MERGED: Terri Schiavo
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A_Wanderer
ONE love, blood, life
Krauthammer is a paraplegic.
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A_Wanderer said:
He is, and he's also a reliable mouthpiece for the GOP party line. That's generally why I do not trust him to be objective; but whatever. That's his right as an editorialist. I just keep that bias in mind.
I think it is wrong to compare people with all disabilities to Terri Shiavo. We're not talking about unplugging someone who can respond, even if that response was limited to blinking "yes" or "no." Terri cannot do even that. We're not talking about unplugging someone who even has a brain. Her cerebral cortex died and was liquified.
What people don't realize is that thousands of babies each year are born exactly in Terri Shiavo's condition: with only a brain stem. There's actually an ethical debate going on as to whether we should hook a feeding tube into them, let them grow, and then harvest their organs for transplant. As it stands, they are left to die and die within a week.
No one ever said that nature or reality was fair. We just have to, once and for all, face reality. Terri Shiavo is no longer there; we're just keeping her body alive. We could do the same thing to those thousands of babies born each year with brain stems, but should we? After all, we can't ask those babies if they want to be alive or not either, but the fact remains that if you don't have a cerebral cortex, no matter who you are, you are physically incapable of thinking or doing anything beyond involuntary reflexes. That alone is why Terri Shiavo should be left to pass away. It's unfortunate. It is not ideal. But we do not set the laws of nature, and nature does not conform to human definitions of morality, contrary to what any Christian institution says otherwise.
Melon
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verte76
Blue Crack Addict
It seems like this is it for the Schiavo case. They're not going to put the feeding tube back in. It's just a matter of days, then she'll rest in peace. Since Terri herself didn't do anything wrong, she won't have to pay for the sin; someone else is committing that. But the controversy will never go away.
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babyman
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verte76 said:
my mouth says exactly these words.................................
DaveC
Blue Crack Addict
melon said:
This post should be printed and distributed to every person standing outside that hospice right now.
phanan
Blue Crack Addict
So many different ways to look at this.
So many different opinions on what is right and wrong.
I don't know Michael Schiavo personally, and I've never met Terri Schiavo's parents. I don't know what kind of people they are (although others seem to think they do), but I know that they disagree on what should be done regarding Terri.
I know that Michael Schiavo is the spouse, and as her spouse, is her legal guardian. As a result, the decision is his alone to make, and it should be something that stays private between him and his wife. It is not our right to judge.
So many different opinions on what is right and wrong.
I don't know Michael Schiavo personally, and I've never met Terri Schiavo's parents. I don't know what kind of people they are (although others seem to think they do), but I know that they disagree on what should be done regarding Terri.
I know that Michael Schiavo is the spouse, and as her spouse, is her legal guardian. As a result, the decision is his alone to make, and it should be something that stays private between him and his wife. It is not our right to judge.
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diamond
ONE love, blood, life
its not accurate.
db9
db9
indra
ONE love, blood, life
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verte76 said:
Only if you believe a sin occurred. I don't.
Of course I don't believe in god either....
DaveC
Blue Crack Addict
diamond said:
what isn't?
A_Wanderer
ONE love, blood, life
nbcrusader
Blue Crack Addict
DaveC said:
Is it? It's convenient to live in the gray area because you can always claim the situations are different.
I find it interesting that the doctors are giving Terri morphine for the pain she is supposedly not feeling. My guess is the parents see something in Terri's eyes that the rest of us will never know.
pax
ONE love, blood, life
nbcrusader said:
I think that's something we can all agree on.
My prayers are with her and her whole family--including her husband. I suspect we will never know what is or was going on in her head. All we can hope for now is peace for everyone involved.
Irvine511
Blue Crack Supplier
nbcrusader said:
one never wants to disregard the pain of the relatives of the deceased (or about to be), but i'm starting to lose a little sympathy for the Schindlers. my guess is all they're seeing in Terri's eyes is themselves, and their inability or downright refusal to cope with the virtual death of their daughter. it seems to me that this isn't about Terri at all, but about parents who can't let go and accept reality -- i'm sorry, but all that video footage they've complied together makes me angry, they're obviously desperate and they're completely reading into things that aren't there, and then they've culled a few minutes from years of her being comatose and edited it together into a terribly manipulative clip reel.
in my opinion, any parent who keeps a child in such a state for 15 years, and then dress her up and put make up on her and wave balloons in her face and claim she's somehow responding, doesn't have the child's best interests in mind. it strikes me as very self-centered, as if she's some sort of plaything.
while this does sound a little harsh, i fully admit that, i'm beginnign to think the circumstances and their grandstanding and histrionics are starting to deserve a little more harsh scrutiny than they've been getting. like i've said, i can't imagine their pain, and i've known parents who have lost children and it is unspeakably horrible ... but it's been 15 years.
deep
Blue Crack Addict
Life or Death:
Love's Choice
Two mothers, each acting out of compassion, reach different decisions after their children lapse into vegetative states.
By Stephanie Simon
Times Staff Writer
March 26, 2005
MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. — Day after day, year after year, two mothers sat vigil beside their children.
