Media 'getting it wrong' on Terri Schiavo story

MATTERS OF LIFE AND DEATH
Media 'getting it wrong' on Terri Schiavo story
Press erroneously report she's 'comatose,' doctors also dispute vegetative-state ruling

Network news outlets across the board and national newspapers – from the New York Times and the Washington Post to the Miami Herald and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution – are misreporting the medical facts of the Terri Schindler-Schiavo story, say her family, doctors and the pro-family organization Focus on the Family.

"The media's killing us, and they're killing her, frankly," said Terri's father, Robert Schindler, at a press conference yesterday. The family and about a dozen people, including doctors and Terri's caregivers, spent an hour trying to school reporters on the facts of case.

Public opinion outside the courtroom matters in high-profile legal battles, as the 165,000 e-mails sent this week to Florida Gov. Jeb Bush's office and the scores sent to state legislators exemplified. The community spoke and lawmakers heard them and responded with emergency legislation empowering Bush to defy Terri's judge-ordered starvation by ordering the reinsertion of the 39-year-old brain-disabled woman's feeding tube.

For the Schindlers, the first task at hand in setting the public record straight regards the erroneous use of the word "comatose" by newspapers and media outlets across the country in their coverage of the emotionally charged legal battle.

The Webster's New World College Dictionary defines comatose as someone who is in a deep or prolonged state of unconsciousness. It is undisputed that Terri does not meet this definition. Even her husband, Michael Schiavo, who sought the court order to end her life does not call her "comatose."

Yet, in a search of today's coverage of the case using the Lexis-Nexis media search engine, WorldNetDaily found that national network news outlets across the board – ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC and NPR – refer to Terri as being "in a coma" or "comatose." Prominent newspapers making the same error include the New York Times, Washington Post, Miami Herald, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Baltimore Sun, Cincinnati Enquirer, Salt Lake City's Deseret News, South Dakota's Aberdeen American and even one local paper, the Bradenton Herald.

At the press conference, Terri's family and several doctors also stressed it is debatable whether she is in a persistent vegetative state, or PVS, despite court rulings labeling her as such.

"You have to get it through your heads. This girl is not PVS," Robert Schindler pleaded with reporters.

Dr. William Hammesfahr, a Clearwater, Fla., neurologist, told reporters Terri's eyes fixate on her family and she tries to follow simple commands, such as when doctors ask her to pull against their arm.

WorldNetDaily has reported Terri sustained brain damage when she mysteriously collapsed in 1990 at the age of 26 and oxygen was cut to her brain for several minutes. Terri breathes and maintains a heart beat and blood pressure on her own. She can see and move her limbs. But she needs a feeding tube to sustain her life.

Six years after being awarded $1.2 million in medical malpractice suits on the basis that he intended to seek long-term medical care and therapy for his wife, Michael Schiavo hired right-to-die attorney George Felos and launched a court battle to terminate his wife's life. Terri has no written directive on the matter.

At a press conference Thursday Felos insisted his client was acting out of love and respect for his wife's desire to "die with dignity."

"Who in God's name would subject themselves to what he has gone through for any other reason?" he said. "He always deeply loved her."

After hearing testimony from Michael Schiavo, his brother and sister-in-law that Terri had casually told them she would not want to be kept alive by artificial means, probate Judge George Greer ruled in 2000 and again in subsequent trials to remove the feeding tube.

Felos and Schiavo maintain Terri is PVS, which in Florida is defined by statute as a "permanent and irreversible condition of unconsciousness in which there is the absence of voluntary action or cognitive behavior of any kind [and] an inability to communicate or interact purposefully with the environment."

Last year, Greer reaffirmed his ruling in favor of Felos and Schiavo on the basis of testimony from two physicians solicited by them and a third appointed by him. The PVS diagnosis is required by law for the removal of the feeding tube.

The Schindlers, who have been fighting with their son-in-law for 10 years argue Terri is alert, responsive and vocalizes, and given appropriate therapy can improve. WorldNetDaily has reported their opinion is buttressed by that of nearly a dozen physicians who signed sworn affidavits that she is not PVS – affidavits Greer rejected as evidence. The physicians offered their opinions after viewing videotape of Terri taken during a court-ordered evaluation. Some doctors have offered pro-bono treatment for her, which her husband declines.

In excerpts of the video shown in court, Terri smiles, laughs,vocalizes and tracks a balloon from one side of the room to the other. The Schindlers posted three audio clips and a series of videos clips of Terri on their website.

