Terri Schiavo III

Still twitchin’

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson

6/20/05

It doesn’t look like the Terri Schiavo case is ready to settle down any time soon. Like Terri herself, the argument lingers on well past the point where it could have been laid to rest.

One of the more moderate voices came from right winger John Leo, of the U.S. News and World Report. Unlike many of the right-to-life crowd, he actually admits that the autopsy proved there was "extraordinary damage" to Terri’s brain, and that it also showed that her husband, Michael, had not abused her. Mind you, this is one of the more moderate voices from the right.

This same "moderate voice" starts out by mentioning Barney Frank. The Massachusetts Congressman didn’t play any significant role in the Schiavo case. Certainly his role was smaller than that of master remote diagnostician Bill Frist, or the lumbering, sullen governor of Florida, Jeb Bush. So why start out by talking about him? Well, Frank is gay, of course, and Leo wants his target audience to start out with a little spasm of hate and contempt for all "leftists" who opposed keeping the remains of Terri twitching indefinitely. But don’t worry: he’s appealing to good, clean, Christian hate, so that’s ok then.

He talks about the moral question of whether anyone should be disconnected from life support without their explicit consent, glossing over such things as full power of attorney for next of kin, or recommendations from attending medical experts, and then makes a complete Catch-22 of his argument by noting that some outfit called the Hastings Center issued a report that claimed that a third of all people disavow written directives concerning living wills and the like. So what Leo is saying is that it was wrong to stop the forced feeding of Terri’s corpse because she hadn’t given consent, and that if she had given consent, it would have been wrong anyway.

Leo doesn’t say so, but he clearly feels that even though there is clear evidence that Terri was mind-dead, and would never, ever improve, a twitching lump of meat that was blind and deaf and not even aware that it was blind and deaf, she should have been kept going artificially, for decades if need be, for "moral" reasons.

This was a "moderate" voice. It goes downhill from there.

In one of the most inexcusable acts of petty vindictiveness seen yet in this whole sordid mess, Governor Jeb Bush of Florida, wastrel brother to a wastrel President, convinced a prosecutor to open an investigation into whether Michael Schiavo tried to murder Terri on the morning she had her event. He bases this on the fact that the records show that the call for an ambulance occurred about 5:40 am that terrible morning, and thirteen years later Michael Schiavo recalled finding her "about 4:30." The right-to-lifers felt deep, sour anger that no evidence of any foul play by Michael Schiavo turned up in the reports (a favorite of the nastier whackjobs protesting outside the hospice was that he had tried to strangle or suffocate her that morning). That minor discrepancy, an hour separated by thirteen years, is what they went to the esteemed governor about, and that’s what he wants a case built upon. It beats having to admit he was wrong right along.

Incidently, the medical reports at the time make it clear that only the fact that she received medical attention promptly saved her life at all. Other sources have noted that for Jeb Bush’s conspiracy theory to be true, that Michael waited a leisurely 45 minutes to call an ambulance, meant that Terri’s brain survived without any oxygen for at least an hour.

Others are still trying to find justification in the fact that the report can’t find a reason for the collapse. There was no heart attack, or damage to the heart – there was no elevation of the CPK enzymes, the way there would have been if she’d had an infarct. But her electrolyte levels were way out of whack. Serum potassium was much too low. The right tries to pretend that it was the medical treatment for her collapse that threw the enzymes out of whack, although usually treatment would include heroic doses of potassium to counter IV infusions and other items that might cause an imbalance.

If her potassium balance was really that low, a possible result of unwise dieting methods (there’s a rumor that she was bulemic), then she might well have had a neural heart stoppage. This would have cut off all oxygen to her brain. And unlike a heart attack, there are no "telltales" in the enzymes of dead muscle tissue, because it isn’t a portion of the heart dying; it’s simply a failure of the "spark plugs" to fire. What happens (the technical term is "ventricular fibrillation") is the bottom two chambers of the heart have stopped beating and are just quivering helplessly, moving no blood. Four to six minutes is all it would take for widespread neurological necrosis to occur, the die off of billions of brain cells. Death is inevitable within twenty minutes. Even if the immediate damage was relatively small, in 1990 they didn’t really have a solid grip on reducing swelling of the brain, and that would have enhanced the damage, especially if ischemic contractions continued.

But of course, Bush isn’t going to think of any of that. He just wants to look like the fight is continuing in order to pander to the nut jobs who are his base, even though the final bell has rung, and if he has to continue the torment of Michael Schiavo that the vicious and ugly Christian right has conducted for seven years, then so be it.

Another meme the far right is using is that the "leftist elite" wants to destroy the rights of the disabled. They like to say this whenever they aren’t bitterly blaming the leftist elite for the Americans with Disability acts, performing that remarkable right wing ability to argue in exactly two opposing directions at once.

So they are arguing that Terri wasn’t "mind-dead." Just "disabled." You know; like the kids in the wheelchairs that they don’t like having in the classrooms with their kids, or the folks up in the old folks home that they resent visiting every week.

It takes completely ignoring the autopsy report, but then, they ignored the reports of every independent physician and neurologist that attended her, and the fact that forty different judges all agreed that there was no reasonable hope of any improvement. They also ignore the fact that Michael Schiavo himself kept up a brave fight on Terri’s behalf for seven mortal years, hoping against hope that something might bring her back to a semblance of her former humanity.

These people excel at ignoring proof because God told ‘em something different. Or at least they say he did.

Terri wasn’t "disabled." She was, to all intents and purposes, dead. Her mind was gone; not just damaged. Destroyed. The neurons and cells that combined to make her a person, or even a cognitive being of any sort, were destroyed.

But of course, the troubling thing is that in matters like this, there is no black and white. I would find a law mandating that hospitals let hopeless or broke patients die (like the one George W. Putsch signed while governor of Texas) just as troubling as one that outlawed any effort to end life support for a patient deemed hopeless.

The law can mandate that certain steps be followed to determine what the right course of action for a patient like Terri should be. They can say that independent physicians must be brought in, and examine the patient, and make reports. They can demand that the next of kin be fully notified. (One of the more striking postures of the "pro-family" right, in both this case and the case of Elián Gonzales, was their willingness to overturn the prerogatives and rights of next of kin in order to get their way). And the law does do that.

Hospitals make mistakes. Patients are not only kept alive when by rights they should be allowed to die, but sometimes patients are let go when there might have still been a chance. You can’t prevent those mistakes by mandating a black-or-white rule. All that does is guarantee more cases where the wrong path is followed.

But the black and white thinking of the religious right not only attempts to make sure that only one path is available, but they also are quite capable of whipping around the following week and declaring that black is white. Next month they might find some poor family to destroy because Barney Frank and the liberal elite are denying some accident victim’s desire to meet his maker.

It’s the type of thinking that leads to witch hunts.