They sang snatches of favorite songs. They told bright stories out of fragments of the past: Remember when you put that snake in my flowerpot? Remember playing with our old dog, Sweeper?
In Florida, Kaye O'Bara would stroke her daughter's cheek. "Wake up, honey," she'd say. "Wake up and we'll go to Disney."
In Kansas, Shirley Bradley would clutch her son's limp hand. "Squeeze if you can hear me," she'd tell him.
The daughter did not wake up. The son did not squeeze back. The children would not ever again speak or read or move. Their brains were damaged beyond recovery. And so the mothers made their choices.
Kaye O'Bara chose to bring her daughter home, to sustain a life she still viewed as a blessing. Shirley Bradley chose to close off her son's feeding tube, to end what she saw as his suffering.
Neither mother would presume to pass judgment on the other.
Neither claims to have made the right choice. Just the choice that was best for her child.
With the certainty of a mother's love, Kaye O'Bara knows her daughter is happy.
Edwarda O'Bara lies in a sea-green nightgown, on sea-green sheets, in a room filled with angel figurines. Her gray-green eyes flick about, restless and unfocused. Her tongue lolls slackly in her open mouth.
The TV is tuned to Jerry Springer until O'Bara notices and, clucking, changes the channel. "Edwarda doesn't like Jerry," she explains. "She never did like anything smutty."
When she was 16, a lack of insulin sent Edwarda into a diabetic coma. Her heart stopped for several minutes; her brain, starved for oxygen, began to shut down. She can breathe on her own, and cough, but not much more. Edwarda turns 52 tomorrow. On her birthday, as on every day, her mother will braid her long, gray hair with ribbons and pour a mixture of baby food, eggs, milk and yeast into her feeding tube.
Edwarda coughs hoarsely, chest heaving.
"What's the matter, pumpkin?" O'Bara asks, threading a tube down her throat to suck out the mucous. "What's the matter? You want to turn over?"
O'Bara wrestles with Edwarda's motionless body, hoisting her up to change the pad on her sheet, adjusting her head, shifting her hips to avoid bedsores. "You're going for your ride, aren't you?" she says, in the singsong voice mothers use with babies. "You're going for your ride!"
O'Bara, 77, is panting a bit with the effort of turning her daughter. She has done this every two hours, day and night, for 35 years.
"There you are! Miss America!" O'Bara croons, fluffing the pillow. She nuzzles up to Edwarda's cheek. "Oooh, I love you. I love you."
As her mother kisses her, Edwarda's mouth curls into an awkward, fleeting smile.
Shirley Bradley got those smiles, too.
But she knew, with the certainty of a mother's love, that they meant nothing.
For 12 years she had watched over her son, Randy McCullough, in his nursing-home bed. Unmoving, unseeing, his warm brown eyes had gone dull, his limbs stiff and wracked with spasms.
He seemed to know when his mother was with him. Massaging him, she could soothe him into sleep. Although he, like Edwarda, was in a persistent vegetative state, sometimes he seemed to smile at her.
"That smile. That wasn't a smile," she says now, sitting in her home in Topeka, Kan. "It was a muscle reaction. Involuntary. Randy was gone."
She had known it the moment she saw her 25-year-old son strapped to a hospital gurney after a motorcycle crash that had caused head injuries so extensive that he was not breathing when the paramedics arrived.
"I knew intuitively that Randy's spirit, Randy's essence, was no longer with him," says Bradley, a social worker.
She nurtured the body on the bed, tended the sores and kissed the slack cheeks, but it began to seem a charade: "This body was being kept alive, but there was no person in it."
For the first 25 years after Edwarda came home to stay, O'Bara left the house only twice: Once for her husband's funeral and once for her other daughter's wedding.
The wedding was held in a church. But the reception was in the O'Baras' small bungalow in this Miami suburb -- around Edwarda's bed. The priest pinned a corsage on Edwarda's nightgown. The bride held her big sister's hand and told her all about the ceremony.
Ever since she brought Edwarda home on May 31, 1970 — five months after the teenager slipped into a diabetic coma while everyone thought she was simply sleeping off the flu — O'Bara has chosen to treat her as a functioning member of the family.
She varies her diet by alternating mashed carrots and mashed green beans in her feeding tube. She rubs sugar-free Popsicles along her lips, and dabs banana pudding on her tongue. She reads the newspaper to her daughter. She paints her nails and shaves her legs as though she might get up tomorrow and go off to the high school prom.
She will not subject Edwarda to any experimental treatment for brain damage, lest it make her worse. But she makes sure she gets the same medical care as anyone else. Edwarda has had surgery on both kidneys and on a collapsed lung. She had a lump in her breast removed; it turned out to be benign. Her mother checks her blood sugar every four hours, around the clock.
O'Bara used to say with conviction that Edwarda would wake up. Now, she says only that perhaps she might.
But even if her daughter remains in this state until she dies, O'Bara has no doubt that it's a life worth living.
"It's all how you look at life," says O'Bara, a former teacher at a Catholic school. "She's enjoying doing what she's doing."
