Not Dead Yet News Item

Not Dead Yet the resistance in Black Gothic Lettering

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One Month and Waiting...

I have been covering the hearing in Clearwater, Florida to determine whether a severely disabled woman named Terri Schiavo should have her feeding tube removed. She is stable. She is not terminally ill. Her attending physician freely admitted on the stand that he does not know why the woman he has been treating for years is in living in a hospice setting.

At one point, she got a large amount of money for malpractice. The money handled well could have met her needs for the rest of her life. She is expected to live a very long time if the current judge does not starve her to death.

However, her husband has used most of that money in his legal fight to end her life. Hence, the fight is no longer about money. The money has disappeared because there is a book to sell and to pay professional Right-to-Die speakers. Both the writer and those speakers will be listing Terri's medical money on their incomes taxes for this year.

The doctors who have spent the most time with Terri deeply believe that she is there and responding to stimuli like the rest of us. They are not being paid out of Terri's money to say that. Instead, they have been pointing it out on extensive videotape shown in court.

Those videotapes of Terri interacting with her environment are both good and sad to see. Physicians who current treat people wth disabilities like Terri and everyone else in the courtroom can clearly see her voluntary responses -- to balloons, pain and humor... If you are fortunate enough to have a loving relationship with your mother, then it is very easy to see the love that passes between mother and adult child when Terri's mother enters the room.

The other side says that is an uncontrolled brain stem reflex that just coincidentaly happens every time she sees her mother. They puzzle that she does not respond to their doctors in the same way after painful neurological exams done with non-standard equipment like rental car keys....

What if Terri got the medical treatment you and I expect for our illness and disabilities and then said in some way, "Enough already?" I would be sad and struggle with that. But, I would also listen.

Terri has never been given standard speech and communication therapy so she could tell us what she thinks. Because of that she lost the speech she had post-injury. Now that same lack of therapy is being used against her.

Even little kids understood that denying someone something and then holding it against them that they don't have it is wrong.

But, I have to stop writing somewhere. So here it is: The judge has decided to wait until Thanksgiving to announce whether Terri lives or dies. He gets to decide this with her never having had the post-disability opportunity to share her thoughts on the issue.

While the professional Right-To-Die people involved are have their holiday dinner drinks, the order could be out that Terri is to die of thirst. While they are sitting down to turkey and all the trimmings, the ruling could be out that Terri is to die of starvation.

One month and waiting...

Rus Cooper-Dowda