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Terri was observed many times by medical professionals to have some higher brain function. This seems at odds with that one CT scan that got posted all over the Internet. Everyone could "see" that she had no brain -- that is, people who haven't the faintest idea how to read a CT. They got it wrong, and so did some professionals, including neurologists. (Interpreting CAT scans is the specialty of radiologists, not neurologists.)

According to doc CodeBlueBlog (a radiologist),

"1) It is NOT as bad as the neurologists and bioethicists play it up to be; and,

"2) There are many elderly patients with various levels of mental functioning who have severe atrophy that is difficult to distinguish from Terri Schiavo's atrophy."

In particular, the CT shows nearly total atrophy in the anterior (front) of the brain, but a substantial amount of cortex remaining in the rear of the brain, with networking.* This was confirmed in the autopsy. Dr. Hammesfahr said that this was consistent with the limited but still hopeful brain functions he had observed in Terri when he worked with her.

That one CT probably did more to give people a false impression of Terri's condition than Felos's top ten lies. Whoever posted it invited the whole world to do a medical no-no: diagnosing an unexamined patient.

* How she got such an injury makes fascinating speculation. If her brain injury was due to cardiac arrest, why was only the brain affected and not organs below her neck such as her heart and liver? And why was the damage so much greater in the front of the brain than in the rear? Pressure on the carotid arteries, which feed oxygenated blood to the front of the brain, is one possible answer. Another is a "coup-contra coup" injury which is akin to the "shaken baby syndrome." It's like whiplash. The brain sort of sloshes back, bounces off the back of the skull (minor damage), then smashes hard into the front of the skull with heavy damage.

Briefly, the question of swallowing. Terri certainly could swallow. She swallowed her saliva and didn't drool. Her nurses used to feed her Jello and pudding on the sly (when Michael wasn't around) and said she hugely enjoyed them. Terri's swallowing problem were more like it was dangerous to give her food -- not impossible. If she aspirated any food -- got it down the wrong tube and into her lungs -- it could have caused infection and pneumonia. The Medical Examiner (coroner) noted that she had in fact suffered aspiration pneumonia and retroactively bawled out whoever gave her food by mouth. But I believe the nurses -- Terri's primary caregivers -- knew exactly what they were doing. And after all, this was ten years before her death, when she was in better shape. No telling how she contracted the pneumonia detected in the autopsy.

In any case, it could not have hurt to put some ice chips in her mouth when she was being put to death.