She says her daughter can understand the love that surrounds her and that Edwarda has been blessed with a special power to heal. A book and video about the O'Bara family have drawn visitors to Edwarda's bedside from around the world; several have said she helped them recover from grave illness.
"Maybe someone would come in and say Edwarda doesn't have a good quality of life," O'Bara says. "Well, can you tell me anyone doing as much good as she's doing? To me, that's quality of life."
After the accident in 1991, Bradley saw no quality in her son's life.
Randy, the youngest of her three children, was always so playful, so full of zeal. He loved to wrestle, to water-ski, to pump up his biceps to impress the girls. In the sunroom of her Topeka home, Bradley holds up a photo of her son. He stands waist-deep in water, muscles bulging out of his yellow life vest, grinning and blowing a kiss. That was Randy, alive.
In the nursing-home bed, "he was living, breathing, pulsating, but it was a life sustained only by technical means," his mother says.
"There was energy, of course. But it wasn't life."
The doctors advised her to wait; they told her it was possible he could recover some function. So Bradley waited. She and Randy's father — the couple had divorced several years earlier — visited the nursing home daily. Bradley talked to Randy about silly memories: the chocolate cake with caramel icing she baked for his birthday, the treehouse he built with his father, the endless games of Sorry with his two older sisters.
She hoped he could hear her. She never saw any sign that he did.
Instead, she saw his bedsores fester. She noticed bruises caused when his caretakers dropped him as they struggled to prop him in a wheelchair.
He got sick with bout after bout of pneumonia. The antibiotics gave him diarrhea so constant, the skin on his bottom began to peel. Randy had trouble coughing up phlegm, so nurses would suction it out with a tube that made him gag. "I kept thinking: Why are we doing this? Why are doing this?" his mother said.
After several years of fighting to get good care for him in Topeka, Bradley moved her son to a nursing home near his sisters in North Dakota, where she thought he might get more attention. His sisters visited him often; she flew up to see him several times a year. His care did seem to improve. He stopped getting pneumonia.
But his mother noticed a rigidity in his face, in his body, that convinced her he was in pain.
One day, she says, she saw in her son's eyes a plea for help.
"I hesitate to say this, because people won't understand, but if there was any life in that body at all, it was as if he was saying: 'I've had enough. I've had enough.' I knew then that I couldn't stop until I brought him peace."
Bradley told Randy's doctor what she wanted to do.
The doctor convened an ethics committee; they studied Randy's case for months. Meanwhile, Bradley talked with other family members, gradually earning their assent. She also put herself through therapy. She wanted to make sure, she says, that she was acting only out of the "purest intent" — doing what was best for Randy, not what was most convenient for her.
In January 2003, the doctor agreed to stop feeding Randy, and Bradley flew to North Dakota, to her son.
"I told him what was going to happen. I told him how much I loved him. How much we appreciated the gift of him. I told him it was time now to bring him peace."
For six days, Bradley sat by her son's bed, watching him die.
Blisters pocked his mouth and tongue. His frail body shook with muscle cramps. It was agonizing, she says now: "gruesome, prolonged." But in the dying, "there was also something sacred, something beautiful."
At the end, she recalls, as he gasped for every breath, she wrapped him in her arms and whispered:
"Let go, Randy. I love you. Just let go."
"My goodness!" O'Bara chirps as Edwarda begins, again, to cough. "Cough it up strong. Can you do it yourself? Yes you can! There, that's a good one!"
O'Bara lifts the tube that feeds her daughter, uncaps it and pours in her homemade formula. She does this every six hours, nourishing Edwarda with 1,800 calories a day.
The formula costs O'Bara $219.80 a month. Other supplies — pads for the bed, lotion to keep Edwarda's skin smooth, tissues and alcohol swabs and catheter bags — run more than $400 a month.
Medicaid would pay for Edwarda's care if she were in a nursing home or a hospice — a bill that could easily top $60,000 a year. But because she stays at home, government programs cover only the costs of her medications and one hour a day of nursing care, O'Bara says.
To keep Edwarda comfortable, her mother has taken out multiple mortgages on her house. She juggles 21 credit cards. She cheerfully admits she's $300,000 in debt, but she refuses to worry.
O'Bara doesn't look back at what she missed in life by devoting all her days and all her nights to Edwarda. She refuses to fret about who will take over Edwarda's care in the years ahead. Her daughter is at home, where she belongs, and that's all that matters.
O'Bara wraps Edwarda's fingers around her own.
"You're a funny little kid, aren't you?" she murmurs. "You're a funny little kid."
A picture of Terri Schiavo fills the TV in Edwarda's room.
The sound is muted, so O'Bara squints to read the news flash: The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to step in. Schiavo's parents are nearly out of appeals in their fight to have their daughter's feeding tube reinstated. O'Bara strokes Edwarda's arm.
She has sympathy for both sides: For Schiavo's husband, who says Terri would have wanted the feeding tube removed, and for her parents, who say Terri would want to live.
There is no one correct course, O'Bara says. It's a private decision — one a family must make on its own, with love.
