Posted on 05/22/2004 7:07:30 AM PDT by floriduh voter
Only His words can bring us the comfort we need. Thank you for posting them.
ProLife Ping!
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Can You Name This Woman?
By Susan Brinkmann
CS&T Correspondent
She loves piano music and hates soap operas. When someone hurts her feelings, she will completely ignore them. She loves praise and hates being yelled at. Talk to her and she'll talk back. She's very sensitive to pain and is partially blind. She can swallow and has voluntary control over all of her extremities.
Any idea who this woman might be?
Believe it or not, this is Terri Schindler-Schiavo. If the general public was able to read the neurological examination performed in September, 2002, by Dr. William Hammesfahr, they would hardly recognize this woman as the same blindly staring patient they see on television. Most shocking of all, the woman in Dr. Hammesfahr's report probably doesn't even need the feeding tube that has been the center of so much controversy since her mysterious collapse in Florida in 1990.
Dr. Hammesfahr's examination was conducted at the request of the Second District Court of Appeal on Sept. 3 - 4, 2002. He concurred with several other physicians, including Dr. Jay Carpenter, former Chief of Medicine at Morton Plant Hospital, that "it is visually apparent that Ms. Schiavo is able to swallow and, in fact, does swallow her own saliva."
Terri was able to make "talking" sounds, looked for people who's voices she recognized and was so aware of what was being done to her that she refused to smile at the doctor after he tested her gag reflexes.
Dr. Hammesfahr told us that when he first walked into her room her husband, Michael Schiavo, was already in the room along with a court reporter. "You've seen the pictures shown by the husband and his attorney, George Felos, where Terri looks off in space and appears kind of out of it, with her mouth hanging half open. That's what she looked like when I walked in. They were chatting and as I walked in, her eyes darted over to me and then went back, which is not what coma patients do."
Dr. Hammesfahr started talking to her and initially received no response except for subtle changes in her facial expression. "Then her mother came in. Terri heard her mother's voice at the door and she brightened up and turned her face and body to the left where the door was, and started trying to seek her out . . ."
Unfortunately, she's partially blind and can only see 18 inches in front of her face. "What she does is she picks up people by sound . . . then as they get closer, you see more and more facial expressions as they get into her visual field. . . . What I found very interesting was that she wasn't responding to any of us, but immediately responded to her mother's voice. That's a conscious thing. She's not responding to just random sounds, she's responding to specific sounds and the voices of specific people."
People in a persistent vegetative state (PVS) or coma, cannot do this. Although they might appear to be tracking movements, they're not. "They will sort of look around and every once in awhile they'll follow something with their eyes, but there's no specificity to it, no prolonged duration to it because this takes conscious willpower."
What he found equally interesting is that Terri refused to respond to her husband. "Michael was talking in the background. He did things like tap his toe very loudly. It was very distracting, but she gave no response to that. So she's picking up specific sounds and more importantly, specific people, and responding to people in different ways."
Terri has long been communicating with sounds. According to Dr. Hammesfahr, she is able to understand commands and makes sounds at the appropriate time. "Most patients that I treat who can communicate at all, even just to make grunts, but grunts that are appropriate, eventually get back useable speech within three to five years."
Unfortunately, Terri has been denied even the most rudimentary therapy for the last decade and has often been left in a darkened room without any stimulation such as a television or radio. As a result, she suffers from "severe contractures in all four extremities," Dr. Hammesfahr said. He spent the first 45 minutes of the exam gently massaging and stretching her left arm, which was tightly contracted, until it finally began to relax.
"I could feel the left biceps suddenly relax, and as it did, her whole body relaxed. It must have been incredibly painful. Blood flow gets cut off to joints that don't move and they hurt. This was probably the first time in years that her arm opened up and got some blood flowing into them."
If he could make so much progress on her arm in just 45 minutes, what might happen after more extensive therapy?
Besides eating and drinking on her own, Dr. Hammesfahr believes she would be able to talk, have good use of at least one arm and one hand, and perhaps even be able to transfer herself from a wheelchair to a bed. Her quality of life would be far better than it is now.
