Thank you. It is obvious that you share a heartfelt conviction that life is sacred, precious beyond understanding. Your posts have been terrific!
For anyone to suggest that you and I and those like us delight in the misery of others is a foul lie and reveals a deeply disturbed mind and calloused heart. It is an outrage to find a blanket apology laced with retraction followed by further retractions and dissembling.
There is no moral or ethical defense for the killing of Terri. She is physically healthy and mentally aware. (If intellectual astuteness were the litmus test for life or death there would be far fewer people posting on FR) The court awarded her financial security and she has family to love and care for her.
Only two of those things are required to claim your Constitutionally protected right to life. Physical health and mental awareness. The test for each is stringent, at least it used to be. Physically you must not be fatally injured or diseased beyond help. Pass or fail on that is simple. If after all possible measures have been taken your body dies then you fail.
Lacking any other tests for mental awareness you must not be brain dead, ie lacking electrical activity in the cognitive parts of the brain. Terri passes both of these tests with ease.
Only one other factor can be considered, the conscious will of the patient to limit heroic life sustaining measures that will likely be permanent. The test for determining and accepting that conscious will should be very high. Hearsay casual comments are so non-specific that they set a standard so low that almost everyone could be shot immediately 'by their own request.'
Terri lives or the legal right to live of the less than perfect dies with her. Unborn babies have already lost that right. Who's next?
Wow. This is so very well said that it deserves a wider audience than would be available on the smokey back room location of this thread (likely another of the intents of the author who is no longer responding to tougher questions?).
Written up as a stand alone editorial and published at another site your fine words might achieve wider influence.
Kudos TigersEye.
-Av
'Preservation instinct'
What's also confusing is that many purely reflexive actions might be misinterpreted as conscious behaviors, said Dr. Ira Goodman, chief of neurology for Orlando Regional Healthcare.
"People in a vegetative state can look awake and alert," Goodman said. "They actually move their limbs; they can follow you [with their eyes] when you're moving around the room. They close their eyes at night and go to sleep. But there's absolutely no awareness there."
This is because when blood flow to the brain is interrupted, cells in the areas responsible for higher thinking are most vulnerable and die first. Cells deep within the brain -- in the area called the brain stem -- are more resilient to temporary interruptions in blood flow. The brain stem can emerge intact from such incidents.
Because the stem controls involuntary functions such as breathing and eye movement, a person without higher-thinking abilities can still track people or objects with their eyes, groan, move limbs in response to touch or even smile and grimace. Gebel said it is all part of the "preservation instinct" ingrained in human biology.
"If you need to be able to respond to a tiger jumping out of the bushes, you just want your eyes to pick up the movement," Gebel said. "That's all someone in a vegetative state is doing -- following the light or responding to the sound."
When researchers have removed most of a monkey's brain and left the stem intact, the animals maintain cycles of sleep and wakefulness, respond to light or noise and track objects with their eyes, said Dr. Walter G. Bradley, chairman of the neurology department at the University of Miami School of Medicine.
He has seen snippets of a video made by Schiavo's parents in which the woman appears to focus on her mother's face and smile as her mom touches her cheek.
"The smiling is perhaps the most evocative aspect of the [video], but the reflex smile that I saw was associated with face-touching," Bradley said. "That's the sort of thing that can easily be explained by reflex."
'A black hole'
Last October, five physicians examined Schiavo as part of the legal proceedings.
In summarizing their findings, the 2nd District Court of Appeal said: "Although the physicians are not in complete agreement concerning the extent of Mrs. Schiavo's brain damage, they all agree that the brain scans show extensive permanent damage to her brain. The only debate between the doctors is whether she has a small amount of isolated living tissue in her cerebral cortex or whether she has no living tissue in her cerebral cortex."
The doctor appointed by Circuit Judge George W. Greer was Peter Bambakidis, a board-certified neurologist at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation. According to court records, he said Schiavo's CT scans show "such a profound loss of tissue" that the "normal brain cortex has become lost. It's not there anymore."
One of Michael Schiavo's doctors, Ron Cranford, a neurologist at Hennepin County Medical Center in Minnesota, said her brain scans showed "massive" atrophy of the cerebral hemisphere "compatible with severe irreversible brain damage."
"There is hardly any cerebral cortex left," Cranford said. "It looks like a black hole."
rsuriano@orlandosentinel.com Our technological ability to sustain human biological functions will soon far outstrip our ability to die a natural death. Indeed, they already do.
But I've also heard that even plants respond to love. But no tubes for me. I don't fear death and there are some things worse then death. I would not wish to live in Terris condition. Some might.
But of this used to be no ones buisness but my doctor, my wifes and mine. Now it's hers mine and the states buisness, it seems.
I live here in Pinellas Co. and have followed this story from the beginning. The story has been hyped all out of shape to the extent that I won't even try to reply to emotional tirades and accusations that fly around on these threads...