I have a secretary that I KNOW has no brain waves. I don't need a MRI to tell me that.

Like I said before, if a MRI was needed I'm sure one would have been performed.

You guys should research this...

Aren't you curious WHY she hasn't had an MRI and PET scan.

Aren't you curious if MRI and PET scans are normally done with a PVS diagnosis?

And, in fairness, she has had a CT scan. But, from what I've been able to research, CT shows 1/10 of the picture that an MRI will.

My grandmother was in a hospice for years after her stroke. We got to know the nurses quite well, and they got to know us. There wasn't that much turn-over in care givers. Not sure why someone would assume that there is, especially in a hospice????

- Skip

Terri's family will lose this fight, and part of it will be their own fault. They should have been all over the news for the last 15 years exposing her 'husband' and all of the abuse he's put her through.

He lied at one time or another. When he was trying to win money from the malpractice lawsuit, he said she wanted to live and that he wanted her to live. He said he would do everything he could to save her. Then he turns around and has all of the therapy stopped, removes positive notes from her medical chart, and does everything in his power to kill her off.

Something's wrong here. They shouldn't have waited until now.

OK I'm a little curious, I think the doctors know beter than I do.

She has been in several facilities over the last 15 years, 24/7. That adds up to a lot of care givers.

Why do people seem to want to believe everyone that gets in front of a camera but not the husband?

Skip - No - I'm not curious at all with regards to the decision.

Here's why - this is a personal family matter that has been decided in the courts. It isn't any of my business; now the morbid sensationalism revolving around the case has my interest peaked but I am more concerned with the way congress and the president have invaded a man's rights (regardless of the man) to make decisions for his family. He *IS* married to this woman and he *DOES* have power of attorney over her care. We can argue until the end of time the merits of a case we only know the pomp and circumstance of but the facts of that argument for us are that - and pay attention - We are not privy to the reality of the situation. We should not be making this desicion for the husband *OR* the parents. We have no business here.

This is a personal and private matter for the family. It is unfortunate that they cannot agree to a course of action - these desicions are hard and not for the faint of heart.

The phrase "these are not the droids you're looking for" is a reference to the "jedi mind trick" to distract the weak minded. Consider yourself distracted - maybe you should put your attention back onto congress and the president to see what it is exactly they are up to.

I expect an Executive order any moment from the President restoring this woman's feeding tube.

By default the husband is *ALWAYS* the bad guy. Where have you been? We get the shaft in any marital legal proceedings.

The state is trying to pass another unconstitutional law. I just wrote my state congressman to let him know I didn't approve of my representative bowing down to a group that has gunned down doctors and blown up clinics. If he is not willing to stand up to these terrorists then I'll look for a better represntative the next time around......

Nazis: Pioneers in medicine

Ours is a nation where a judge may not sentence Beltway sniper Lee Malvo to death, because he is too young to die, but can sentence Terri Schiavo to death, because she is too severely handicapped to live.

Schiavo continues the process of dying by starvation and dehydration, a method of capital punishment most would consider criminal if done to a pet.


This was the method used at Auschwitz to murder Father Maximilian Kolbe, the priest who volunteered to take the place of a Polish father of a large family, who was one of 10 the camp commandant had selected for execution in reprisal for the escape of a prisoner.

After being starved and dehydrated for days, Kolbe was injected by his Nazi captors with carbolic acid. He died a martyr's death, said the church that canonized him. That is what would have happened to Terri. Only she would have been denied the lethal injection by those watching her die.

That there arose a national outcry at the execution of Schiavo – so loud Congress and President Bush heard it and came to the rescue – is a sign America is not morally dead ... yet. But a culture of death has taken deep root in America's soul.

One wonders if our young, so many of them cheated of a knowledge of history in schools they are forced to attend, are aware of how closely our elites approximate, in belief and argument, the elites of Weimar and Nazi Germany in the 1920s and 1930s.

In 1920, Dr. Alfred Hoche, professor of psychiatry at the University of Freiburg, and Karl Binding, a law professor at Leipzig, authored "The Permission to Destroy Life Unworthy of Life." They urged a national policy of assisted suicide for those "empty shells of human beings" – the terminally ill and mentally retarded, and those with brain damage and psychiatric conditions.

In October 1933, The New York Times quoted the Nazi minister of justice as saying that ridding Germany of such poor creatures would make it "possible for physicians to end the tortures of incurable patients, upon requests, in the interests of true humanity." "If we desire a certain type of civilization," said George Bernard Shaw, "we must exterminate the sort of people who do not fit in."

In researching "The Death of the West," I discovered that the first episode of publicized "legal" killing of an innocent was the case of "Baby Knauer." The father of the little boy, who was blind, retarded and missing an arm and a leg, appealed to the Fuhrer for permission to have his son put to death. Hitler referred the matter to his physician, Karl Brandt. In 1938, permission was granted.

