RIP Terry Schaivo

[Jammrock]

Technically he hasn't remarried. He has a live-in girlfriend who just happens to have birthed his child.

The only problem I have with your quick sum, Gurm, is that all men are as$holes. Some are just less of an as$hole than others.

Jammrock

[Jon P. Inghram]

Should be interesting to see the results of the autopsy and her families response to it. If if does show the seemingly obvious conclusion that she has been "dead" for years I'd hope that they will finally accept it, but I will not be surprised if they'll just become even more disconnected from reality.

[Jessterw]

Well of course. It was her soul that was still there and that was speaking to them.

[KRSESQ]

IMO when a "spouse" is in this position and has started another family there should be a presumed conflict of interest and he should not be making life of death decisions for the disabled spouse. Physical guardianship should then revert back to her family.

8. In EVERY STATE IN THIS COUNTRY, when you go persistent vegetative your NEXT OF KIN gets to decide if you're kept on a machine or not. Guess who your NEXT OF KIN is, in EVERY STATE IN THIS COUNTRY? Oh, could it be... your SPOUSE? Yup, yessireeeeeee!

I grew up being led to believe that once you married you created an entirely new family unit that seperated itself from the old parental unit. The only way Terri's care would have reverted back to her parents was if Micheal Schiavo had died. Apparently I was misinformed. I feel it a little with my in-laws, or else I'm paranoid. Like the only reason I'm the uncle is because I married Christine and if anything happened to her I wouldn't be "family" anymore. Anyway, I hope I'm just paranoid.

Anyway, be at peace, Terri. Hell is being someone else's cause.

Kevin

edited for spelling

[KvHagedorn]

Where did you get these "facts"? I admit all I have seen that make me think she wasn't truly dead was the video of her looking around and blinking her eyes.

[Helevitia]

Here is where I read some of the facts.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050325-4737.html

[xortam]

You need to do a lot more reading on the subject KvH.

[High_Jumbllama]

Technically he hasn't remarried. He has a live-in girlfriend who just happens to have birthed his child.

The only problem I have with your quick sum, Gurm, is that all men are as$holes. Some are just less of an as$hole than others.

Jammrock

Women insult us enough. Whether some or most of us deserve it or not, they do not need our help.

[Wombat]

Where did you get these "facts"? I admit all I have seen that make me think she wasn't truly dead was the video of her looking around and blinking her eyes.

What you saw was a couple snippets of video. Video carefully culled from hours of taping. A body with a brainstem tends to have basic reactions and reflexes, sometimes to stimulus, sometimes to nothing. The Schindlers took the actions that appeared to coincide with their actions, and released those as "proof." Any one who has watched all the video, uncut, disagrees with them.

[Wombat]

From what I heard, he was running out of money to keep her alive.

Not true. $750,000 was awarded for her care, and put in a trust. That was over a dozen years ago. $400,000 was used in defending her case in court, and there appears to be about $50,000 still in the fund. So, $300,000 or less was used to maintain her body for over a decade. At that kind of rate, the body could have been kept pumping for decades if the Schindlers hadn't filed suit after suit.

[Gurm]

What you saw was a couple snippets of video. Video carefully culled from hours of taping. A body with a brainstem tends to have basic reactions and reflexes, sometimes to stimulus, sometimes to nothing. The Schindlers took the actions that appeared to coincide with their actions, and released those as "proof." Any one who has watched all the video, uncut, disagrees with them.

Yup. These people are so deluded that they will cling to ANY "proof" of their delusional opinions. If you take a tape of me 24/7 for a year, and then cut and paste, you can probably make me say "I like Catholics an awful lot, and that Pope guy - he's just swell!"

[Dr Mordrid]

Gurm and others;

Do some research: brain volume, or lack of it, does NOT necessarily mean lack of either intelligence or conciousness.

First a parameter: the average male brain mass runs ~3 lbs. Females are slightly smaller, but in proportion to their smaller physical stature. The cerebral cortex makes up about 80-85 percent of this mass.

In my experience doing CT's and MRI's I've run into numerous people who presented quite normally but when the images started coming up they showed very minimal thicknesses of cerebral cortex, often with appearances much worse than that shown in Mrs. Schiavo's old (and quite low quality) CT scans.

This kind of anomaly was shown quite starkly by the late Dr. John Lorber, of Sheffield University, England. He found numerous persons with very low cerbral cortex volumes who had perfectly normal, or even superior, intelligence. Others have found hundreds more.

One of these persons was a then student at Sheffield U who had a cortex only 1mm thick and a mass of only .2 lb (.09kg), which is only about 7% of normal, an IQ of 126 and yet had a First Class Honors Degree in mathematics.

Then there is the case of those newly discovered persons now commonly known as "Hobbits"; a sub-species of human recently discovered in Indonesia and who, it is claimed by locals, only died out after westerners cane to the area. Some there claim they're still around, but only in very remote locations.

These people were very similar to austalopithecines but only 3 feet in adult stature. Their small brain volume was presumed to contraindicate any ability at tool-making, until scientists found such tools, and quite good ones, in their burial sites and encampments.

Now said scientists are forced into re-thinking their presumtions about brain size and intelligence.

Granted there is a difference between being born or becoming this way surgically and doing it by illness or misadventure, but IMO this should warn us not to make too many presumptions of "no conciousness" in the absense of a functional MRI or PET scan; both which were denied to Mrs. Schiavo by her husband and his attorneys.

Making matters worse is recent research done in the US showing that many minimally concious persons who had been presumed to be in persistant vegetative states are not. The procedure was to do an fMRI while showing them images and sounds of things both familiar and not familiar. The activity shown on the scans picked up very significantly when they were shown things familiar; an indication that cerebral processing was being done.

This research has caused quite a stir in the neurological community, and should give everyone pause about how we treat these patients.

Since there will be an autopsy it'll be very interesting to see how the brain sections look, but the sections will take about 2 months to come back (the brain has to be "fixed" so it can be sliced without destroying it). Unfortunately the sections will only show anatomy, not function. Again; this would have been far better evaluated by fMRI or PET scan before euthanizing her.

If her cortex is not as thin as expected, or even > than the 7% shown by the young man found by Dr. Lorber, there is some explain' to be done by those who wanted her to die.

Dr. Mordrid

[ZokesPro]

Not true. $750,000 was awarded for her care, and put in a trust. That was over a dozen years ago. $400,000 was used in defending her case in court, and there appears to be about $50,000 still in the fund. So, $300,000 or less was used to maintain her body for over a decade. At that kind of rate, the body could have been kept pumping for decades if the Schindlers hadn't filed suit after suit.

I see. Wasn't too sure to begin with.

[Dr Mordrid]

Actually most of the money spent in the last 15 years was expended by Mr. Schiavo on attorney fees trying to get permission to kill her, not on her care.

Much of her care was being provided for free by the Hospice. Even so her "carek", such as it was, largely consisted of just that of her tube feedings, diapers and urine plumbing; which are minimal.

Dr. Mordrid

[Gurm]

Actually most of the money spent in the last 15 years was expended by Mr. Schiavo on attorney fees trying to get permission to kill her, not on her care.

Actually defending his right to kill her. There's a distinct difference. He was forced to blow all that money because her family couldn't handle the fact that EVERY STATE recognizes his right as her husband to determine if heroic measures are taken to prolong her life. Period.