Posted on 03/18/2005 10:22:14 PM PST by nickcarraway
TAMPA, Fla. - (KRT) - Two dark scenarios haunt Jay Wolfson even now, a year and a half after his brief appointment to be a neutral arbiter, a guardian, an unbiased observer, the one man asked by the state of Florida to stand in Terri Schiavo's shoes.
One is that the severely brain-damaged woman is in a terrible lightless place, aware of nothing but a yawning, endless hopelessness.
The other is that even though he never elicited a response from her, despite all the pleading and cajoling he did at her bedside, that he might have missed some subtle, nearly invisible signs that she was somewhere in there, aware.
"Imagine not having hope and being aware that's all you had was no hope. The horror. It's like not being, but knowing that you're not," said Wolfson recently in his Tampa-area office. "That's one thing. The other is, what if she's knocking on a door somewhere and I was walking through all the wrong corridors and I missed it. What if?"
Wolfson was appointed by a Florida court in the fall of 2003 to be Schiavo's guardian ad litem, or guardian at law, to deduce Schiavo's best interests and represent neither her husband nor her parents but Terri Schiavo herself.
This makes Wolfson one of the very few people to have spent extended time with Schiavo and gauged her level of awareness without having a vested interest at stake.
In the end, after long hours at Schiavo's bedside and after poring over 30,000 pages of legal documents, Wolfson concluded that Schiavo was indeed in a permanent vegetative state.
It wasn't the conclusion he'd hoped to make.
"You want to weigh in on life as opposed to death," Wolfson said. "You want some way to elicit a response."
Wolfson was appointed Schiavo's guardian after the Florida Legislature passed "Terri's Law" in 2003, a move that allowed doctors to reinsert her feeding tube, despite a judge's ruling that it should be removed. The law has since been struck down as unconstitutional.
Wolfson, who has a law degree and a PhD and is a distinguished service professor of public health and medicine at the University of South Florida, was asked to decide whether Schiavo's feeding tube should be removed and whether more tests should be done to assess her ability to swallow.
He scoured 13 years' worth of legal documents and extensively interviewed Schiavo's husband, Michael, and her parents, Bob and Mary Schindler. His time with Schiavo was spent trying to determine whether she was aware of and interactive with the world.
At first, walking into Schiavo's room, he was struck by her presence, even though he knew in advance that she drifted between wakefulness and sleep.
"She's a person, like you or I, and the first disconcerting part is that she's awake," said Wolfson.
When awake, Schiavo's eyes rolled about the room. She made random noises that sounded like groaning or the start of a laugh or cry.
But court documents said Schiavo's cerebral cortex, where reason and emotions are housed, had degenerated to fluid. So Wolfson set about trying to determine whether Schiavo's noises and jerks were merely reflexive or if they indicated something more.
He played Elton John CDs for her, and Bach and Mozart and music from the late 1980s, when she was in her 20s, prior to her collapse. He held her hands, squeezing them, and stroked her hair and face.
He put his face close to hers and tried to make eye contact, pleading desperately, trying to will her into giving him any kind of sign.
"I would beg her, `Please, Terri, help me,'" he said. "You want to believe there's some connection. You hope she's going to sit up and bed and say, `Hey, I'm really here, but don't tell anybody.' Or, `I'm really here, tell everybody!'"
But Schiavo never made eye contact. When Wolfson visited her when her parents were there, she never made eye contact with them either, he said. And for all of Wolfson's pleadings and coaxing, he never got what he most wanted: a sign.
"I felt like there was something distinctive about whoever Terri is," said Wolfson. "But I was not clear that it was there, inside the vessel."
Wolfson was dismayed to learn Friday that Barbara Weller, an attorney for the Schindlers, claimed that Schiavo tried to speak. "Terri does not speak," he said. "To claim otherwise reduces her to a fiction."
One thing Wolfson never doubted was that for all their intense, mutual antagonism, both Michael Schiavo and Terri's parents love and adore her.
She was cared for incredibly well, Wolfson said. Her hair was always combed, and after 15 years of being incapacitated, she never developed a bedsore. In fact, Wolfson said until about seven years ago, Michael Schiavo had Terry's makeup and hair done regularly, and her clothes changed every day - to the point that hospice staff protested that he was being overly demanding about her care.
Also, Wolfson concluded, Schiavo would never have tolerated the enormous, "omnipresent" acrimony between her husband and parents.
In the 38-page report he wrote afterwards, Wolfson said the best decision for Schiavo could be made only if both sides agreed to fresh, independent medical testing. If the new testing showed she couldn't swallow on her own and that Schiavo had no hope for improvement, then the feeding tube should be pulled.
Both parties were on the verge of agreeing to these new conditions, Wolfson said, but once the Florida Supreme Court struck down Terri's Law his efforts were moot.
Wolfson still refuses to give his personal opinion on whether Terri's feeding tube should or should not have been pulled.
But he will say, as a parent of three sons, that after doing everything one can, sometimes the time comes to let go.
"When it evolves beyond that person into issues that are other people's issues or are broader issues, it becomes less objectifiable," said Wolfson. "It's hard to be objective anyway. This is the kind of thing you don't wish on anybody."
