Terri could not be fed by hand. Why are you even wasting my time by bringing this up?
I see you are around still.
You assert that a surgically implanted feeding tube is "artificial life supprt". It is not. For example I have a person in my town who had such a tube for most of her life -- from when she swallowed some caustic agent as a toddler. In recent years she was fortunate enough to have further surgeries, care and therapy -- and for what seems the first time in her life, she was able to swallow again.
I agree that Terri never would have recovered and most likely (to state one way or the other is simple conjecture) didn't not have remaining mental faculties. Still, why was dehydration used as means of death? I found it to be inhumane and something that just never be done to an animal let alone a human being. They should have just given her morphine.
Perhaps, perhaps not. Nobody knows. She could swallow saliva, as you know, and she was fed a little, by hand, by nurses. Whether she could have received enough nourishment by hand to sustain life is simply not known.
Judge Greer evidently thought she could swallow and receive nourishment. That was why he ordered that she could not receive Holy Communion when he'd ordered her feeding tube removed the first time -- lest she be nourished by it and momentarily thwart his order to kill her. (I am confident Greer didn't make that ruling simply to deny Terri her First Amendment rights.)
When he ordered her feeding tube removed again last March, Judge Greer must still have conceded the possibility of her being nourished by hand because he also ordered that no one was to give her food or water. If her disability was such that she really couldn't be fed by hand, this order by Greer was absurd. It was also almost certainly illegal.
Terri's ability to swallow was, again, why Greer ordered that she could not be given ice chips in her mouth to relieve the agony of death by dehydration -- lest she be nourished by it and defeat his order to dehydrate her.