Bradley feels the same. Watching politicians and protesters presume to know what's best for Terri angers her. She would not have wanted a stranger to make the choice for Randy.
Bradley talks to her son often now. "None of us know what awaits us when we die, but I sense that he's aware I'm talking to him," she says. "He's healed. He's free."
Sitting by Edwarda's bed, surrounded by angels, O'Bara also talks to her child. "I see her," she says, "exactly the same as she always was."
Love's Choice
Two mothers, each acting out of compassion, reach different decisions after their children lapse into vegetative states.
By Stephanie Simon
Times Staff Writer
March 26, 2005
MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. — Day after day, year after year, two mothers sat vigil beside their children.
They sang snatches of favorite songs. They told bright stories out of fragments of the past: Remember when you put that snake in my flowerpot? Remember playing with our old dog, Sweeper?
In Florida, Kaye O'Bara would stroke her daughter's cheek. "Wake up, honey," she'd say. "Wake up and we'll go to Disney."
In Kansas, Shirley Bradley would clutch her son's limp hand. "Squeeze if you can hear me," she'd tell him.
The daughter did not wake up. The son did not squeeze back. The children would not ever again speak or read or move. Their brains were damaged beyond recovery. And so the mothers made their choices.
Kaye O'Bara chose to bring her daughter home, to sustain a life she still viewed as a blessing. Shirley Bradley chose to close off her son's feeding tube, to end what she saw as his suffering.
Neither mother would presume to pass judgment on the other.
Neither claims to have made the right choice. Just the choice that was best for her child.
With the certainty of a mother's love, Kaye O'Bara knows her daughter is happy.
Edwarda O'Bara lies in a sea-green nightgown, on sea-green sheets, in a room filled with angel figurines. Her gray-green eyes flick about, restless and unfocused. Her tongue lolls slackly in her open mouth.
The TV is tuned to Jerry Springer until O'Bara notices and, clucking, changes the channel. "Edwarda doesn't like Jerry," she explains. "She never did like anything smutty."
When she was 16, a lack of insulin sent Edwarda into a diabetic coma. Her heart stopped for several minutes; her brain, starved for oxygen, began to shut down. She can breathe on her own, and cough, but not much more. Edwarda turns 52 tomorrow. On her birthday, as on every day, her mother will braid her long, gray hair with ribbons and pour a mixture of baby food, eggs, milk and yeast into her feeding tube.
Edwarda coughs hoarsely, chest heaving.
"What's the matter, pumpkin?" O'Bara asks, threading a tube down her throat to suck out the mucous. "What's the matter? You want to turn over?"
O'Bara wrestles with Edwarda's motionless body, hoisting her up to change the pad on her sheet, adjusting her head, shifting her hips to avoid bedsores. "You're going for your ride, aren't you?" she says, in the singsong voice mothers use with babies. "You're going for your ride!"
O'Bara, 77, is panting a bit with the effort of turning her daughter. She has done this every two hours, day and night, for 35 years.
"There you are! Miss America!" O'Bara croons, fluffing the pillow. She nuzzles up to Edwarda's cheek. "Oooh, I love you. I love you."
As her mother kisses her, Edwarda's mouth curls into an awkward, fleeting smile.
Shirley Bradley got those smiles, too.
But she knew, with the certainty of a mother's love, that they meant nothing.
For 12 years she had watched over her son, Randy McCullough, in his nursing-home bed. Unmoving, unseeing, his warm brown eyes had gone dull, his limbs stiff and wracked with spasms.
He seemed to know when his mother was with him. Massaging him, she could soothe him into sleep. Although he, like Edwarda, was in a persistent vegetative state, sometimes he seemed to smile at her.
"That smile. That wasn't a smile," she says now, sitting in her home in Topeka, Kan. "It was a muscle reaction. Involuntary. Randy was gone."
She had known it the moment she saw her 25-year-old son strapped to a hospital gurney after a motorcycle crash that had caused head injuries so extensive that he was not breathing when the paramedics arrived.
"I knew intuitively that Randy's spirit, Randy's essence, was no longer with him," says Bradley, a social worker.
She nurtured the body on the bed, tended the sores and kissed the slack cheeks, but it began to seem a charade: "This body was being kept alive, but there was no person in it."
For the first 25 years after Edwarda came home to stay, O'Bara left the house only twice: Once for her husband's funeral and once for her other daughter's wedding.
The wedding was held in a church. But the reception was in the O'Baras' small bungalow in this Miami suburb -- around Edwarda's bed. The priest pinned a corsage on Edwarda's nightgown. The bride held her big sister's hand and told her all about the ceremony.
Ever since she brought Edwarda home on May 31, 1970 — five months after the teenager slipped into a diabetic coma while everyone thought she was simply sleeping off the flu — O'Bara has chosen to treat her as a functioning member of the family.
She varies her diet by alternating mashed carrots and mashed green beans in her feeding tube. She rubs sugar-free Popsicles along her lips, and dabs banana pudding on her tongue. She reads the newspaper to her daughter. She paints her nails and shaves her legs as though she might get up tomorrow and go off to the high school prom.