THIS GUY IS A DAMN LIAR! A SHILL FOR THE STUPID! MANY HOSPICE WORKERS HAVE GIVEN SWORN AFFIDAVITS OTHERWISE!!!
But after being awarded $800,000 for Terri's rehabilitation and lifetime care and $640,000 for his loss, Michael had a do-not-resuscitate order placed on his wife's chart and repeatedly denied her treatment for infections.
No I think it is you flaglady who is delusional. You can't tell the difference between someone who is braindead and dying and someone who isn't.
Even if Terri were PVS it would be a crime to STARVE HER to DEATH!!!! WE don't STARVE people in this country. At least in the America, I knew!
And a device that was made especially for him to communicate. Otherwise Hawkings wouldn't be just like Terri and UNABLE to speak. Doctor's think Terri could learn to speak without such a device.
Notice all those broken bones in the 1991 bone scan as well strangulation marks. A scan that Michael kept secret from Terri's family until 2003.
"No I think it is you flaglady who is delusional. You can't tell the difference between someone who is braindead and dying and someone who isn't."
You're going to lose on every level of this case, you know. On every point. In every court. The U.S. Supreme Court just shot down Congress's appeal. And Monday, no matter what gyrations certain members of Congress go through, it will do absolutely no good as most members of Congress have already left town on spring break, and won't come back in to vote on this subject, not very many of them at all. There won't be enough members to make a quorum so there won't be any vote. And Congress won't return until, I believe the first week in April, two weeks from now. By that time it will be too late.
If a law is passed in the FL legislature early this next week, it will be shot down immediately by the FL 2nd Court of Appeals, and then the FL State Supreme Court. You've got nowhere left to go. The end, finis. Unless you've got some really really good idea that no one else has thought of yet. Good luck.
This straw man, wrong diagnosis and chemical imbalance was apperently believable and was proved well enough to award her a 2 million dollar malpractice settlement.
That's on strong straw-man.
With our notoriusly corrupt court system that grows increasingly more corrupt with each passing year, I find it laughable that you would even consider justifying the STARVATION of Terri because of the decision of ONE very BIASED Judge.
Does anyone know what the true numbers are on this case. I have heard 2 million, 1 million, $700,000 now $800,000 plus $640,000.
Why is it that something as simple as getting the numbers on a the settlement straight can't even be accomplished.
Can anyone point me to some documents/articles that show these numbers?
This guy thinks starving Terri to death is a way to "let go"? Dear me!
Is this appeal the same as the subpoena they issued for Terri to testify?
Are the appeal and subpoena connected in any way?
except that he's lying about her not having bedsores..and being well cared for.. since she had to have 5 teeth pulled because of lack of dental care, and not being allowed to leave her room or even look outside for 5 years, so why wouldn't he lie about everything else? impassive observer my a**
To answer your question:
The U.S. Supreme Court late Friday denied without comment a House committee emergency request to have Terri Schiavo's feeding tube reinserted. The decision came after the committee requested the court's ruling in order to buy time as lower court appeals on subpoenas issued by the committee are considered.
"because of the decision of ONE very BIASED Judge."
How about the little fact that this case has gone before 19 judges, not just one. The one (Greer) makes a decision, and then it is backed up or not by higher courts. His decisions have been backed by all courts the case has appeared before. So can the only one bit. Does not compute.
Then the appeal and subpoena are not connected.
This is good I think.
Do you know what the next move is concerning the subpoena?
Do they send in the federal marshalls?
If yes, do you think they have the courage to do so?
Do they have the legal standing to do so?
Those are APPEALS court judges. They don't rule based on the FACTS. They only examine whether Judge Greer made PROCEDURAL errors. Even if they strongly believe Judge GREER erred based on the facts (and they well might), they cannot legally overrule him on that basis.
Ok, let me put it to you this way. My calculated guess is that the Courts are real PO'd right now at Congress, as they overstepped their bounds with the subpoenas, effectively thumbing their noses at the Court system. And the Courts (all of them) aren't going to like that one bit. It's that old separation of powers thingy, and the courts believe their toes have been stepped on bigtime. Therefore, at this point, I suspect anything that has to do with the Schiavo case that appears before a Court will now be shot down. Want to bet?
The subpoena question will now be moving through the lower federal courts, and will probably end up eventually before the U.S. Supreme Court, where it will undoubtedly be shot down, as the Court will refuse to review the case. That's my guess.
If they did it would only proving our point that there IS a very serious attitude problem ON THE COURT SIDE. These are not the well behaved yankee doodle dandy courts envisioned in the 18th century where a magistrate was lucky to make it into his sixties. They are septuagenarian and octogenarian Philosopher Kings unto themselves, legislating vast changes in the landscape from the bench.
His findings of fact have never come into scrutiny, only points of law. That the legal engineering and machinations of Felon and company were superb, is the only thing that can be read into this.
Something has to be wrong when one mind is all that is needed to find fact bearing on the very life or death of a person. Murderers get a better chance than this.
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