the people and politicians that were so adamant about keeping Terri alive are against. Terri’s parents, lawyers, and politicians, have not won a single legal proceeding in this whole hoopla. The only thing they have done this whole time is abuse, circumvent, and violate the courts to try and push their agenda that had no legal merit to actually win a case. The media has done their part to create this circus from their emphasis on reporting the side of the parent’s claims rather than just the plain truth being about Terri’s condition. Do people really believe that the doctors and courts would conspire with her husband to murder her?

There is a medical condition called Locked-In Syndrome where the person has only the ability to move their eyes and nothing else. Stephen Hawking has MLS has come close if not now progressed to this point. I read his biography years ago and he even noted that he may owe much of his brilliance to the fact that his body failed him. The thing is even with a condition as severe as his, he is still able to do one important thing even though it is with his eyes only; communicate. Let’s assume Terri was still alive inside that brain and was living this past 15 years without even being able to use her eyes to communicate but could only see whatever they were looking at that she had no control over. (She has never shown awareness by focusing on the people around her, the video showing her following the movement of something over her is an automatic response that can happen with people in a vegetative state) This would seem to me to be the worst, most inhumane prison possible for someone. I would suspect that someone who had lived that way for 15 years would have lost their sanity some time ago.

Yes, there are medical conditions that bear strong similarities to a permanent vegetative state. One movie starring Robin Williams, Awakenings, was based loosely on a real life doctor and his experiments in the 1960s. Those patients however had suffered encephalitis and not the death of so much brain tissue from the lack of oxygen that Terri Schiavo did. Her parents were holding on to a corpse kept alive artificially that hadn’t been their daughter for 15 years, and would have never been their daughter again.