[Ohioan from Florida]

I understand that there is plenty of discussion as to whether Terri was truly PVS or not, and the possiblity exists that there will be discussions around this same concept for Haleigh, too. However, I think it's about time that everyone realizes that Terri was not brain-dead, nor was she ever brain-dead, because if she had been they would not have been able to resuscitate her in 1990 no matter how hard they tried. Some people seem to continually want to put out utter untruths about Terri as being clinically dead. She was not clinically dead until March 31, 2005.

From your link, T'wit:

Harvard Ad Hoc Committee on Brain Death In 1968, this committee of the Harvard Medical School published a report describing the following characteristics of a permanently nonfunctioning brain, a condition it referred to as "irreversible coma," now known as brain death:

1. Unreceptivity and unresponsitivity

2. --patient shows total unawareness to external stimuli and unresponsiveness to painful stimuli; No movements or breathing

3. --all spontaneous muscular movement, spontaneous respiration and response to stimuli are absent; No reflexes

--fixed, dilated pupils; lack of eye movement even when hit or turned, or ice water is placed in the ear; lack of response to noxious stimuli; unelicitable tendon reflexes.

In addition to these criteria, a flat electroencephalogram (EEG) was recommended. The committee also noted that drug intoxication and hypothermia which can both cause reversible loss of brain functions should be excluded as causes. The report was used in determining patient care issues and organ transplants. The condition of irreversible coma, i.e., brain death, needs to be distinguished from the persistent vegetative state, in which clinical presentations are similar but in which patients manifest cycles of sleep and wakefulness. [See President’s Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research, Defining Death (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1981)].

[TAdams8591]

If Terri were brain dead, she would have required a heart and lung machine. She would not have been able to breathe on her own.

[T'wit]

>> No movements or breathing

Especially note this condition -- the patient cannot be breathing on his own. Take note, because this condition is routinely ignored now. People are chopped up for spare parts while they are still breathing -- while there should still be hope for their recovery. It happened in my family within the past year to a young woman, only in her 40s, the victim of a fire (carbon monoxide). She was not dead.

Evidently the body snatching business is so profitable that hospitals have their own "chop shops" now -- surgical teams on standby duty who extract the useful parts, including the beating heart, from a warm body.