Quote:
Originally posted by honeychile
This gave me new perspective. I seldom (if ever) agree with this columnist, but he mentions depositions etc that I had no idea had been taken:
"On Friday, a Senate committee, trying to forestall the withdrawal of feeding, subpoenaed her, though unsuccessfully. The action is not as silly as it sounds. At one point, after she presumably became vegetative, Terri Schiavo was taken to a shopping mall."
"...The facts are these: Terri Schiavo collapsed in 1990. She has been in hospitals and nursing homes since then. Videotapes depict a young woman who seems to respond to some voice stimuli, but does not communicate. At least three affidavits are on file from former nursing home attendants who insist Terri showed some hope of making progress, but that her husband insisted she be given no rehabilitation."
"...One nurse, Carla Sauer Iyer, said Terri 'spoke on a regular basis, saying such things as 'Mommy' and 'help me.' " Iyer said that when she put a washcloth in Terri's hands to keep her fingers from curling together, 'Michael saw it and made me take it out, saying that was therapy.'"
Read the article - it's an eye opener.
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My mother is a nurse and when she was in nursing school she worked at Neurological Institute at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital with comatose patients and people in cronic vegetative states. I was talking to her about the case and she told me some pretty interesting stuff. She says that many facial movements and other stuff are reflexive movements which come from the brain stem (the part which directs the most innate movements - like breathing). People in CVS can smile, yawn, and make noise. They can make small movements with their hands and arms. I was particularly surprised by the yawn thing which I thought was pretty advanced but is apparently something that we're innately trained to do. She says that family members would come and they would be like "look she smiled!! She recognized me!!" But what they didn't realize is that the person smiles reflexively whenever, whether there's someone in the room or not. It's not evidence that the person can hear you or anything.
Since this woman is breathing, there's no reason you can't wheel or to a mall, or anywhere else for that matter. As long as they give her good nursing care, they can take her wherever. But it doesn't mean that she knows where she is or that she's enjoying her day out. There are sophisticated tests which they do to see if people are having advanced brain activity and it's my understanding she isn't. If she hasn't had brain activity of the thinking kind for fifteen years, no amount of therapy is going to change that. All that therapy can do is keep her physical body healthy, by preventing atrophy of the muscles, infection of the lungs, bedsores, sepsis, etc. In that respect, her health could "improve" but it isn't going to change her CVS.