Comatose Man Walks Out of Hospital

Wife had his feeding tube pulled after only a week

From "Comatose Mesa man walks out of hospital" by Rich Dubek, posted 10/19/07 at azcentral.com

Doctors said he had only a small chance of recovery. His own wife pulled his feeding tube after a week. But Friday, Jesse Ramirez walked out of the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, alive and recovering.

It has been an amazing five months for the US postal employee and father of three who was literally at death's door when he was critically injured in a horrific accident. Jesse and his wife Rebecca were in their SUV when Jesse lost control and crashed into a Chandler pottery store. Rebecca suffered only minor injuries, but Jesse was airlifted to a hospital with a fractured skull and face, punctured lungs and broken ribs. One week after the accident, and following a couple of surgeries, Rebecca Ramirez pulled Jesse out of the hospital and moved him to a Mesa hospice. Rebecca then made the decision to pull his feeding tube and Jesse went six days without food or water.

...But one day after our story aired, the family called to tell us Mesa hospice officials put Jesse's tube back in and the courts were now involved. A judge later ruled that the tube must stay in, until they work through the legal issues of the case. While those things transpired, family members reported that Jesse was now opening his eyes, and making hand gestures. Clearly no longer in a vegetative state, he was communicating with family. In court, it became official when a court appointed guardian announced that Jesse was indeed alert and awake. He was then transferred to a rehab center to begin the long road to recovery.

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Rationalizing the Murder of Terri Schiavo

Bobby Schindler has noted that whenever a supposedly vegetative patient, who doctors were sure would never react consciously again, suddenly regains understanding or "miraculously" awakens the reporters seem never to make the connection to his sister Terri Schiavo...

From "Subliminal Understanding That What Happened to Terri Schiavo Was Wrong?" by Wesley J. Smith, posted 10/15/07 at Secondhand Smoke

...It is as if these reports, to quote Shakespeare, "doth protest too much," as if there is a subliminal realization that a terrible injustice was done to her.

The latest almost unbelievable example is in an otherwise interesting and important (and long) piece in the New Yorker, byline Jerome Groopman. After describing how supposedly unconscious people have been misdiagnosed, the author quotes an unnamed neuroscientist about Terri. From the story:

A neuroscientist showed me a video on the Internet of Terri Schiavo, the Florida woman who spent fifteen years in what most doctors agree was a vegetative state--tests revealed almost no activity in her cortex--and whose death, in 2005, provoked fierce debate over the rights of severely brain-damaged patients. (Schiavo died after the Supreme Court rejected her parents' appeal of a judge's decision approving her husband's request that her feeding tube be removed. An autopsy showed extensive brain damage.) In the video, a man's voice can be heard praising Schiavo for opening her eyes in response to his instructions, and the neuroscientist told me that he was impressed until he muted the sound. "With the sound off, it is clear that her movements are random," the neuroscientist said. "But, with the voice-over, it is easy to make a misdiagnosis. (My emphasis.)

The above stills are from the video in question. It deeply touched my heart and it is seared forever in my memory. In that video, Terri is asked by the examiner to open her eyes. At first, nothing. Then, within ten or so seconds, her eyes flicker, she opens them, and then opens them so wide her forehead wrinkles. It is clearly an intentional response to the question.

But if you turn the sound off, there is no question to hear--and voila, her opening her eyes with clear intention can now be dismissed as merely "random movement." But a random movement under those circumstances would be to move her head from side to side or lick or lips. But when she opened her eyes, and so intently, precisely as requested, you have to work hard to make it "random." So, to make sure we don't see the terrible wrong that was done to her, we just turn off the sound.

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Two Years Later, Terri Schiavo Case "Shrouded in Massive Ignorance"

From "Two Years Later, Terri Schiavo Case "Shrouded in Massive Ignorance" by Hilary White, posted 4/2/07, at Lifesite.net

A year ago this weekend, March 31, marks the second anniversary of the death of Theresa Marie "Terri" Schiavo, who died after being denied nutrition and hydration for two weeks. The manner of death was certified as "undetermined".

Father Frank Pavone, National Director of Priests for Life and a friend of the Schindler family, said this weekend, "Terri's case remains shrouded in massive ignorance."

Most mainstream media outlets claimed that Terri was "terminally ill" or "on life support" but she breathed without a respirator and doctors agreed that she was likely to live for many years.

Pavone said, "She was brain-injured, and therefore some thought she was disposable. The cause of her death - dehydration - was deliberately introduced. That's called killing. While there is such a thing as a useless treatment, there is no such thing as a useless life."

In February 1990, Terri Schiavo collapsed under medical circumstances that were never fully explained. She was left disabled and dependent upon care and assisted nutrition and hydration. In 1998, her husband and legal guardian, Michael Schiavo, petitioned the Pinellas County Circuit Court to remove her feeding tube.

Terri's parents fought the order, however, saying that she responded to them and was conscious. After seven years, 14 legal appeals; innumerable motions, petitions, investigations, and hearings; legislation passed and overturned and even appeals from the Vatican, Michael Schiavo won the final case and Terri died march 31, 2005, after surviving two weeks without fluids.

...Shortly after Terri's death, Fr. Pavone, who was with her up to five minutes before, recalled, "Do you know that police officers were standing over that bed at every moment, every moment - armed police officers - making sure we didn't dip our hands in that water and put it on her tongue. Armed police officers enforcing the culture of death."

Bobby Schindler’s Letter to Florida Bishop: When Bishops Don’t Do Their Job – Innocent People Die

Says Bishop’s silence makes him “complicit in my sister’s murder.”

From "Bobby Schindler’s Letter to Florida Bishop: When Bishops Don’t Do Their Job – Innocent People Die" by Meg Jalsevac, posted 3/28/07 at Lifesite.net

Bobby Schindler, brother of Terri Schiavo, has written an open letter to Bishop Robert Lynch, bishop of St. Petersburg, Florida chastising the bishop for his inaction at the time of Terri’s death and asserting that the bishop’s lack of action “brought scandal to the Universal Church and to the faithful, particularly here in Florida.”

March 31, 2007 will be the second anniversary of the death of Terri Schiavo, a cognitively disabled woman who was starved to death according to the wishes of her husband and the order of a Florida court. The Schindler family, backed by countless disability groups and individuals around the world – including several direct pleas from the Vatican to spare Terri’s life - fought for years to save Terri from death at the hand of her husband.

...In Schindler’s letter, he admitted that what motivated him to write was Bishop Lynch’s own published commentary on the ‘homeless’ in the city of St. Petersburg. Schindler quoted Lynch’s commentary which read, “I am convinced that both on Judgment Day and in history, we will most likely be judged not by the things which we might have considered personally important to ourselves in life but how we took care of others less fortunate.”

Schindler continued to quote the Bishop’s commentary, “The faces which may haunt each of us on Judgment Day may well be those of people who have approached us for assistance and were turned away.”

Schindler questioned how the bishop could look at the homeless as “less fortunate” and demand action in their name but could remain tacit in the face of the death of an innocent and totally helpless woman despite pleadings from her family for intervention. “The bottom line is, when apostolic grace and responsibility are abdicated, innocent people die.”

Read the whole article.