Man who was Schiavo's advocate recalls his role
BY CARA BUCKLEY
Miami Herald
http://www.kansas.com/mld/kansas/news/nation/11182554.htm
TAMPA, Fla. - Two dark scenarios haunt Jay Wolfson even now, a year and a half after his brief appointment to be a neutral arbiter, the one man asked by the state of Florida to stand in Terri Schiavo's shoes.
One is that the severely brain-damaged woman is in a terrible lightless place, aware of nothing but a yawning, endless hopelessness.
The other is that even though he never elicited a response from her, despite all the pleading and cajoling he did at her bedside, that he might have missed some subtle, nearly invisible signs that she was somewhere in there, aware.
"Imagine not having hope and being aware that's all you had was no hope. The horror. It's like not being, but knowing that you're not," Wolfson said recently. "That's one thing. The other is, what if she's knocking on a door somewhere and I was walking through all the wrong corridors and I missed it."
Wolfson was appointed by a Florida court in the fall of 2003 to be Schiavo's guardian ad litem, or guardian at law, to deduce Schiavo's best interests and represent neither her husband nor her parents but Schiavo herself.
This makes Wolfson one of the very few people to have spent extended time with Schiavo and gauged her level of awareness without having a vested interest.
In the end, after long hours at Schiavo's bedside and after poring over 30,000 pages of legal documents, Wolfson concluded that Schiavo was indeed in a permanent vegetative state.
It wasn't the conclusion he had hoped to make. "You want to weigh in on life as opposed to death," Wolfson said. "You want some way to elicit a response."
Wolfson, who is a distinguished service professor of public health and medicine, was asked to decide whether Schiavo's feeding tube should be removed and whether more tests should be done to assess her ability to swallow.
He scoured 13 years' worth of legal documents and extensively interviewed Schiavo's husband and her parents. In his time with Schiavo, he tried to determine whether she was aware of and interactive with the world.
When awake, Schiavo's eyes rolled about the room. She made random noises that sounded like groaning or the start of a laugh or cry.
But court documents said Schiavo's cerebral cortex, where reason and emotions are housed, had degenerated to fluid. So Wolfson set about trying to determine whether Schiavo's noises and jerks were merely reflexive or whether they indicated something more.
He played Elton John CDs for her, and Bach and Mozart and music from the late 1980s, when she was in her 20s, before her collapse. He held her hands, squeezing them, and stroked her hair and face.
He put his face close to hers and tried to make eye contact, pleading desperately, trying to will her into giving him any kind of sign.
"I would beg her, 'Please, Terri, help me,' " he said. "You want to believe there's some connection. You hope she's going to sit up in bed and say, 'Hey, I'm really here, but don't tell anybody.' Or, 'I'm really here, tell everybody!' "
But Schiavo never made eye contact. When Wolfson visited her when her parents were there, she never made eye contact with them either, he said. And for all of Wolfson's pleadings and coaxing, he never got what he most wanted: a sign.
Wolfson was dismayed to learn Friday that Barbara Weller, a lawyer for Schiavo's parents, claimed that Schiavo tried to speak. "Terri does not speak," he said. "To claim otherwise reduces her to a fiction."
In the 38-page report he wrote after his time with Schiavo, Wolfson said the best decision for her could be made only if both sides agreed to fresh, independent medical testing. If the new testing showed she couldn't swallow on her own and that Schiavo had no hope for improvement, then the feeding tube should be pulled.
Both parties were on the verge of agreeing to these new conditions, Wolfson said, but once the Florida Supreme Court struck down Terri's Law his efforts were moot.
Former Lee sheriff arrested trying to bring water to Schiavo
By GRANT BOXLEITNER
GBOXLEITNER@NEWS-PRESS.COM
Published by news-press.com on March 20, 2005
http://www.news-press.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050320/NEWS01/503200500/1075
Wolfson makes me sick. He could have saved Terri but chose not to. Anyway, Terri's quality of life could be improved with proper care and therapy. Her quality of life could be improved and no one can deny it. I have a feeling Wolfson is having trouble sleeping right now.