She will not subject Edwarda to any experimental treatment for brain damage, lest it make her worse. But she makes sure she gets the same medical care as anyone else. Edwarda has had surgery on both kidneys and on a collapsed lung. She had a lump in her breast removed; it turned out to be benign. Her mother checks her blood sugar every four hours, around the clock.
O'Bara used to say with conviction that Edwarda would wake up. Now, she says only that perhaps she might.
But even if her daughter remains in this state until she dies, O'Bara has no doubt that it's a life worth living.
"It's all how you look at life," says O'Bara, a former teacher at a Catholic school. "She's enjoying doing what she's doing."
She says her daughter can understand the love that surrounds her and that Edwarda has been blessed with a special power to heal. A book and video about the O'Bara family have drawn visitors to Edwarda's bedside from around the world; several have said she helped them recover from grave illness.
"Maybe someone would come in and say Edwarda doesn't have a good quality of life," O'Bara says. "Well, can you tell me anyone doing as much good as she's doing? To me, that's quality of life."
After the accident in 1991, Bradley saw no quality in her son's life.
Randy, the youngest of her three children, was always so playful, so full of zeal. He loved to wrestle, to water-ski, to pump up his biceps to impress the girls. In the sunroom of her Topeka home, Bradley holds up a photo of her son. He stands waist-deep in water, muscles bulging out of his yellow life vest, grinning and blowing a kiss. That was Randy, alive.
In the nursing-home bed, "he was living, breathing, pulsating, but it was a life sustained only by technical means," his mother says.
"There was energy, of course. But it wasn't life."
The doctors advised her to wait; they told her it was possible he could recover some function. So Bradley waited. She and Randy's father — the couple had divorced several years earlier — visited the nursing home daily. Bradley talked to Randy about silly memories: the chocolate cake with caramel icing she baked for his birthday, the treehouse he built with his father, the endless games of Sorry with his two older sisters.
She hoped he could hear her. She never saw any sign that he did.
Instead, she saw his bedsores fester. She noticed bruises caused when his caretakers dropped him as they struggled to prop him in a wheelchair.
He got sick with bout after bout of pneumonia. The antibiotics gave him diarrhea so constant, the skin on his bottom began to peel. Randy had trouble coughing up phlegm, so nurses would suction it out with a tube that made him gag. "I kept thinking: Why are we doing this? Why are doing this?" his mother said.
After several years of fighting to get good care for him in Topeka, Bradley moved her son to a nursing home near his sisters in North Dakota, where she thought he might get more attention. His sisters visited him often; she flew up to see him several times a year. His care did seem to improve. He stopped getting pneumonia.
But his mother noticed a rigidity in his face, in his body, that convinced her he was in pain.
One day, she says, she saw in her son's eyes a plea for help.
"I hesitate to say this, because people won't understand, but if there was any life in that body at all, it was as if he was saying: 'I've had enough. I've had enough.' I knew then that I couldn't stop until I brought him peace."
Bradley told Randy's doctor what she wanted to do.
The doctor convened an ethics committee; they studied Randy's case for months. Meanwhile, Bradley talked with other family members, gradually earning their assent. She also put herself through therapy. She wanted to make sure, she says, that she was acting only out of the "purest intent" — doing what was best for Randy, not what was most convenient for her.
In January 2003, the doctor agreed to stop feeding Randy, and Bradley flew to North Dakota, to her son.
"I told him what was going to happen. I told him how much I loved him. How much we appreciated the gift of him. I told him it was time now to bring him peace."
For six days, Bradley sat by her son's bed, watching him die.
Blisters pocked his mouth and tongue. His frail body shook with muscle cramps. It was agonizing, she says now: "gruesome, prolonged." But in the dying, "there was also something sacred, something beautiful."
At the end, she recalls, as he gasped for every breath, she wrapped him in her arms and whispered:
"Let go, Randy. I love you. Just let go."
"My goodness!" O'Bara chirps as Edwarda begins, again, to cough. "Cough it up strong. Can you do it yourself? Yes you can! There, that's a good one!"
O'Bara lifts the tube that feeds her daughter, uncaps it and pours in her homemade formula. She does this every six hours, nourishing Edwarda with 1,800 calories a day.
The formula costs O'Bara $219.80 a month. Other supplies — pads for the bed, lotion to keep Edwarda's skin smooth, tissues and alcohol swabs and catheter bags — run more than $400 a month.
Medicaid would pay for Edwarda's care if she were in a nursing home or a hospice — a bill that could easily top $60,000 a year. But because she stays at home, government programs cover only the costs of her medications and one hour a day of nursing care, O'Bara says.
To keep Edwarda comfortable, her mother has taken out multiple mortgages on her house. She juggles 21 credit cards. She cheerfully admits she's $300,000 in debt, but she refuses to worry.
O'Bara doesn't look back at what she missed in life by devoting all her days and all her nights to Edwarda. She refuses to fret about who will take over Edwarda's care in the years ahead. Her daughter is at home, where she belongs, and that's all that matters.
O'Bara wraps Edwarda's fingers around her own.
