Routine returns a sense of calm (Nurse Aignes admits Terri had feelings!!)

PINELLAS PARK - The room was quiet Friday. The stuffed animals and family pictures were gone. The air mattress that protected her skin from bedsores is neatly covered with a pink and blue blanket.

Only a few clues marked her passing: a bouquet of flowers, still fresh in their vase. An electric candle, ceramic angel and farewell note left by the staff.

For the first time in five years Friday, life at Hospice House Woodside went on without Terri Schindler Schiavo.

About 50 patients were fed and bathed. An elderly woman with cancer died just before noon. Workers who helped keep Schiavo alive for so long reined in their emotions and plowed through another day.

"It's been very hard watching a circus outside and be there with her while she was dying," said Susan Agines, a senior nursing supervisor. "I think what finally did it was when the juggler came. To me it was ... awful."

Hospice workers are accustomed to death. Their job is to help families through it. But never has the journey exacted such a toll as this one, said Woodside manager Becky McAllister.

For two weeks, nurses, aides and volunteers had to pass through yelling throngs to get to work. Angry voices accused them of murder.

"Today, we are feeling a mixture of relief, exhaustion and satisfaction that we were able to take care of her as well as we did," McAllister said, "and pride in our staff that we were able to continue in spite of having to run this gantlet."

Losing a patient is never easy, McAllister said. Hospice workers deal with patients and families on intimate levels and tend to get attached.

One patient always walked around with a red mark on his cheek, bragging about his daily kiss from the receptionist. An AIDS patient, after several days of extensive wound treatment, told staff that "no one would ever touch him before that," McAllister said. "He felt loved here."

The bonds with Terri Schiavo also were strong. Her five-year stay was two years longer than any other patient. She originally came in 2000 after Pinellas-Pasco Circuit Judge George W. Greer ordered her feeding tube removed for the first time. People expected her to die soon, but litigation stretched on and on.

The staff took pride that she never developed a bedsore. With twice as many nursing aides per patient than the average nursing home, Woodside workers were able to turn her every two hours.

"She wasn't able to verbalize," said Agines, the nursing supervisor. "But if she was uncomfortable, because the staff had been with her so long, we knew. If she moved, we knew what it meant. We knew when she should settle down with a different piece of music."

For five years, the staff also made connections with Terri's two families - her birth family and marriage family. Some of the staff had moral reservations about removing her feeding tube, others were fine with it, McAllister said. But they were trained to keep those feelings to themselves and try to support everyone equally.

"I said, "This isn't my battle,"' Agines said. "I'm there as a nurse caring for patient. I am caring for the wife of Michael Schiavo, the daughter of Bob and Mary Schindler and the sister to Suzanne and Bobby."

Agines, McAllister and Hospice of the Florida Suncoast president Mary Labyak said their biggest regret was not helping Michael Schiavo and the Schindler family bury their differences, at least long enough for everyone to be present at her death.

Family members have given conflicting versions of what transpired in Schiavo's last few hours Thursday, and the hospice workers declined to elaborate, citing confidentiality.

About 7,000 people die a year under Hospice of the Florida Suncoast care, mostly at home and in nursing homes, Labyak said. Conflict is common as families decide when to treat infections, when to put in feeding tubes, when to disconnect ventilators, when to sign do-not-resuscitate orders.

The Schiavo case is the only one she could remember where disagreements kept family members from a bedside at death.

"What saddened us with Terri was all our hoping for reconciliation," Agines said. "To see a family so torn and divided ... I think that was the hardest."

Labyak said it was too early to assess the financial impact of the publicity and furor. She has seen no significant effect on donations.

"Some people wrote letters and said they were not going to donate anymore because they were against" the removal of Schiavo's feeding tube, Labyak said. "Others sent contributions because they said they were proud of what we were doing."

Woodside, with room for 70 patients, is a small part of Hospice's $90-million-a-year operations. Hospice paid about $40,000 for off-duty Pinellas Park police officers to provide security, in addition to officers assigned there by the Police Department, Labyak said. That money came from a "quality of life" reserve fund that usually fulfills last wishes such as helping one patient fly to Peru to visit her mother.

"If anything, I fear that when people need us, they will think of hospice as those signs, those statements, instead of the compassion and dignity and we will not have people dying well in our community because of something they saw on TV," Labyak said. "That would be the ultimate tragedy."

Dr. Theresa Buck, the staff physician, understands the danger. Her own mother and step-mother refused to believe her assessment of Schiavo's condition because of what they saw on television.

"They said she is talking and asking for things," Buck said. "I had dinner with them Wednesday night and couldn't convince them that's not true. And I'm here every day."

Gulfport resident Delys Cavalaro, 82, loves how hospice workers are treating her. "We smile at each other. It's a bond. We don't see many frowns," said Cavalaro, who has breast cancer.

She has a living will and does not want to be kept alive through a feeding tube. "I want to go peacefully. If God chooses to let us live a little longer, I guess that's good fortune."

But she also feels for Mary Schindler. She never met Michael Schiavo, but wished "he would have given her back to her mother. It would have solved a lot of problems."

Jane Burnham knows Michael Schiavo, who lived at Woodside after his wife's feeding tube was removed March 18. His room was next door to the room where Burnham's mother, Betty, 74, lives as she copes with chronic lung disease.

