Posted on 03/23/2005 5:35:31 PM PST by gentlestrength
Yes I also like the part where he says she does not respond whatsoever. On March 18 after they pull her feeding tube out (this in itself is painful) Teri's father audio tapes Teri. He asks Teri some basic questions e.g. what part of your body hurts. For example being in bed for so long her back should hurt. Teri responds when he asks her about her back. Teri doesn't respond when he ask if her leg hurts. She obviously does have brain function.
Consider this: somehow Michael Schavio got the courts to agree that Teri's parents weren't allowed to visit their daughter round 2003-2004. This happened after the parents were caught videotaping Teri.
I'll betcha anything Michael Schavio was surprised that Teri's father got that audio taping March 18 2005.
Still other people found the audio tape scary. Well not if you've seen the Patricia Neal Story (played by actress Glenda Jackson). Patricia was a stroke victim. After the stroke she could not move or speak. The doctors said she needed rehab. Her husband (lucky her she married one who loves her) went through those rehab exercises every step of the way and she was able to walk again and speak again. Whereas prior to rehab all she could do is make the grunting sounds that Teri makes now. Patricia, an actress, then went back to work and took a role in the 1961 movie "Breakfast At Tiffanys".
It's really too bad that the vast population doesn't understand that just because a person can't move or speak doesn't mean they can't come back with rehab. Other doctors argued it for Teri, but somehow Mr. Schavio can say no to doctor reccomendations. Just like he can say no, her parents can't visit.
It's obvious that even Felos and Schiavo must be in basic disagreement with Doctor Cranford, who testified, for them, in front of Greer, that Terri is PVS.
Do you agree with Cranford that Terri has no constitutional rights? Do you think she is not a "person" according to the Constitution.
Think this through, because Michael and his lawyer have been saying they are protecting Terri's "right to die" and Terri's "right to privacy."
How can Michael and Felos be protecting the rights of someone, when their own expert witness says that person has no rights?
Thank you. I've read that this may not be true, but it is certainly worth looking into.
"my question is this: Is it right (not just legal, but right) to kill someone soley because they have been diagnosed with PVS?"
See? That's the problem. everyone misses that that is absolutely not what is happening.
Here - from my profile page:
First, simply understand that, under Florida law, as approved by the US Supreme Court in Cruzan, (in which they gave states the right to determine what level of evidence was necessary to determine a patient's wishes) the deciding issue is whether or not there is clear and convincing evidence that Terri would or wouldn't want to be maintained on a feeding tube. It is not about determining her quality of life. It is simply a matter of a patient's ability to refuse treatment, whether by oral or written statements made while they were lucid.
As stated in 2001, by the Florida 2nd District Court of appeals in their support of the foundation ruling (linked to below, they found that there was clear and convincing evidence that she wouldn't want the tube to remain.
They also noted that Michael did not make the decision - he asked the court to listen to both sides and for the court to take his role in this matter of her tube. He did not have to do that. He could have forced he parents to challenge his legal decision from a less powerful position.
http://abstractappeal.com/schiavo/trialctorder02-00.pdf
Greer's decision that there was clear and convincing evidence she would not want the tube.
Then, read the second district's very informative affirmation of his ruling:
http://abstractappeal.com/schiavo/2dcaorder01-01.txt
Description of the testimony at the 2000 trial to determine Terri's wishes.
http://www.sptimes.com/2003/11/08/Tampabay/Schiavo_s_wishes_reca.shtml
If you study those, it should really help clear up what this is all about.
I see anguish on the face of Michael, too.
But it reminds me more of the anguish on the face of the folks in Iraq who were ordered to speak to the terrorists' cameras before they were beheaded.
I am not being funny.
Michael is afraid of someone or something.
"On March 18 after they pull her feeding tube out (this in itself is painful) Terri's father audio tapes Terri"
Someone speaking on behalf of the Schindlers said the other day that it was most likely an older tape, but that he hadn't heard it. Bob Schindler was not with Terri after her tube was removed.
I do agree that it is disturbing if it is legitimate - even if it is older.
I see now...
The US Supreme Court has taken on right-to-die cases before....
Why are so many talking heads acting like it's outlandish for the Supremes to take up Terri's "right-to-die" case?
That is why I always say the choice of Cranford was as stupid of Felos as the choice of hammesfahr by Anderson.