"You can see on the tapes how she has a big smile on her face as soon as she sees her mother, like she's opening up a Christmas present," her father remarked to WorldNetDaily. "That's what's so heartbreaking."

Felos and two neurologists – one of them a right-to-die advocate – maintain Terri's vocalizing and apparent expressions of happiness at seeing her mother or her tracking a balloon with her eyes are merely "involuntary reflexes" by a woman in a persistent vegetative state, whose cerebral cortex has been so irreparably damaged her condition cannot be improved by therapy or treatment.

WorldNetDaily has reported that in the first couple of years after her collapse Terri received rehabilitative therapy and progressed to the point of saying "no," according to nurses' notes. She would also say, "yes" and "stop that," according to her parents. But in 1993, following the malpractice-suit awards, the therapy was discontinued and Terri was relocated by her husband to one nursing home and then another before ultimately being moved to a hospice in 2000 where she remains.

During a covert therapy session, Robert Schindler reports his daughter sat bolt upright and tried to get our of her chair when told by a therapist over the telephone she was sentenced to die.

"My daughter is not in a persistent vegetative state. She is not a 'plastic plant' as Mr. Felos says she is. She is extremely brain-damaged, and she's a human being," Mary Schindler, Terri's mother said at yesterday's press conference. "She responds to me every time I go in there."

Focus on the Family believes the liberal-biased mainstream media is promoting and facilitating the judicial error by misreporting the medical facts of the case. The conservative, pro-family organization issued a fact sheet prepared by physician Walt Larimore and bioethics analyst Carrie Gordon Earll, to assist the family in correcting the misinformation, or disinformation.

Among the points the fact sheet makes is that Terri "is not comatose," "is not dependent on life support," and was not dying by natural causes prior to the removal of her feeding tube.

"Focus on the Family believes that there is a time to die (Ecclesiastes 3:2), and therefore there are situations when medical interventions should cease and a natural death be allowed. The question is not whether Terri should be allowed to die, however. The question is whether she has been given the opportunity to live," reads the fact sheet.

"The sad case of Terri Schiavo is a poignant sign of the advance of the Culture of Death and the impact of its logic on the nation's conscience," concurs R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, in commentary posted on Crosswalk.com. "The liberal elites have embraced the euthanasia movement and are ready to define life in terms of its perceived 'meaningfulness.'"

BEHIND THE HEADLINES Inside right-to-die case, a woman's real life Amid the raging controversy, family and friends say people forget that Terri Schiavo is a person - that before people became obsessed with whether she should die, she had a life.

By ALLEN G. BREED Associated Press 10/25/2003

Diane Meyer can recall only one time her best friend, the future Terri Schiavo, really got angry with her, and she remains haunted by that 1981 episode.

The recent high school graduates had just seen a television movie about Karen Ann Quinlan, who had been in a coma since collapsing six years earlier and was the subject of a bitter court battle over her parents' decision to take her off a respirator. Meyer made a cruel joke about Quinlan, which set her friend off. "She went down my throat about this joke, that it was inappropriate," Meyer said. She remembers her friend wondering how the doctors and lawyers could possibly know what Quinlan was feeling or what she would want.

"Where there's life," Meyer recalled her saying, "there's hope." By contrast, Schiavo's husband, Michael, and members of his family have said Schiavo told them she would not want to be kept alive artificially if she were incapable of getting better. She has not been fully conscious since collapsing in 1990 at age 26 from what doctors have said was a potassium imbalance that stopped her heart.

Theresa Marie Schindler had been born Dec. 3, 1963, into a well-to-do family in the Philadelphia suburbs. The oldest of three children, she was always shy and retiring. Her mother, Mary, says the girl would spend hours in her room, arranging her more than 100 stuffed animals into a private zoo. Always heavy, she hated sports, except horseback riding, which fed her love for animals. The girl never said anything about her weight, but her mother always sensed it bothered her. "She cried a lot when she went to get clothes," Mary Schindler said. He daughter didn't go to school dances, not even her senior prom. Instead, she and her friends would go to the movies. Meyer remembers they went to see "An Officer and a Gentleman" four times in one day. She was a huge fan of the television show "Starsky and Hutch." Sue Pickwell figures she and Terri Schindler wrote hundreds of letters to co-star Paul Michael Glaser, and "I remember the excitement when they finally wrote back, or their people wrote back." Father recalls a gullible girl Terri Schindler was naive and somewhat gullible. When she couldn't get her Christmas tree to stand up straight one year, her father, Bob, told her to take it back to the lot and have them put it in the "tree straightener." "She called me about an hour later and said, "What did you do to me? They all laughed at me.' " She has always been very tenderhearted, especially when it came to animals. She came home crying one night, saying she thought she had run over a rabbit or squirrel. Knowing she would be devastated if she saw the animal the next day, her brother Bobby went out and threw it in the bushes, then assured her he had found nothing.

