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Day Five of the Current Hearing to Save Terri Schiavo

Beginning around the hearing lunch break today I began to have this enormous new appetite for more of everything around me...more bites of chocolate, more sips of soda, more talk with Terri's parents, more touch with their supporters, more hugs from my pets and even more sauce on my dinner pasta.

I think it is because Dr. Greer, a Vincent Price look-alike who testified today, came across as so threatening to people with disabilities. He was on the husband's side to boost the argument that Terri is too disabled to live...too disabled to appreciate sustenance, fluid, family, touch or hugs like I was doing today from my wheelchair with all my existing physical deficits.

There were some amazing factual gaps in his knowledge.

For example, he considered the message boards used regularly to assist people who can not speak well as something very rare. Innumerable places where people with cerebral palsy are helped every week refute that. The number of intensive care units who use them with people on ventilators do the same.

He claimed to have never heard of the most famous computerized message board user of all -- Stephen Hawking. I'm sure the message board I used at the onset of my disability would have puzzled him. It was incredibly effective in letting me speak my mind and was made of an old file folder and a used black magic marker. That this might have cost all of fifty cents would have definitely been beyond the realm of possibility in his medical opinion.

The additional possibility that a similar message board could help Terri Schiavo communicate is being totally discounted by this doctor and the others arguing for the discontinuation of her feedings.

The lawyer who has brought these doctors together has said a real litmus test is whether she can put a spoon to her mouth.

That would sure knock physicist Hawking out of the box marked living. Holding a spoon without assistance vs. holding Newton's chair as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University....

A few days ago, the husband's attorney even spontaneously compared Terri to a houseplant who thinks it is not a vegetable...but is one nonetheless.

But, wait there's more...
Dr. Greer does not remember clapping to check Terri's startle response, but he thinks he probably sang "Melancholy Baby" to her.

While being asked to look at video of Terri's interaction with her mother, Greer also had to be asked twice to please look at his monitor. In addition, during this same line of questioning the doctor had to be asked to put his glasses back on so he could see his screen clearly.

Greer talked to the entire court as if we were the world's dumbest first year medical students. This made sense as he admitted counting time on the stand as teaching hours.

The doctor's arrogance to all within his sight was astonding. For example, when the parent's attorney asked about how confident he was in his evaluation of Terri, Greer replied, "My confidence in my evaluation is based on my confidence in my evaluation."

Later when asked if Terri vocalized during examination of her, he said, "She probably did. I didn't notice...I didn't put it in my memory sources."

The hardest part of the day for me was when Dr. Greer said that Terri saying "No" post-injury meant nothing.

As people with disabilities, we ourselves have to respond to the banality of Dr. Greer's evil by saying "No!" over and over again to that kind of thinking until there is not a single forum left where it has to be said.

Only then will people with disabilities now and in the future be truly safe.

Rus Cooper-Dowda