How about the videos showing Terri swallowing and licking her lips? Folks in PVS cannot do many things, and selectively licking the lips is one of them ... Your agenda is getting clearer by the post.
Sorry. I have no agenda.
I was wondering about your post #613...I have taken care of two younger aged patients, both diagnosed as being in a PVS, one for many, many years the other for just a few months...both had feeding tubes....yet they also appeared to be able to swallow, lick their lips, at various times, they seemed to utter words, always had their eyes appearing to look here and there....
As being their caretaker on my shift, I always had to chart, ,whether or not, I saw any meaninful attempt on the part of my patient to interact with their environment...sadly, most of the time, I had to chart, 'No'...now these patients knew me well, I cared for them 5days a week, 8 hrs a day, and gave them full loving care...yet they almost never responded to me in any meaningful way...I say 'almost', because there were occasions, that it appeared that they responded to me, whether to my voice, to my moving around their bed, or to any commands I might give them...but those were almost non existant times...
I remember one time, when one of them appeared to be tracking me with their eyes, as I passed at the foot of their bed...and I charted as much...but it was the only time, ever that this patient seemed to track me...his eyes were always moving, and it seemed to me, and apparently to the nursing home staff as well, that he coincidentally was moving his eyes across the foot of his bed, in a random manner, but it happened when I was moving across the foot of his bed...I would have been overjoyed, if it had signaled a true response to his environment, as he had a wife and young children....but he never did repeat it, not to me, nor to anyone else....
So, I do wonder, are there varying levels of PVS?...can some PVS patients appear more responsive than others?...just what do PVS patients feel and know?...even the greatest doctors minds seem not to be able to agree fully on this aspect of the PVS patients minds...we do know so little about the brain, and what it can and cannot do...
Their not able to sit up and look out windows the way Terri was either.