NOHLGREN (11/10/03): The single most dramatic moment occurred when William Hammesfahr, a Clearwater neurologist picked by the Schindlers, asked Schiavo to open her eyes.
At first, her eyelids barely flutter. She slowly turns her head toward Hammesfahr, gradually opening her eyes. Then her eyebrows lift into an exaggerated arch—the kind of face a cartoonist might draw to show astonishment.
A lay person could easily conclude that she somehow tapped into a latent reservoir of cognition, even if just for a second. Hammesfahr and her parents bubble with excitement.
"Good job!" the doctor exults. "Good job, young lady!"
But she never pulls it off again, or anything remotely like it. For nearly an hour, her parents and the doctor tell her to open her eyes, close her eyes, look this way, look that way—with little apparent response.
Judge Greer counted.
"By the court's count, (Hammesfahr) gave 105 commands to Terri Schiavo and, at his direction, Mrs. Schindler gave an additional six commands," Greer wrote. "He asked her 61 questions and Mrs. Schindler asked her an additional 11 questions. The court saw few actions that could be considered responsive to either those commands or those questions."
Hmmmmm. Dr. Hammesfahr. He's the Nobel Prize nomineee, isn't he? The one Judge Greer called the "self-promoter"? The one who testified in court that he had treated patients worse off than Terri Schiavo yet offered no names, no case studies, no videos and no test results to support his claim?
Terri was deaf. Terri was blind. She could no more comprehend what she was hearing than she could follow a balloon with her eyes. You are either ignorant of the facts of this case or you believe I am. Either way, you're making a mistake.
I fully expect you to now slink away, knowing who you're dealing with. In anticipation of that, I'll say, "Adios".
Your own source in The DAILY HOWLER is a hostile editorial (blog), and the writer is far from expert in the case. TDH warned you, right in the masthead: "Caveat lector." That means, "Let the reader beware." You don't do fact checking in a partisan broadside.
For instance, it says, "What are the two Americas? If you read the Washington Post, you read about a woman who had a heart attack and suffered brain damage in the process..."
This writer and the Washington Post are 100% wrong on that -- a point that could easily have been checked. That in turn gives them a false -- indeed untenable -- view of what happened to Terri in the first place. Terri never suffered a heart attack -- which was known at the ER in 1990. It was, of course, confirmed in the autopsy fifteen years later. Her heart was still fine. Hammesfahr got it right.
Look at the two lines you underscore. The first says, "She never pulls it off [responds] again, or anything remotely like it." The second admits that, yes, she did pull it off again. Judge Greer says he saw at least a "few actions that could be considered responsive..." The two statements you underscored actually contradict each other. Perforce, one of them is wrong.
And look again at the second line you emphasized: "The court saw few actions that could be considered responsive to either those commands or those questions."
"Few"? How many is that, from this person who meticulously "counts"? How many responsive actions did a medically untrained, blind, biased judge see? The fact that he admits to any is remarkable. It is what lawyers call "an admission against interest." Here again, from Greer himself, we hear that Terri did indeed respond to sound. He played the responses down, in keeping with his own persistent bias, but he couldn't deny them.
>> Terri was deaf. Terri was blind. She could no more comprehend what she was hearing than she could follow a balloon with her eyes.
-- Greer admitted she wasn't deaf, and this conforms to heaps of medical records, anecdotal evidence and sworn testimony. You said earlier that Cranford said she was deaf. I don't recall that he did and find it puzzling. Let's check the facts.
-- Her supposed blindness is an open question. It need not be controversial. Hammesfahr and, if I recall, Baden found her to be severely sight-impaired but not blind. The M.E. asserted she was cortically (not optically) blind, which is an untestable opinion. If he was right, the difference can still be explained by extra cortical damage by dehydration. If he was wrong, she wasn't blind.
-- What she could comprehend, you most assuredly do not know, nor does anyone else. Science has no tool to determine that.
>> You are either ignorant of the facts of this case or you believe I am. Either way, you're making a mistake.
I was misinformed on one point, admitted it, and thanked you for the correction. We all make mistakes, and those of who seek the truth must be grateful to those who call errors to our attention. I call attention to your mistakes in the same spirit.