The day Terri Schiavo died, Burnham's mother was reeling under an infection and was not eating. As they left the hospice, Michael and his brother Brian stopped to say goodbye.

"With all that going on in his life, he knew I was having a rough day," Burnham said. "He came by and gave me a hug and said I was in his thoughts and prayers. He is the nicest man."

Burnham said protesters often yelled at her during her daily visits to her mother. "They have called us murderers," she said. "They say, "Why are you going to go in there where they kill people?' They have no idea what really goes on in here."

McAllister said she expects a new patient to take over Schiavo's room on Monday. It's in the back of the building and looks out over 9 pine-wooded acres. Sometimes, people hold memorial services out there, and weddings, including one between two patients, McAllister said. Afterward the staff welded their hospital beds together.

What you can't see from Schiavo's room is the front of the hospice, where protesters bore witness for two weeks. On Friday, only a few remained.

Michael Schiavo fights to fulfill wishes

Excerpt:

Schiavo, also 41, was the youngest of five brothers brought up in the mass-produced suburb of Levittown, Pa. They grew up in the Jubilee model -- two stories, four bedrooms, two baths and an attached garage.

The brothers were confirmed in the Lutheran church, though Sunday services weren't always a priority, says Scott Schiavo, who still lives in Levittown.

Once the "runt of the litter," Michael grew to 6-foot-7. But unlike his brothers, he had little interest in athletics; at Woodrow Wilson High School, Michael Schiavo joined the Italian Club, not the football squad.

"Mike was more of a debater," his brother says. "He was not a go-out-and-start-knocking-heads and stuff like that. ... He would rather try to discuss or argue a point."

After high school, Michael enrolled in nearby Bucks County Community College. It was there, in a sociology class, that he met Theresa Marie Schindler.

They were engaged just five months later and married in November 1984. After a year and a half, the couple moved to Florida for Terri's work at an insurance company, and her parents followed them three months later. Michael Schiavo got work managing a restaurant.

Friends of Terri's have said that Schiavo became possessive of his wife, tracking her movements and begrudging time she spent with her family. Terri had been overweight as a girl, and he reportedly rode her about her weight -- and threatened to leave her if she got fat again.

Terri's brother, Bobby, has said Terri was even contemplating leaving Schiavo. Scott Schiavo says he saw a happy couple.

Then, in the early morning of Feb. 25, 1990, Terri Schiavo collapsed, changing everything.

Initially, Michael Schiavo felt that his wife might benefit from therapy. He staged fund-raisers to pay for a flight to California for rehabilitation.

During a medical malpractice case in 1992, Schiavo testified that he was studying nursing at St. Petersburg College to better learn how to care for Terri.

"I want to bring my wife home," he told the court.

When asked how he felt about being married to Terri in her current state, he said: "I feel wonderful. She's my life, and I wouldn't trade her for the world. ... I believe in the vows that I took with my wife. Through sickness, in health, for richer or poorer.

"I married my wife because I love her and I want to spend the rest of my life with her. I'm going to do that."

But by 1993, Schiavo was fighting with his in-laws, Bob and Mary Schindler, over his wife's care and guardianship. In a deposition, the ruggedly handsome Schiavo was forced to admit that he had already been involved in lengthy relationships with two women since his wife's collapse.

One of those women, a nursing assistant at the home where Terri was being cared for, told the Schindlers' attorneys that Schiavo would "whine all the time" about how Terri's illness had ruined his life, and that he couldn't wait to collect the malpractice settlement. She described Schiavo as obsessive and claimed he stalked her for more than a year after their breakup.

Trudy Capone, who worked as a nurse at a home where Terri was treated in the early 1990s, says Michael Schiavo is "an evil, evil, evil man" who repeatedly told her that he and his wife had never discussed what to do if she was incapacitated. She says he was always asking, "What should I do?"

"This man is a liar," Capone says.

That is not the Michael Schiavo who Jill Schad knows. A fellow nurse, Schad has known Schiavo for six years and has seen him on the job and with Terri. He strokes her hair and holds her hand and kisses her, Schad says.

"He acts like a caring person should, like a loving husband should," says Schad. "You can just see the sorrow in his eyes ... There's no way he could be faking it."

Russ Hyden feels the same way. Hyden was introduced to Schiavo in 1991, when Hyden's pregnant wife, Karen, was diagnosed with breast cancer.

Despite his own travails, Hyden says Schiavo was there for him, shooting hoops with Hyden's 7-year-old son and stopping by to make sure things were OK. When Hyden's wife died in 1994, Schiavo arranged for the family to go to Disney World.

"He is a loyal friend, a wonderful father and a wonderful person," Hyden says.

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About a decade ago, Schiavo met Jodi Centonze. They now have two toddlers, a daughter and a son, and live in a comfortable house in Clearwater surrounded by palms, live oaks, and most recently, no-trespassing signs.

Schiavo has declined requests by The Associated Press for an interview. But in a recent appearance on ABC's "Nightline," Schiavo insisted that his relationship with Centonze not withstanding, he is Terri's husband, and he's still bound to abide by her wishes.

"I still have a big commitment to Terri," he said. "I made her a promise."

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