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Rick and Tamie Hollis think they know how Terri Schiavo's parents feel. Their son, Dustin Hollis, now 22, suffered brain damage in a 2003 motorcycle accident in Oklahoma City. Unresponsive for months, fed through a tube in his side, he was not expected to improve, and his parents were repeatedly told to face the facts. "Against the advice of all of the doctors and medical experts, we brought him home," Rick Hollis said Friday. "The doctors said he was in a semi-comatose state. They said we would probably kill him." Instead, he has made gradual progress, and his improvement and...

Defense of adulterer Michael Schiavo's thirteenth public attempt to murder his invalid wife (with the aid and abetment of the Florida courts) only manifests that America’s conscience is in a Persistent Vegetative State. Depriving a cat of food and water for a week would see Schiavo in an orange jumpsuit by nightfall---with the torches and pitchforks of PAWS, PETA and Greenpeace at his jugular. Merely human, Terri has no such rescuer; tortured to death in Florida as the 300 million of us sit and watch. Not one man can be found in America. Had she, like Charles Manson, been imprisoned...

Judge George Greer ruled that the State of Florida has no right to take custody of Terri Schiavo, which ruling came hours after an appeal by Terri's parents to re-insert the feeding tube was refused by the U.S. Supreme Court. Meanwhile, another hearing was scheduled tonight before US District Judge James D. Whittemore .. the same judge who previously heard and denied the request subsequent to the 'de novo' intention of the law past last weekend by the Congress and signed by President Bush, in an effort to confirm that no stone was left unturned before Terri would endure legally...

STARVATION: DAY 8 Jeb Bush not likely to ride to rescue Florida governor indicates he won't defy court order Posted: March 25, 2005 1:00 a.m. Eastern © 2005 WorldNetDaily.com Those hoping Florida Gov. Jeb Bush will step forward to save Terri Schiavo from imminent, court-ordered starvation death are likely to be disappointed, based on his comments to a group of reporters following county court Judge George Greer's ruling against the state's effort to take custody of the brain-injured woman at the center of a worldwide euthanasia controversy. While Bush reiterated his motivation to save Schiavo, based on new evidence that...

Responding to Patients in the Persistent Vegetative State Donal P. O'Mathuna, Ph.D.     {This article was published in Philosophia Christi 19.2 (Fall 1996): 55-83. This journal is a publication of the Evangelical Philosophical Society.}      Modern medicine has provided people with many great benefits, but it has also forced people to make difficult ethical decisions. One of the hardest of these is to let a loved one die when medical technology could keep him or her alive. People must now decide if and when they would want certain treatments withheld or withdrawn from themselves or others. The ethical issues involved raise questions about...

Anyone watch the O'Reilly Factor tonight? I try not to watch O'Reilly too much anymore since he has become so smug and egotistical but I sometimes catch the first few minute of his Talking Points to see what the major topic is. Of course tonight was the Terri Schiavo situation and it's impact. I was almost horrified when O'Reilly laid out his feelings for what should happen to Terri Schaivo and people in Persistent Vegetative States, etc.. O'Reilly feels that the State and more important the Doctors should be the final arbiters of who should live and who should die...

Prayer for Terri Schiavo and the Schindlers In to your hands, O Lord, we commit our dear sister Terri and her loving family. Strengthen them, O Lord, for the days and tasks ahead, open the doors that the dark one has tried to shutter close and have mercy on this family. Bring mercy and wisdom to the minds of those who deal with her. May the judges who wrestle with these issues be gifted with respect for mercy and life. Terri and her family are such a symbol of life, of it's preciousness, and of the evil that men do...

I have the consent of Salamander to post this. In the interest of clarity for those undecided about Terri's quality of life and her potential for recovery, I post Salamanders story. A fascinating take on the nature of brain injury and its effects on consciousness.I have no frontal lobe. It was destroyed in an accident in 1981. All that's filling up the space is scar tissue and spinal fluid. Apparently I'm still functioning and "thinking" to some extent. I won't bore you with the details of the damage I also sustained in my temporal and parietal lobes and cerebellum. Suffice...

Prognosis for Recovery There are two dimensions of recovery from a persistent vegetative state: recovery of consciousness and recovery of function. Recovery of consciousness can be verified by reliable evidence of awareness of self and the environment, consistent voluntary behavioral responses to visual and auditory stimuli, and interaction with others. Recovery of function is characterized by communication, the ability to learn and to perform adaptive tasks, mobility, self-care, and participation in recreational or vocational activities. Recovery of consciousness may occur without functional recovery, but functional recovery cannot occur without recovery of consciousness. In some instances, during the early stages of...