In the girl's junior year, Mary Schindler took her to a doctor to ask about her weight, which had ballooned to more than 200 pounds on a 5-foot-3 frame. The doctor told her Terri would lose the weight when she was ready. After graduation from Archbishop Wood Catholic School, she was ready. On a structured diet program, she initially got her weight down to 140 to 150 pounds. College leads to romance She enrolled in Bucks County Community College with the goal of working with animals, and there she met Michael Schiavo.

Mary Schindler says her daughter went head over heels. "It was the first guy who ever, ever paid any attention to her," she says. Meyer says her friend talked about how gorgeous Schiavo was and how he was always telling her she was beautiful. He was the "Officer and a Gentleman" to a chubby girl who had lived vicariously through Danielle Steele romances, Meyer says.

After a little more than a year of dating, the two were married in 1984. Terri Schindler wrote to John Denver, her favorite entertainer, to ask him to sing at her wedding, but he never replied. By a year later, Terri Schiavo had gained a little of her weight back. Meyer says her friend told her that Michael Schiavo had seen her high school graduation picture and warned her "if she ever got fat like that again he'd divorce her." "I said, "He's probably kidding,' " Meyer said. "But it was upsetting to her."

Scott Schiavo, Michael's brother, says the Schindlers were the ones who rode Terri about her weight. He says her brother sometimes showed one of the woman's old driver's licenses for a laugh.

Friend airs talk of divorce In 1986, the couple moved to Florida. Michael Schiavo managed restaurants, and his wife got a clerk's job at an insurance agency. Jackie Rhodes, who worked and socialized with Terri Schiavo, says Michael Schiavo frequently called his wife at work and left her in tears. She says she and Terri Schiavo had discussed divorcing their husbands and moving in together. But Scott Schiavo, Michael's brother, says he wasn't aware of any trouble in the marriage. And when the couple went to his grandmother's funeral, Scott Schiavo says, Terri Schiavo told him she would not want to be put on a respirator, as the grandmother had been. "Terri turned around and looked right in my eyes, and I can still see her sitting there on my left- hand side," he recalled, repeating testimony he gave in court. " "If I'm gone, just let me go.' "

Bobby Schindler says his sister began talking about leaving Schiavo in 1989. "She said she wished she had the strength or the energy or the know-how to get a divorce," he said. By this time, her weight had dropped below 120 pounds, and Mary Schindler says she confronted her daughter about it. The reply: "I eat, Mom. I eat." Potassium disorders and heart failure have been linked to anorexia, but family members say they do not think Terri Schiavo had a real eating disorder. Doctors never have been able to say with certainty what caused the collapse.

The day before she collapsed, Terri Schiavo had complained to her mother that she was having menstrual problems and that she wasn't satisfied with her doctor. Mary Schindler said they would get together after the weekend and find her a new one. They never had the opportunity.

Terri Schiavo is 39 now, living in a hospice in Pinellas Park. After working so hard to come out of her shell, she spends most of her days alone in a single room. She still has her "stuffies," only not as many as before. Just a couple of stuffed dogs and a pair of plush pumpkins her mother hung up for Halloween. Her family says she laughs when they play John Denver for her and follows them with her eyes. Doctors say those are unconscious responses.

A special person, not a cause Michael Schiavo, who has since become a registered nurse and has a daughter with his girlfriend, could not be reached to comment. But Scott Schiavo says his brother is merely trying to let Terri Schiavo die with dignity. "When it sunk into Mike's head, Mike decided to stop being selfish. "I can't bring her back, and I've got to grant her wish,' " he said. "The bottom line is that Mike never wanted this to be a sideshow." Her family and friends say they love her, too, and think she can get better with therapy. They are just as convinced that she would not want to be let go. One thing they are sure of. She would not like all this attention and fuss over her. "She's not a cause," Meyer said. "She's a person. A very special person."

Courtesy - Buffalo News

<http://www.buffalonews.com/adredir.asp?ciid=2085&url=http://www.premiergroup.net/l

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