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Before debate over whether she should die,
Terri Schiavo had a life

ALLEN G. BREED
Associated Press
Posted on Fri, Oct. 24, 2003

PINELLAS PARK, Fla. - DIANE MEYER can recall only one time her best friend Terri Schiavo really got angry with her. It was 1981, and it haunts her still.

Excerpts from article on Weight Issue and Related Personality Profile and Living Environment:

Her mother, Mary, says Terri would spend hours in her room, arranging her more than 100 stuffed animals into a private zoo.

Always heavy, Terri hated sports, except horseback riding, which fed her love for animals.

Terri never said anything about her weight, but her mother always sensed it bothered her.

"She cried a lot when she went to get clothes," Mrs. Schindler says.

Terri 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 TV show "Starsky and Hutch." Sue Pickwell figures she and Terri 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."

Terri 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.'

"Terri has always been very tenderhearted, especially when it came to animals. She came home crying one night, saying she thought she'd 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 Terri he'd found nothing.

When her yellow Labrador collapsed, Terri performed mouth-to-nose resuscitation on him, her mother says."She was puffing away for all she was worth," she says. "He died in her arms."

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Her junior year, Mrs. Schindler took Terri to the doctor to ask about her weight, which had ballooned to over 200 pounds on a 5-3 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 got her weight down to 140 to 150 pounds initially.

"Terri has always been beautiful from the inside out," Meyer says. "And then when she lost all the weight, she really became quite beautiful on the outside as well. What was inside she allowed to shine out at that point."
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Terri enrolled in Bucks County Community College with the goal of working with animals, and there she met Michael Schiavo.

Mrs. Schindler says Terri went head over heels.

"It was the first guy who ever, ever paid any attention to her," she says.
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Meyer says Terri talked about how gorgeous Schiavo was and how he was always telling her she was beautiful.
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He was the "Officer and a Gentleman" to a chubby girl who had lived vicariously through Danielle Steele romances, Meyer believes.
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After a little more than a year of dating, the two were married in 1984. Terri wrote to her favorite entertainer, John Denver, to ask him to sing at her wedding, but he never replied.
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By a year later, Terri had gained a little of her weight back. Meyer says Terri told her that 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,'" she says. "But it was upsetting to her."
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Scott Schiavo, Michael's brother, says it was the Schindlers who rode Terri about her weight. He says her brother sometimes showed one of Terri's old driver's licenses for a laugh.

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In 1986, the couple moved to Florida. Schiavo managed restaurants, and Terri got a clerk's job at an insurance agency.

Mrs. Schindler says Terri began complaining that Schiavo never wanted to go anywhere. When she would go visit her parents or a friend from work, Mrs. Schindler says, Schiavo would check the mileage on her car."She could go to those places," she says. "Any other place, he gave her crap."

Jackie Rhodes, who worked and socialized with Terri, says Schiavo would frequently call his wife at work and leave her in tears. She says she and Terri had each discussed divorcing their husbands and moving in together.

"We actually discussed how much we could afford and where we would want to live," she says.

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 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 lefthand side," he recalls, 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 says.
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By this time, Terri's weight had dropped below 120 and Mrs. Schindler says she confronted her daughter about how thin she was getting.

Terri's reply: "I eat, Mom. I eat."
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Potassium disorders and heart failure have been linked to anorexia, but the family doesn't think Terri had a real eating disorder. (IN DENIAL-GT)

The day before she collapsed, Terri had complained to her mother that she was having menstrual problems, and that she wasn't satisfied with her doctor. Mrs. Schindler said they'd get together after the weekend and find her a new one.
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SEVERE AND LONG-TERM BULIMIA NERVOSA PROVEN IN 1992 JURY TRIAL. WAS THIS A CONSPIRACY TO!!