We make a lot of assumptions about those who have been brain damaged the way Terri Schiavo has. We see them lying there, changed from the person they used to be to something different. No one wants to be there. We are repulsed, turned away, and think it is perhaps the worst of fates. And yet how little we know about what's going on inside a person's head during all of this. We could learn more, like by using MRIs to see how much cognitive ability is really left, but too often in our rush to disassociate ourselves from the...

ABSTRACT This consensus statement of the Multi-Society Task Force summarizes current knowledge of the medical aspects of the persistent vegetative state in adults and children. The vegetative state is a clinical condition of complete unawareness of the self and the environment, accompanied by sleep-wake cycles, with either complete or partial preservation of hypothalamic and brain-stem autonomic functions. In addition, patients in a vegetative state show no evidence of sustained, reproducible, purposeful, or voluntary behavioral responses to visual, auditory, tactile, or noxious stimuli; show no evidence of language comprehension or expression; have bowel and bladder incontinence; and have variably preserved cranial-nerve...

My brother went into acute respiratory failure a year ago September at forty-five years old. By the time I got the phone call, he was on a respirator in the ICU of a small hospital several hours from my home. Think SARS without the contagious aspect and you’ll get some idea of what condition he was in: as the Merck site puts it, 'the survival rate for patients with severe ARDS who receive appropriate treatment is about 60%; if the severe hypoxemia of ARDS is not recognized and treated, cardiopulmonary arrest occurs in 90% of patients.' There was the usual...

“Don’t Kill Terri” 3/10/2005 By Tom Brodersen A friend relates recent times with Terri Schiavo. By the way, “Country Roads” is her favorite song. Editor’s note:A judge has given the green light for Terri Schiavo’s husband to remove her food and water on March 18. This condemns to death a woman who, though severely disabled, responds to music and to love. She is not on artificial life support. Read this moving article, where a friend pleads for her life. Take action: Thousands of calls are needed to spur the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee to act on Terri’s Law, S 539....

Two recent cases illustrate the difficulty – and often the agony – experienced by family members and medical teams when they have to decide whether or not to remove life-support from an apparently dying patient. This past July a twenty-six year old man was reportedly placed on life-support following an automobile accident. He was in a coma for two weeks and remains so at this writing. Physicians treating him at the University of Virginia Medical Center wanted to remove him from life-support, deeming the case hopeless. The young man’s father, however, secured a court order prohibiting the medical team from...

Disability activists call for a moratorium on the starvation and dehydration of people with disabilities. New research indicates many people being killed this way in hospitals may be alert and conscious, but unable to respond. (PRWEB) February 16, 2005 -- How much more evidence do we need? Disability Activists Call for Moratorium on Starvation and Dehydration. Disability activists have called for a nationwide moratorium on the dehydration and starvation of people alleged to be in “persistent vegetative state.” This would apply to individuals who do not have an advance directive or durable power of attorney. The call for a moratorium...

Breaking the Silence 20-year wait to hear their daughter speak again is over for parents of near-fatal accident victim By Clara Kilbourn The call came Feb. 4. "Are you sitting down? There's someone here who wants to talk to you." Betsy Scantlin recognized the caller, Jennifer Trammell, director of social services at Golden Plains Health Care Center. The next voice was different. "Hi, Mom." "Sarah, is that you?" "Yeah." "Hi, Dad," she said, then, slowly drawing out the words, "Happy Valentine's Day." For 20 years, Betsy and Jim Scantlin had waited to again hear their daughter's voice. Jim wanted to...

Hutchinson-- For 20 years, Sarah Scantlin has been mostly oblivious to the world around her -- the victim of a drunken driver who struck her down as she walked to her car. Today, after a remarkable recovery, she can talk again. Scantlin's father knows she will never fully recover, but her newfound ability to speak and her returning memories have given him his daughter back. For years, she could only blink her eyes -- one blink for "no," two blinks for "yes" -- to respond to questions that no one knew for sure she understood. "I am astonished how primal...

Sarah Scantlin was knocked into a coma by a drunk driver 20 years ago has begun to speak and remember her past. Her brain was injured so badly that doctors first feared she would spend her life in a vegetative state, spending years unable to form words or make any sounds other than loud cries. A week ago Sarah began speaking and doctors have no explanation. The parents, brother and sister of Terri Schindler Schiavo hope the Florida courts will see this miracle and think of Terri. Video tape shown today on CNN Headline News of Sarah with her mother...

How To Talk When You Can't Speak How To Talk When You Can't Speak Communicating with unconscious minds. By Clive Thompson Posted Thursday, Feb. 10, 2005, at 3:33 PM PT This week, Neurology published an unsettling study of two brain-damaged men who are "minimally conscious"—able to breathe on their own but otherwise generally unresponsive. When neuroscientists scanned the patients' brains as they played audiotapes of loved ones, the activity was strikingly normal. The visual cortex of one of the men even lit up in a way that suggested he was visualizing the stories..... If these devices ever do become ready...