"You're a funny little kid, aren't you?" she murmurs. "You're a funny little kid."
A picture of Terri Schiavo fills the TV in Edwarda's room.
The sound is muted, so O'Bara squints to read the news flash: The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to step in. Schiavo's parents are nearly out of appeals in their fight to have their daughter's feeding tube reinstated. O'Bara strokes Edwarda's arm.
She has sympathy for both sides: For Schiavo's husband, who says Terri would have wanted the feeding tube removed, and for her parents, who say Terri would want to live.
There is no one correct course, O'Bara says. It's a private decision — one a family must make on its own, with love.
Bradley feels the same. Watching politicians and protesters presume to know what's best for Terri angers her. She would not have wanted a stranger to make the choice for Randy.
Bradley talks to her son often now. "None of us know what awaits us when we die, but I sense that he's aware I'm talking to him," she says. "He's healed. He's free."
Sitting by Edwarda's bed, surrounded by angels, O'Bara also talks to her child. "I see her," she says, "exactly the same as she always was."
yolland
Forum Moderator
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- Messages
- 7,471
Interesting new development....
Deathbed Conversion
The lesson of Tom DeLay's mortal hypocrisy.
By William Saletan
Posted Monday, March 28, 2005, at 11:23 AM PT [slate.msn.com]
In 1988, Tom DeLay's 65-year-old father, Charles DeLay, suffered catastrophic brain damage and went into a coma. He had no hope of recovery but evidently reacted when his son entered the room. Although Charles DeLay had no living will, his family concluded that he would be better off dead and wouldn't want to go on living this way. Tom DeLay joined other family members in deciding to withhold dialysis. His father died.
That story, pieced together from interviews and medical and court records by Walter F. Roche Jr. and Sam Howe Verhovek of the Los Angeles Times, defies Tom DeLay's pronouncements 16 years later. In the Terri Schiavo case, DeLay condemns the reasoning he and his relatives followed when the tragedy was theirs. Which is more honorable: what DeLay says as a politician, or what he did as a son? And what does that tell us about the wisdom of families and politicians in matters of life and death?
Physically, Charles DeLay was in far worse shape than Terri Schiavo. He needed dialysis, not just nutrition. He was 65, not 41. His body, unlike hers, was failing. But mentally, his condition was similar. According to his sister-in-law, doctors told the family that Charles DeLay would "basically be a vegetable." A neighbor who had visited him in the hospital said he "did a bit of moaning and groaning, I guess, but you could see there was no way he was coming back." Tom DeLay's mother told the Times that her husband seemed unconscious except that "whenever Randy [his son] walked into the room, his heart, his pulse rate, would go up a little bit."
Friends and relatives considered Charles DeLay's quality of life and concluded he'd be better off dead. "He was all but gone," said the neighbor. "He would have been better off if he'd died right there and then." According to Charles' sister-in-law, his brother "prayed that, if [Charles] couldn't have quality of life, that God would take him—and that is exactly what [H]e did."
God may have taken Charles, but his family held the door open. They inferred, without written evidence, that Charles wouldn't have wanted to go on living in this condition. "Daddy did not want to be a vegetable," said Vi Skogen, who at the time was Charles' daughter-in-law. Tom DeLay's mother told the Times, "There was no point to even really talking about it. There was no way [Charles] wanted to live like that. Tom knew—we all knew—his father wouldn't have wanted to live that way."
That was then. This is now. At a press conference on March 18, Tom DeLay denied that quality of life could be valid grounds for withdrawing Schiavo's feeding tube. "It's not for any one of us to decide what her quality of life should be," he said. "It's not any one of us to decide whether she should live or die." Congress, DeLay explained, was intervening against Schiavo's husband "to protect her constitutional right to live."
In the absence of a living will, DeLay argued, Schiavo's spouse couldn't legally vouch for her wishes, as DeLay's mother had done—on less apparent basis—for DeLay's father. When a reporter noted that "Terri Schiavo's husband has said that she expressed a verbal desire that she not continue in this sort of state," DeLay replied, "The sanctity of life overshadows the sanctity of marriage. I don't know what transpired between Terri and her husband. All I know is Terri is alive. … And unless she had specifically written instructions in her hand and with her signature, I don't care what her husband says."
A day later, DeLay told reporters that Congress had to intervene rather than "take it from just a few people that have decided whether she lives or dies. For one person in one state court to make this decision is too heavy. That's why it does take all of us to think this through, think about the Constitution and its protection of life."
DeLay hasn't confined his condemnation to the principles on which his family acted. He has condemned the character of people who now apply or defend those principles. On March 18, he charged, "Senators Boxer, Wyden, and Levin have put Mrs. Schiavo's life at risk to prove a point—an unprecedented profile in cowardice." A day later, he said of Schiavo's husband, "I don't have a whole lot of respect for a man that has treated this woman in this way. … My question is: What kind of man is he?"