That man is just creepy.
What made it less harmful to Felos is that they had a long history of other docs and therapists and nurses who had said since 1990 that she was PVS, with no contradictions, and 2 others at that trial, plus gambone who cited the history of docs.
Her parents had this one chance to pick 2. Their choices of alternative medicine docs who were so easily impeached were literally deadly.
Greer erred in his holding and his condescending snide comments have come back to bite him in his ass. He erred because Karen Quinlan died in 1985. He is condescending and snide because he has an animus toward the Schindlers. It is no better illustrated than in his comments regarding Quinlan.
When the court issues orders banning nurses from putting ice chips in her mouth, the court has moved well beyond a "right to refuse treatment" case.
You're right - I misread your shift. My eyes are fuzzy. I apologize. =} I've managed to keep quiet most of these days - now isn't the time to be popping up. lol
I don't know enough about the doctor today to criticize him, nor did I. I didn't study his report - just read it. PVS is not easy to diagnose. Good docs can disagree, and from what I could tell, he was only saying it was possible she was misdiagnosed. That's why I wish they'd followed Wolfson's advice. (It did bother me that he cited Hammesfahr - I have a feeling a lot of congressmen and docs are going to regret their quoting him later. At least Glenn Beck got rid of him, sensing the lack of honesty.)
I wasn't sending you to that thread about Hammesfahr for that post. I seem to remember links on there about the Nobel Prize Nomination process and thought there were good leads for you to follow.
I'm not going to hunt down and type out every link, or post them in every post. I have cited these things so many times, I finally put most of them on my page. I have seen too many here who haven't read the most basic documents, like the 4 court decisions I link to at the top. there are more below that are highly informative.
It isn't like I'm just saying "do the research". I've done the hard part for y'all, tracking down and reading for months, and putting all the links together - easy to access. Links like the first 6 that are almost never posted here, but highly critical to understanding.
If you read his testimony, then you know he said zero response. If you saw the tapes, then you know he said she did respond. The court testimony was not sealed. Greer ordered the tapes sealed and not to be released. He declared them to be Mickey's property. If the tapes don't contain Bambakidis telling those present, that there was a response, you would be right, but the audio clearly proves otherwise.
"But remeber that 8 other neurologists have diagnosed her as PVS"
NIH on PVS: "Although individuals in a persistent vegetative state may appear somewhat normal, they do not speak and they are unable to respond to commands." HTe tapes have her following the balloon and responding with great effort to say the word "dad" when she hears her fathers voice.
" The only 2 who didn't were alternative med docs Maxwell (a radiologist who couldn't define pvs) and Hammesfahr"
Incompetents and Hammesfahr's a quack. The lawyer sucks too.
"Please read his report if you haven't."
Thanks, but not tonight.
"On my profile page is also a link to a description of the 4 hours of video.
I saw and analyzed what I saw of the video myself.
" And read the links on my page to the court decisions of that (2002) trial."
I read all the previous court testimonies and findings. Thanks. Good night.
Melvin Greer, chosen by Michael, may not have been creepy like you say Cranford was, but he was a poor excuse for an expert witness.
Dr. Melvin Greer, [an expert witness] appointed by Schiavo, testified that a doctor need not examine a patient to know the appropriate medical treatment. He spent approximately 45 minutes with Terri.and
When questioned by Anderson, Dr. Greer admitted he had not read a certain, major article in a British medical journal reporting a 43 percent error rate in PVS diagnoses over a five-year period.I'll let you guess why the Death-to-Terri folks don't highlight Greer's testimony, and prefer the testimony of crrrreeeepy Crrrranford.
It's also about the right of my wife to make that decision in the event I am unable to.
There are several cases where I would prefer death to forced feeding...And for 15 years?...I'd come back and haunt her if she allowed that.
Is it right?
Should death by omission be considered murder?
It is a complex ethical question.
If it can be considered so then how many crimes of this nature are committed by society every day. Think Sudan. Or any other place where death starvation, and injustice prevail because we do nothing...sometimes for the most practical reasons.
But at the level of the family this should be a private matter for if we are not responsible as murderers for the death by omission of the many how can we claim a moral high ground to stand on the claim of one?
I am a long time fan of William F. Buckley.
This is what he wrote about this case. I concur with him.
