Terri had hydrocephalus ex vacuo. Normally, cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) is continuously created and reabsorbed, and it flows throughout the ventricles (spaces) in the brain and around the spinal cord. In Terri’s case, she had significant brain damage which caused atrophy. Since the cells that atrophied couldn’t grow back, that space was filled with extra CSF. It results in enlargement of the ventricles and large amounts of CSF, but the fluid isn’t under higher pressure - it’s just filling up the empty space.
Neither you nor I were there, we only heard what the husbands doctors said, and don’t forget about the ACLU and their influence. Neither of us really know anything about what happened.
Her wishes were unknown, we have only her husband’s biased word for it.
The reason the husband won is because medically speaking, using real doctors and not some politician’s words, her brain no longer existed. There is no hope of recovery when the brain is gone and her brain was gone. Truthfully, I feel the Republican Party specifically and cultural conservatives in general used and abused that family for partisan reasons and the circus benefited no one but a few right wing politicians who used this woman’s death as an event to make money off using campaign donation mailers. It was a sad, sad affair.
And consequently, as others have pointed out, we don’t really know anything about what happened after the plug was pulled either. It’s perfectly possible, in the lekattian sense of “possible”, that Terri Schiavo made a miraculous recovery after being removed from life-support. The news was suppressed and her funeral faked to allow her to recuperate without all the stressful publicity, and she is now living a normal life except for some lingering motor-control problems in the Federal Witness Protection Program under the name of Emily Sands. Thank heavens her husband was brave enough to carry out her wishes and take the step that allowed this fortunate outcome.
It’s just as possible as anything you’ve suggested in this thread, and you have absolutely no way of knowing for sure whether or not it happened. You weren’t there.
Numerous doctors assessed her condition and nearly all of them were unanimous in their conclusion that she was utterly brain dead with zero hope for recovery. That includes doctors hired by the court to be unbiased assessors of the facts. The only few (very few) who said otherwise were clearly compromised to come to a different assessment. The medical community was nearly across the board in agreement that Terri was brain dead. Permanently brain dead.
Further we have brain scan pictures that show the profound degeneration of her brain leaving it mostly liquid. You may not trust brain scans but doctors do and for good reason. There may be error in reading the things but it is hard to miss the substantial portions of her brain in the scan that were empty of brain (being just liquid). Here’s her CT scan. See those dark areas? Not normal. That means no brain is there. Even my unschooled-in-medicine intellect can see that clearly.
Finally, as has been pointed out to you before, the doctors’ (majority of them) opinions were born out upon her autopsy. They cut her brain out and physcially examined it. Everything they thought about her state was 100% supported by an examination of her brain. A close, hands on examination. Which of course lends credence that the MRIs and CT Scans and so on are valuable diagnostic tools that were right all along.
Please note in the above the word irreversible.
Her wishes were known. There was testimony from her friends as well and they all agreed Terri would not want to live in that state. I do not think a friend of hers ever said otherwise.
She was no more alive than Henrietta Lacks is. The fact that parts of her body were still alive is far less important than that her brain - the part that makes her her - was not.
I think one of the most significant findings of the autopsy that, AFAIK, isn’t widely known, is that the most severe and profound damage was to the occipital lobe of her brain. That lobe controls vision, so the autopsy proved the she was blind.
This proves that her parents and their supporters were entirely deluded when it came to the videos of Terri that supposedly showed her responding to visual stimuli (looking at people, following the movement of a balloon). The autopsy proved that she was blind, so it’s impossible that her parents were correct about her vision. If her parents were wrong there, it’s very likely her parents were wrong in their other opinions about her other abilities and chance of recovery.
Yes we do. Every single thing, including the EEG and the testimony of TERRI’S doctors (not “his,” they were hers), and the court appointed doctor is public record. you can look at the picture and see the fluid yourself. You can read the autopsy report. Nobody is taking anybody’s word for anything. This is all publicly available information.
The ACLU. Snerk.
This is factually incorrect. Multiple other witnesses besides Michael Schiavo testified that she had mad the same wishes known to them.
I think lekatt is telling the truth when he says he doesn’t know anything about what really happened. He’s just wrong in assuming the rest of us don’t know anything either.
In real life it is common to see reversals of dying/suffering/severly-in-pain people’s decisions challenged 8I’ve seen them twice) because of lack of consent or impaired mental state.
I agree that if you make the decision while healthy your being brain dead doesn’t change it. However, since there is no document it’s a second hand story what we got. True of false, we know what the husband told us.
Bollocks. 18 witnesses testified regarding Terri’s wishes, and the court found clear and convincing evidence that she would not have wanted to live in a permanent vegetative state.
You can read the judge’s order here. I recommend you do so before “contributing” anything else.
Dollars to donuts, Lekatt either won’t look, or will come back saying the autopsy is doctored / fake.
Interesting, and what do you suppose that part that makes her, her would be. Could that part be her mind, or soul. Most posting on this board think we humans are just bio-mechanical machines. But this is not true, there is always that part that makes us us to deal with, and it is not the brain. People have been known to wake up from comas years later. People have woke-up or come back to life after being put in the morgue for as long as three days. We are a great deal more than machines. Doctors have told people there was no hope before and they survived. I was told I had six months to live, that was over 20 years ago. It is very common for doctors to be wrong, very common. That is why I don’t believe what a doctor says about someone’s chances. I witnessed a person with cancer in their brain, lungs, stomach, and testicles, fully recover after a doctor gave them 4 months to live. Doctors are fallible, and they don’t always know what they are talking about. And there are accounts of people living solid lives with less than half of their brain and not even know it. A friend of mine had an MRI he found he had a considerable amount of water on his brain. He is an intelligent person, the doctor recommended he do nothing about it, just live his life. The world is full of anomalies when it comes to health. But I know most on this board do believe in doctors, I don’t. I don’t think it helps to keep rehashing this issue, I will always believe it could have been handled better. I will always believe Terri got the bum’s rush because her husband wanted to get rid of her.
Spot on prediction, SteveG1.
Hey, Lekatt. All of those people had cerebral cortices. Show me somebody whoever “woke up” with out a cerebral cortex. Saying that someone can be aware without cerebral cortex is like saying they can see without eyeballs.
Like Ben Underwood. 
What the hell does the ACLU have to do with all of this? 
Then you are ignoring the facts of the case. Michael turned Terri over to the courts as a ward of the courts. He could have not done that and just had the tube removed and nobody could have done a thing. If he wanted to get rid of her that is exactly what he would have done. Instead he made sure that the decision was based on a balanced case view and involved testimony of her friends, her family, and medical professionals.
So stop trying to vilify him.