Why the difference between then and now? Maybe because DeLay saw his father as a human being. He speaks of Schiavo as something more—and less. "It's more than just Terri Schiavo," DeLay told the Family Research Council on March 18. "It is a critical issue for people in this position, and it is also a critical issue to fight the fight for life, whether it be euthanasia or abortion. And I tell you, ladies and gentlemen, one thing that God has brought to us is Terri Schiavo, to elevate the visibility of what's going on in America."
This is what happens when you approach a tragedy as a politician rather than as a family member. You see quality of life as a slippery-slope abstraction, not as a reality affecting someone you love. You find it easy to impose a standard of documentation that would have forced your family to break the law. You second-guess a spouse in a way you would never second-guess your mother. You challenge people's competence and impugn their character. You perceive the afflicted person more as God's tool than as God's child.
I don't have a lot of respect for a man who treats a woman this way. But to dismiss him as a hypocrite would further politicize a case he has already politicized too much. My question is: What kind of man is he? My answer is: He's a better child than politician. So are we all. That's why families should make these decisions, and Congress should stay out.
Deathbed Conversion
The lesson of Tom DeLay's mortal hypocrisy.
By William Saletan
Posted Monday, March 28, 2005, at 11:23 AM PT [slate.msn.com]
In 1988, Tom DeLay's 65-year-old father, Charles DeLay, suffered catastrophic brain damage and went into a coma. He had no hope of recovery but evidently reacted when his son entered the room. Although Charles DeLay had no living will, his family concluded that he would be better off dead and wouldn't want to go on living this way. Tom DeLay joined other family members in deciding to withhold dialysis. His father died.
That story, pieced together from interviews and medical and court records by Walter F. Roche Jr. and Sam Howe Verhovek of the Los Angeles Times, defies Tom DeLay's pronouncements 16 years later. In the Terri Schiavo case, DeLay condemns the reasoning he and his relatives followed when the tragedy was theirs. Which is more honorable: what DeLay says as a politician, or what he did as a son? And what does that tell us about the wisdom of families and politicians in matters of life and death?
Physically, Charles DeLay was in far worse shape than Terri Schiavo. He needed dialysis, not just nutrition. He was 65, not 41. His body, unlike hers, was failing. But mentally, his condition was similar. According to his sister-in-law, doctors told the family that Charles DeLay would "basically be a vegetable." A neighbor who had visited him in the hospital said he "did a bit of moaning and groaning, I guess, but you could see there was no way he was coming back." Tom DeLay's mother told the Times that her husband seemed unconscious except that "whenever Randy [his son] walked into the room, his heart, his pulse rate, would go up a little bit."
Friends and relatives considered Charles DeLay's quality of life and concluded he'd be better off dead. "He was all but gone," said the neighbor. "He would have been better off if he'd died right there and then." According to Charles' sister-in-law, his brother "prayed that, if [Charles] couldn't have quality of life, that God would take him—and that is exactly what [H]e did."
God may have taken Charles, but his family held the door open. They inferred, without written evidence, that Charles wouldn't have wanted to go on living in this condition. "Daddy did not want to be a vegetable," said Vi Skogen, who at the time was Charles' daughter-in-law. Tom DeLay's mother told the Times, "There was no point to even really talking about it. There was no way [Charles] wanted to live like that. Tom knew—we all knew—his father wouldn't have wanted to live that way."
That was then. This is now. At a press conference on March 18, Tom DeLay denied that quality of life could be valid grounds for withdrawing Schiavo's feeding tube. "It's not for any one of us to decide what her quality of life should be," he said. "It's not any one of us to decide whether she should live or die." Congress, DeLay explained, was intervening against Schiavo's husband "to protect her constitutional right to live."
In the absence of a living will, DeLay argued, Schiavo's spouse couldn't legally vouch for her wishes, as DeLay's mother had done—on less apparent basis—for DeLay's father. When a reporter noted that "Terri Schiavo's husband has said that she expressed a verbal desire that she not continue in this sort of state," DeLay replied, "The sanctity of life overshadows the sanctity of marriage. I don't know what transpired between Terri and her husband. All I know is Terri is alive. … And unless she had specifically written instructions in her hand and with her signature, I don't care what her husband says."
A day later, DeLay told reporters that Congress had to intervene rather than "take it from just a few people that have decided whether she lives or dies. For one person in one state court to make this decision is too heavy. That's why it does take all of us to think this through, think about the Constitution and its protection of life."
DeLay hasn't confined his condemnation to the principles on which his family acted. He has condemned the character of people who now apply or defend those principles. On March 18, he charged, "Senators Boxer, Wyden, and Levin have put Mrs. Schiavo's life at risk to prove a point—an unprecedented profile in cowardice." A day later, he said of Schiavo's husband, "I don't have a whole lot of respect for a man that has treated this woman in this way. … My question is: What kind of man is he?"
Why the difference between then and now? Maybe because DeLay saw his father as a human being. He speaks of Schiavo as something more—and less. "It's more than just Terri Schiavo," DeLay told the Family Research Council on March 18. "It is a critical issue for people in this position, and it is also a critical issue to fight the fight for life, whether it be euthanasia or abortion. And I tell you, ladies and gentlemen, one thing that God has brought to us is Terri Schiavo, to elevate the visibility of what's going on in America."