March 23, 2005, 11:18 a.m. The Great Quandary Enough. What was good was that the resources of the entire nation, so it seemed, could be aroused with only the end in mind of sparing — more accurately, prolonging — a single life. It was left only to mobilize the Seventh Fleet to level a thousand guns on the doctors engaged in removing the tubes from Terri Schiavo. Not since 6-year old Elian Gonzalez was ordered by the courts to return to Cuba, there to submit to a lifetime of servitude under Fidel Castro Inc., had there been such a mobilization of public sentiment.
What broke the back of the Free Elian movement was a social convention: deferral to the wishes of the father. He wanted Elian home, and traveled to Florida to pick him up after an eristic judicial storm — which ended with the simple daybreak that the future of a child is to be decided by his parents.
In the case of Terri Schiavo, orderly thought would have led us to believe that her treatment was the next of kin's to decide. But human concern for Mrs. Schiavo interposed qualifiers: The husband had attached himself to another woman, by whom another family had begun. This suggested a diluted moral, though not legal, authority of the husband. Then the father and the mother of the stricken girl argued to keep her alive — to keep her pulse beating. Terri is not, repeat not, brain dead, though she is unable to communicate. Meanwhile the courts of Florida were guided, or seemed to be, by precedents which treated as relevant only the absence of a living will by Mrs. Schiavo, and the legal recognition of her husband as head of the family. The two considerations estopped any movement by the courts to assume authority, as though she belonged to them.
Those many who pleaded to continue the patient's life emphasized the theoretical possibility of a cure, or a rehabilitation of sorts. On this point her parents argued most tenaciously. They released, over the weekend, tapes made of their afflicted daughter, which could be interpreted as showing Terri to be responding to stimuli of various kinds.
But the world was looking at a woman whose immobilizing heart attack happened fifteen years ago. An anonymous doctor declared flatly that she had a flat EEG — electroencephalogram, the brain wave test.
But the political impulse was heartening, even if the hopes voiced were falsetto science. What caused the political commotion was the sense that we were presiding over an execution. Terri Schiavo remained "alive," until we stopped feeding her. Then she began a fall through a trapdoor descending toward death. She was being committed to a death of an agonizing kind, surely? One that began with the removal of the tubes, and would continue until starvation and dehydration brought on the end of the heartbeat.
Some years ago, in a forum on euthanasia, my guest was the Reverend Robert L. Barry, who had studied the subject extensively. Father Barry argued that the deprivation of food and water brings on physical pain whatever else the human condition.
Was the court system in Florida, then, acquiescing in death by pain for Mrs. Schiavo? A doctor consulted by one television analyst brushed aside the question, in language not readily transcribed by a layman. He seemed to be saying that Mrs. Schiavo would not suffer pain as the term is commonly understood.
But that question was not directly accosted by the judge, who said only that Terri's rights had not been abrogated. It was unseemly for critics to compare her end with that of victims of the Nazi regime. There was never a more industrious inquiry, than in the Schiavo case, into the matter of rights formal and inchoate. It is simply wrong, whatever is felt about the eventual abandonment of her by her husband, to use the killing language. She was kept alive for fifteen years, underwent a hundred medical ministrations, all of them in service of an abstraction, which was that she wanted to stay alive. There are laws against force-feeding, and no one will know whether, if she had had the means to convey her will in the matter, she too would have said, Enough.
* * *
Anyone with an ounce of an ability to read a human face, can see Terri's face softens and lights up when she looks at her mom.
There's not much movement in her facial muscles, but anyone who has loved someone can see the emotion, nonetheless.
That is a real sticking point with me, too.I *really* need to go lie down. Back in a bit.
It can't be right to not allow an obviously thirsty and hungry person to at least *try* to eat or drink.
I know the reason is because she is legally considered PVS. Plus, her having failed all tests to swallow in the first three years (the most critical time period, and while she was being given speech and "swallow" therapy), they believe it would lead to one of two things:
1. She aspirates and gets pneumonia (not good if they wind up putting the tube back in)
2. She is able to ingest just enough to make her starvation and dehydration last a very long time.
But still... it just seems wrong morally and legally to use those possibilities as a reason to deny even giving her a chance.
Hope you're OK. If I can help out, let me know.
If some punk steals the portable oxygen tank from an emphysema patient who is walking along a sidewalk, is it murder if the patient dies?
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