When war came in 1939, a program code-named "Aktion 4" went about systematically eliminating all "life unworthy of life" in the Reich. By 1940, scores of thousands had been put to death. Then, Bishop Clemens von Galen took to the pulpit of Munster Cathedral to damn Hitler's regime for "plain murder" and direct German Catholics to "withdraw ourselves and our faithful from their (Nazi) influence so that we may not be contaminated by their thinking and their ungodly behavior."

"Aktion 4" went underground. One of its graduates, Franz Stangl, would turn up two years later as commandant of Treblinka.

After the war, the German doctors who had carried out Hitler's orders in violation of the Hippocratic Oath were judged guilty of "crimes against humanity." The Dutch doctors who refused to cooperate in the Nazi program of eliminating "life unworthy of life" during the occupation of Holland were placed among the moral heroes of an immoral era.

Ironically, as the protest to save Schiavo built up steam over the weekend, The New York Times in its "Saturday Profile" warmly featured another Dutch doctor. Dr. Eduard Verhagen has, said the Times, become famous in Europe for having "presided over the medically induced deaths of four extraordinarily ill newborns."

"For his efforts to end what he calls unbearable and incurable suffering," wrote reporter Gregory Crouch, "Dr. Verhagen has been called Dr. Death, a second Hitler and worse – mostly by American opponents of euthanasia."

Verhagen describes himself as a bearer of peace and happiness to children. When these suffering little ones die, he says, "the child goes to sleep. ... It's beautiful in a way. ... They're children who are severely ill and in great pain. It is after they die that you see them relaxed for the first time. You see their faces in a way they should be for the first time."

Franz Stangl could not have put it better. Hitler's doctors may prove to have been the medical pioneers of 21st century.

Pat Buchanan

You probably didn't vote for him anyway, so he's not out anything.

BTW, there's nothing wrong with doing what the people who voted for you want you to do. I mean, they DID vote for him. Why would you listen to a bunch of people who didn't even want you to have the job?

mikester- Funny one on the Jedi thing. Duh... I remember that scene now. Sorry for being dense. :D

You know what. I almost agree with everything you've said re: family issue.

But, I'm not concerned with the legalities or politics of this issue. The legal system, as good as it is, can be wrong.

To me, this is an ethical question. And, I'd like to better understand those that have different views than myself (i.e. those who are sure Terri's is an unworthy life).

For me there are real questions surrounding this issue. Whether she's actually brain dead/PVS is debatable, the husbands motives might be suspect, the rest of her family don't want her to die, the sole "decision maker" has a new family and has moved on, etc...

The husband may be a saint that is willing to go through anything so that his love's wishes are fulfilled. He may be evil and want the money, not want to loose the fight he's started, etc... I think there's evidence that would support both theories.

-Skip

i agree with steve, the world must be coming to an end. :)
I saw the video where she was watching the balloon and following it around the room, making eye contact with it. hardly a vegetable. i bet there are about 50 more patients in this state that are not being put to death.

workers in that hospital should slip her a little water, buy her some more precious time. time to save her life from the people (courts and judges) who are trying to kill her. i dont believe her husband for a moment. friends close to her have said she always believed "where there's life, there's hope".

Two reasons.

First, everything in life is conceivably "debatable". Maybe someone with a liquified brain could conceivably make a miraculous recovery. Maybe there is a 0.00001% chance. Doesn't mean everyone must err on the side of caution in every decision. Should routine medical treatment cost the moon because the doctor has to run every conceivable test and prescribe every possible treatment? Should products be unaffordable because manufacturers have to include every possible feature and warning? Should no murderer ever be executed because even DNA evidence has some small chance of being a false match? At some point, someone has to take the responsibility of deciding. In this case, the state court had that unenviable job. What the federal district court and now federal appellate court have just said is, the state court did as careful a job of it as they could be expected to do. And what I'm saying is the US Congress, Jeb Bush, George Bush, and all the bloggers and special-interest groups and religious activists in the world have no business trying to take over and make that decision.

Second, the right-to-lifers seem to think there is no downside to keeping this woman's body going in that bed for the next thirty years. But there is a downside - to her wishes, if nothing else. If you or I are dying, and if we say that we want to go quietly and with dignity, those wishes should be carried out. Ignoring our wishes and making a public spectacle of our body, keeping it "alive" in a hospice bed just to satisfy other people's views on ethics - that is a downside. Now, you might say, how does one decide if that really was our wish? And that takes us back to the first point.

bzzzzzt. wrong answer. There's reason to doubt that she told her husband that she wouldn't want to live like that.

