Posted on 03/07/2007 7:50:20 AM PST by OB1kNOb
Doctors call it a miracle. A Southern Colorado woman was in a vegetative state for more than six years, but now, she's talking for the first time. She spoke exclusively to 11 News.
Christa Lilly had a heart attack then a stroke. That's the last thing she remembers. It was November of 2000, when Lilly slipped into a vegetative state, which is essentially like a coma, but with the eyes open. Lilly was unconscious and unaware of her surroundings. Now, for the first time in six and a half years, she's awake, alert, and talking. "I think it's wonderful. It makes me so happy," Lilly tells us.
The last time Lilly was aware of the world around her, Bill Clinton was in office and the September 11th attacks hadn't even happened. Lilly was also surprised to find out her youngest daughter is now 12. "It's kinda exciting," Chelcy says. She’s Christa’s daughter. And she's also a grandmother of three, that's new too. "Seeing her talking," Latiana says, is the greatest gift of all. She's 6-years-old and the oldest of the grandchildren.
“To come back out of it... God is good," Minnie Smith, Lilly’s mother, says. She has been taking care of her all these years. She says this past Sunday, her prayers were answered. "Every morning, I always check on her when I wake up, before I go to the bathroom. I always say, ‘Hi baby, how are you doing?’ She said, ‘I'm fine’ and that's when I knew she was awake." A two-word answer that changed everything.
Lilly says her biggest frustration is learning how to talk again. "I've been eating cake." Eating is no problem for this woman, who had been kept alive by a feeding tube.
“This is a miracle,” Lilly's neurologist, Dr. Randall Bjork, tells us. He checked to see her how her brain is functioning. He says he's as surprised as everyone else. "This is all mystical and I can't explain it."
Uttering her first sentences in more than 6 years, Christa has a lot of catching up to do.
Lilly's mom says her daughter has awakened 4 other times in the past, but not completely, not like this. There's a chance Lilly could slip back into her vegetative state, but the family is hoping she's back for good.
Quick, starve her before she can do anything!
Thanks! And yours is VERY fitting for the world today, methinks!
I am very happy for this woman. However, before I even opened the thread, I knew the Terri Schiavo crowd would be here. May she rest in peace.
NOPE! T'wit's tagline is the best ever!
I agree. And why not let her parents do nice things for her? Even that was forbidden. Judge Greer is such a sadist.
Crowd? fact is that blood is thicker than water and more emotionally binding than a marriage contract.
THOGMARTIN: Her brain was profoundly atrophied. The brain weighed 615 grams, roughly half of the expected weight of a human brain. This was due to diffused hypoxic ischemic damage. There was massive neuronal loss or damage. This damage was irreversible, and no amount of therapy or treatment would have regenerated the massive loss of neurons.
Of note, there was severe occipital (ph) lobe necrosis (ph). Her vision centers of her brain were dead. Therefore, Mrs. Schiavo had what's called cortical blindness. She was blind, could not see.
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0506/15/lt.01.html
So, all that stuff about Terri 'watching' this, that or the other was hooie.
> Dr. Nelson was asked in a press session if his findings
> ruled out Terri being conscious to some degree and able
> to communicate with her family? "No," he said.
He also said all the findings were consistent with that diagnosis. In fact, he said, "The findings of Terri Schiavo are very consistent with persistent vegetative state.
I made the comparison in my report to Karen Ann Quinlan. Karen Ann Quinlan died 10 years after being in a persistent vegetative state. Her brain, Karen Ann Quinlan, weighed more than Terri Schiavo's brain weighed.
The typical things associated with persistent vegetative state are those normal functions of beating heart and breathing and no other types of cognitive function that occurs in the higher portions of the brain."
Now, let's not rehash the whole debate, eh?
Let's just be glad **this** woman wasn't so badly damaged, and was able to recover. That's great, truly great, for her and her family.
How does this statement by Dr. Thogmartin, any other statement by him, anything contained within the actual autopsy report, or any of the accompanying documents prove that Terri's brain was dead, as you claimed? How does it prove that Michael's doctors were lying on the stand when they testified that Terri was aware? How does it prove that at the time Michael's doctors examined Terri and determined that she was aware and could see, that she was brain dead and blind?
Postmortem findings, including the state of the body and laboratory testing, showed that she died of marked dehydration.
How does this prove that she was dead before she was dehydrated?
You've made some false claims, and continue to refuse to back them up. Now you're adding comparisons to Karen Quinlan, who remained on a feeding/hydration tube until the moment she died. Naturally her brain was not dehydrated like Terri's was. The fact that Terri's brain was dehydrated does not prove that she was brain dead prior to the dehydration. You'll have to come up with something better than that.