This is what happens when you approach a tragedy as a politician rather than as a family member. You see quality of life as a slippery-slope abstraction, not as a reality affecting someone you love. You find it easy to impose a standard of documentation that would have forced your family to break the law. You second-guess a spouse in a way you would never second-guess your mother. You challenge people's competence and impugn their character. You perceive the afflicted person more as God's tool than as God's child.
I don't have a lot of respect for a man who treats a woman this way. But to dismiss him as a hypocrite would further politicize a case he has already politicized too much. My question is: What kind of man is he? My answer is: He's a better child than politician. So are we all. That's why families should make these decisions, and Congress should stay out.
indra
ONE love, blood, life
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A comment on what deep posted. I read an article (can't find it right now -- sorry) which noted that when the person in a such a condition is a young female (or was young at the time of the injury or illness), there is a substantially higher instance of the type of battle being waged over Terri Schiavo than when the victim is anyone else. The author of the article speculated that there is a greater tendency to want to protect young women (and also that those young women are less apt to be able to really know what they want in the first place).
It was interesting to think about.
It was interesting to think about.
DaveC
Blue Crack Addict
How the hell is it apples and oranges??
It's the same damn thing!
It's the same damn thing!
Food & water= apple
kidney dialysis= artificial life support=orange
Now I also understand he was on a respirator as well. If I'm correct, I assume Mr. Saletan purposefully omitted that info, making his whole article a fraud.
A family in agreement on the withdrawal of artificial life support= apples
parents pleading against the wishes of the husband that they be allowed to feed their daughter=oranges
They're not even allowed to pour water down her throat.
kidney dialysis= artificial life support=orange
Now I also understand he was on a respirator as well. If I'm correct, I assume Mr. Saletan purposefully omitted that info, making his whole article a fraud.
A family in agreement on the withdrawal of artificial life support= apples
parents pleading against the wishes of the husband that they be allowed to feed their daughter=oranges
They're not even allowed to pour water down her throat.
BVS
Blue Crack Supplier
Two individuals, both brain dead, neither of which hearts can continue to beat with out aid from machine. Both would never recover.
I see no difference except one:
One was old and had his children decide to unplug them, and one's young and has spouses, families, and politicians arguing.
It's a very valid comparison.
I see no difference except one:
One was old and had his children decide to unplug them, and one's young and has spouses, families, and politicians arguing.
It's a very valid comparison.
food isn't a machine.
Brain damaged isn't brain dead.
Michael got a jump start on the Schindlers with the legal proceedings and hired one of the top Florida right-to-die lawyers- good thing he had lots of money to do so- while the Schindlers hired a pro bono lawyer. The facts in the case were established by the judge quickly in, I think, 1993 by some deft legal maneuvering and have not been reviewed since. I'll believe Terri is brain dead when there's a fresh thorough examination and review of the facts. It's been over 10 years and they're letting her die based on a 10+ year old case.
Besides, if they can just keep her alive for 5 more years or so they'll be able to regenerate her brain with embryonic stem cells.
Brain damaged isn't brain dead.
Michael got a jump start on the Schindlers with the legal proceedings and hired one of the top Florida right-to-die lawyers- good thing he had lots of money to do so- while the Schindlers hired a pro bono lawyer. The facts in the case were established by the judge quickly in, I think, 1993 by some deft legal maneuvering and have not been reviewed since. I'll believe Terri is brain dead when there's a fresh thorough examination and review of the facts. It's been over 10 years and they're letting her die based on a 10+ year old case.
Besides, if they can just keep her alive for 5 more years or so they'll be able to regenerate her brain with embryonic stem cells.
Irvine511
Blue Crack Supplier
drhark said:
hmmmm ... there are lots of people who are capable of eating and drinking who are also on dialysis.
the sophistocated feeding tube that Terri has *is* life support, especially if you want to make the comparison that dialysis is life support. she cannot feed herself, and let's stop with the whole -- "if i don't feed my baby it will die" -- nonsense, because over the course of 15 years, a baby will learn to feed itself. Terri will not.
and her parents are unable to feed the daughter, and she'd die if they tried.
i'm getting increasingly exasperated with the hyperbolic, dramatic, overly emotional language used around the Schindlers ... they're working you over, big time, and all this emotionalism can't disguise the fact that their daughter has been dead for 15 years. for that, i am tremendously sorry; for their behavior these past few years, and especially now, and all this know-nothing calls to give a brain dead woman bread and water ...
Irvine511
Blue Crack Supplier
drhark said:
a feeding tube is a machine.
please, go to a hospital, talk to doctors, and learn something.
BVS
Blue Crack Supplier
And how do you think this "food" was delivered to her? You think they just squeezed Kung Pao Chicken in her stomach?drhark said:
drhark said:
And who exactly is brain damaged? Please get your facts straight.
nbcrusader
Blue Crack Addict
Irvine511 said:
To the same point, does it not seem strange that Michael Schiavo insists on maintaining control of the situation leader to her death. If he had surrendered custody of Terri to her parents, we would hear nothing of this case.
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