You saw several fragments of videotape, carefully edited to pick the few moments when random body action coincided with a balloon moving around. You didn't see the hours and hours of videotape in which the same stimulus produced no response. Read this http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=2&aid=79832 and the links within. An excerpt:

She seems to smile at her mother's voice. Her eyes follow a shiny balloon. Asked to open her eyes, she arches her eyebrows as far as they will go.

These and other fleeting images posted on the Internet have turned the heart-wrenching case of Terri Schiavo into a constitutional showdown.

But such moments that suggest awareness -- culled from four hours of medical examinations that were videotaped in the summer of 2002 -- are rare compared to the times when Schiavo lies in bed, slack-jawed and seemingly unresponsive, her limbs stiff, her eyes vacant, her hands curled in tight contractions.

The St. Petersburg Times reviewed all four hours of tapes, which now are public record in the Pinellas County Courthouse. Over and over, Robert and Mary Schindler beg their daughter to demonstrate any sign of consciousness. They have contended for more than a decade that she smiles and laughs in direct response to their conversation. They have told the court that her eyes follow them around the room.

These tests, these videos, offered a chance to show the judge firsthand.

"It's Mommy. Look this way," Mrs. Schindler urges at one point. "Can you say, 'No, no, no' like you did before? No, no, no?"

"Terri, Terri, Terri. Can you look over here, sweetheart?"

Here and there, their daughter's glances and moans seem to coincide with what's being asked of her and might lead one to conclude that she responds. But more often than not, the parents' entreaties fall flat.

A judge who viewed all four hours concluded that Terri Schiavo exists in a hopeless vegetative state and ordered that her feeding tube be removed, as her husband requested. Appellate judges, who also saw all four hours, agreed.

Still, there's no denying the haunting power of a few, select moments. They seem to suggest that Schiavo -- brain-damaged as she is -- retains some shred of awareness and will. They are so disconcerting the Florida Legislature took one look at the snippets, overturned those judicial rulings and empowered the governor to put Schiavo back on the feeding tube.

Yes, the mother's words do seem to prompt what seems like a smile from Terri. Not just once, but twice. Her eyes do follow a balloon on three separate occasions, surprising even a doctor selected by her husband, Michael Schiavo.

But mostly, the Schindlers conduct one-sided conversations with Terri. They speak of family vacations, barbecues and newborn relatives. They profess to spot nuances in their daughter's face that aren't readily apparent to an outsider's eye.

The right-to-lifers are doing a great job of deception, character assasination, and PR.

In addition to the fact that you're being shown only tiny edited fractions of videotape, has anyone noticed that the terisfight website includes all the evidence and briefs filed by the parents, and almost none of the evidence and briefs filed by the husband? Doesn't that make anyone suspicious?

Well, someone has reviewed every single scrap of the evidence, over and over. That's the unfortunate judge who was handed this case, and numerous other judges who have reviewed the case. Do you think 19 state court judges and now multiple federal court judges are all dummies?

tough standards & and cherry-picked video
 

http://www.pelicanparts.com/support/smileys/loki7.gif

Here's where it gets scary..
 

Excerpt from an AP Story..

Bush Exhausts Options in Schiavo Case
Mar 23, 6:57 PM (ET)

By JENNIFER LOVEN

WACO, Texas (AP).....

Republicans have acted on what they perceive to be concerns of religious conservatives who helped the GOP win in November. DeLay, R-Texas, described the Schiavo case in a political context and said conservatives should not retreat because of attacks from the left.

"That's not what Christ asked us to do and they understand that," DeLay said. "It is a political maneuver and they are going to try to destroy the conservative movement and we have to fight back." He made his remarks to the conservative Family Research Council; a recording was made available by a liberal group, Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

......

So says the Majority Leader. I guess we now know that Christ is on the side of the conservatives.

Be very afraid.

Re: tough standards & and cherry-picked video
 

thank you for the smiley face balloon, did you copy and paste that all by your self?

How does that go?

Put 1000 monkeys in a room with typewriters and eventually they may type Shakespeare.

Point being that given an unlimited amount of time they may randomly type letters in the correct order to form intelligent prose.

Admittedly it would probably take billions of years.

So if her parents see random behaviour and try to get her to repeat it often enough then through shear coincidence their prompts will coincide with Terri's random movements.

Plausible?

This woman also claimed in her affidavit that she would write notes, sometimes pages of notes, and they would always come up "missing". Like after her shift, they would come up missing the next day. Sounds suspect to me. It's not that easy to remove these on a daily basis...unless there is some "grand conspiracy" with the administrators, staff, doctors, everyone. Knowing medical records and how the charts get passed between shifts, it does not make sense. This means she would have to be on one steady shift, someone would always have to follow her shift and remove them as soon as she left or something....

Re: Here's where it gets scary..
 

Highly inappropriate remarks. "going to try to destroy the conservative movement..." Who in the HELL is "trying to destroy the conservative movement" here?