You just did rehash it, eh?
The interesting result from the autopsy is not that Terri was injured -- duh -- but that she didn't collapse due to bulimia. That changes the whole story. We have to look more closely this time.
Would you like to take our one question quiz? It is simply this. How did Terri go from being perfectly healthy and asleep in bed, to face down on a hallway floor, in cardiac arrest, unconscious, making gurgling noises, unresponsive, nearly dead, right after Michael got home late that Saturday night?
The answer must conform to all known medical facts including the traumatic injuries reported on Terri's bone scan and the lactic acidosis in her blood tests.
It's not an easy test. I've posed it dozens of times. Nobody has even come close yet.
No. Blindness, like PVS, is a clinical diagnosis that cannot be established with certainty postmortem. Terri's vision was observed clinically by Dr. Maxfield, by Dr. Hammesfahr and by Dr. Cranford, who actually complimented her tracking. That is on video for you to see and hear if you wish.
It was Dr. Thogmartin's findings that were conjectural. He may have been mistaken, or the discrepancy between his view and the doctors who actually observed Terri's vision may have been due to additional damage to her cortex caused by her being dehydrated to death.
It is perfectly possible to have normal intelligence and lead a normal life with half of normal brain weight.
Oooh, I love it when you talk dirty! :-)
Here are three more reasons not to believe a guy who says he is finishing off his wife because it's what she would have wanted for herself, for him, and for the two children the cheating SOB sired with his floozie.
Cardiac arrhythmias, respiratory failure, and profound hypokalemia in a trauma patient
Hypokalemia in resuscitation from multiple trauma. "The degree of hypokalemia was associated with the severity of trauma and subsequent mortality."
>> there was 4 times the cerebro-spinal fluid there should have been in her skull.
And what is your source for whichever of your statements is closer to being true?
I have seen pictures of a headstone for Terri, here on FR and elsewhere. I am not sure whether or not her ashes are actually buried there.
Terri wasn't brain dead. No doctor ever diagnosed her as brain dead. It was perfectly obvious she was not, because she could breathe without assistance. It will come as a shock to our instant neurologists but Karen Ann Quinlan was not brain dead either. She lived nine years after they took her off the ventilator. Nor was Nancy Cruzan. None of them needed life support.
"Brain dead" is usually trash talk by the media and their gullible audience.
Mike sure pulled the wool over a lot of gullible people's eyes.
I commend you for being so knowledgable at least in the tone and mantras of our detractors, considering you have been with FreeRepublic this short time.
It is good occasion, though, to remind anyone visiting this thread that Terri was quite aware even when she was suffering the horrible killing procedure that took thirteen days to do her in. In this case, the truth is close at hand. Each day during this terrible period, Monsignor Malanowski, Terri's priest (Also he is an Army General former Chief of Chaplains.) briefed us compatriots immediately following every daily visit with Terri. As he described each visit and their interaction, we were keenly aware as to just how aware she was. Not only was she quite aware of her surroundings, but at the moment they were to pull the tubes, she screamed in horror when informed her husband's team were about to start killing her.
If you truly wish to become better informed on the truth of what happened and to reevaluate worn out mantras, you may take a peek at the thousands and thousands of posts on the subject in past Terri Dailies. There is so much truth, evidence and fact throughout these threads it is like sipping from a fire hydrant. Rather than have us lay it all out for you, I think you would gain much from delving right in. There are also some good books to read, at least one filled with evidence.
8mm
They are going to feel pretty.....................
sheepish .......................
when they have to face the facts :-)
Perforce, some of the players are in on the secrets and knowingly took part in killing Terri for their own reasons. We can hardly call a Greer or a Cranford "gullible," and especially not Schiavo's lawyers. Much of the media litany traces straight back to George Felos, a far better liar than Michael Schiavo. The death-babblers have been had by a pro.
I wouldn't even be surprised if Felos planted the phony CT scans that everybody saw. Even if not, he did much to publicize them. Freeper Polybius, a radiologist, explained the fakery. The CTs were of different -- non-comparable -- slices of the brain. In lay terms, the one with all that black space was supposed to have all that black space (fluid) area, where the other one was not. The armchair neurologists gawk at it and say, wow!, she had pudding for a brain. They were had again.
Someday the house of cards is going to come down. Too many people know too much. Somebody's going to talk. Will it be one of the lawyers? Will Jodi suddenly realize that her white knight has no alibi for what happened to Terri? Will Michael himself realize that he faces judgment? He can't hide forever.
Mike Farrell must have pushed to keep her alive. </sarcasm>
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