"But Terri is not a simple brain injured patient," he pointed out. "I believe she's also got spinal chord injuries. Every physician - neurologist - who has seen her has said she definitely has a neck injury. When you look at videos she appears to have a great deal more facial movement and expression from her neck up than she does from her neck down. I think she has a spinal chord injury in addition to a brain injury."
Dr. Hammesfahr, who was nominated for a Nobel prize in 1999, received the first patent in history in the year 2000 for his treatment neurological diseases with medications that restore blood flow to the brain. Somewhat of a "child prodigy," Hammesfahr was one of the few high school students who went directly into medical school and trained in Neurosurgery and Neurology at the Medical College of Virginia. He is so confident that Terri's quality of life can improve with therapy that he has agreed to work with her free-of-charge.
However, Michael Schiavo and his lawyer, George Felos, are adept at the sound bite war and have convinced the general public that Terri wants to die even though she left nothing in writing. They have repeatedly hammered home the message that Terri's artificial feeding and hydration should be stopped, allowing her to die a painless and dignified death.
What they won't say is how often hospice staff administer pain medication to Terri, who is obviously not in a coma and able to experience pain. Were she to be put to death by the withdrawal of food and water, she would experience symptoms such as severe seizures, stomach ulcers, the drying and cracking of her eyes and mouth. According to the medical profession, there is absolutely nothing dignified about this kind of death.
Dr. Hammesfahr had nothing but praise for the Pope's recent statement forbidding the withdrawal of food and water from comatose patients. "What the Pope did was very important because he came down on the side of life. What he really said was that we don't know when these people's lives should be over. That has to be decided by God. I think that's important because there are therapies out there - like my therapy for Terri - which only two years ago we were unwilling to even try on somebody like Terri. . . . Ten years ago this was non-existent therapy."
Many facts remain hidden beneath the right-to-die agenda, but once uncovered, they beg the question: Are we allowing people to die with dignity, or denying them a future?
Reprinted with permission of The Catholic Standard & Times, Philadelphia, Pa.
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Ping to 703
Pinging my Terri list to a wonderful article about Terri. Pass it on!
If anyone would like to be on/off my Terri ping list, please let me know!
You beat me!
Glad that article is here. In the new century, the idea that any person in the world cannot have a television set is indicative of all the things that Terri is denied. DEPRIVE AND ISOLATE - a criminal, grim combination.
Thanks for posting that, Juan.
I think a dehydration process ruins the organs but maybe there's a new technique or plan that only the death industry knows about. Florida doesn't stand alone as you mentioned, but retirees are not flocking to Florida as they once did. Maybe they've heard some Florida guardianship or nursing home horror stories.
Thanks, kiddo.
I had not seen this before. You know, it would just take one judge to break rank and go see her to stop this.
I thought Terri does have a TV in her room. I think it was either her mom or dad who told me that she likes to watch the "animal" channel. However, there is so much that she is deprived of.
The article in 703 reminds me of how much Terri may recover if she had the therapy she should have been receiving all this time. To think that she is not massaged for her contractures makes me very ill! How painful is the life that Michael has bound her in! Yet I know that she is cared for by God's hands. He is the one who brings her great comfort! May God continue to richly bless Terri and her beautiful loving family!
Thank you for keeping this important story in our thoughts. We must keep Terri and others like her in our prayers
Yes, we must! Thanks for checking in!
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1160193/posts
Terri's wheelchair is broken and GINO (guardian in name only) won't get it fixed). Terri needs restorative dental work. That was news to Judge Greer. He feigns interest NOW? Please ping your list to the July anad August Dailies. Thanks, OFF.
The link for the July/August 2004 Terri daily thread:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1160193/posts?page=1#1
BUMP
FYI: I realize it's not July 1 but that's the date on the new July-August 2004 Terri Dailies. Sorry for the confusion.
thanks for posting that.
me? confused? lol!
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