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Questions raised about Terri's collapse
Sun Oct 26 23:12:24 2003
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MATTERS OF LIFE AND DEATH
Questions raised about Terri's collapse
Celebrated forensic pathologist says 1990 injuries should be investigated
Posted: October 26, 2003 5:45 p.m. Eastern
http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=35276


© 2003 WorldNetDaily.com

A world-renowned forensic pathologist with over 40 years experience as a medical examiner is challenging the official version of early events in the Terri-Schindler Schiavo case, providing the parents of the brain-disabled woman with powerful ammunition in their battle to save their daughter's life from her court-ordered starvation death.

Interviewed on the Fox News Channel, Dr. Michael Baden, co-director of the Investigative Unit of New York State Police in Albany and former chief medical examiner for New York City, ruled out potassium imbalance and a heart attack as factors in Terri's mysterious collapse 13 years ago – which left her severely incapacitated and unable to speak – and pointed to head trauma and bone injuries as a more likely cause.

Baden explained to host Greta van Susteren it was unlikely for a woman of Terri's age at the time to have a potassium imbalance, unless she had certain types of diseases, which she didn't have.

"Too little potassium can cause the heart to stop beating properly and lead to lack of blood flow to the brain and death of brain cells by lack of oxygen, but that's very unusual, Greta, extremely unusual," he said.

That Terri's heart was healthy would rule out the likelihood of cardiac arrest, he said.

"The reason she's in the state she's in is because there was a period of time, maybe five minutes or eight minutes, when not enough oxygen was going to her brain," said Baden. "That can happen because the heart stops for 5 or 8 minutes, but she had a healthy heart, from what we can see."

Baden said he studied a bone scan made in March 1991at a hospital that describes her as having a head injury.

"A head injury can cause, can lead to the vegetative state that Ms. Schiavo is in now," he continued, adding it showed evidence of other injuries, including bone fractures.

Something totally different

Van Susteren asked if he were suggesting a potassium imbalance caused a fall that led to a head injury, or perhaps some "pre-existing head injury [led] to her passing out."

"Something totally different," he answered. Because cardiac arrests triggered by low potassium are so rare, "the other issue is: could it have been due to some other cause, which is raised by the family. [That] has to be looked at."

Baden said the injuries suggested some kind of trauma: "The trauma can be from an auto accident; the trauma can be from some kind of beating that she obtained from somebody somewhere. It's something that should have been investigated in 1991 when those findings were fresh," adding, "Maybe they were. Maybe they were investigated by the police at that time."

The Fox News interview with Michael Baden and information on Terri's fight for life is posted on the family's website.

Previous articles:

Media 'getting it wrong' on Terri Schiavo story
http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=35270

Constitutional showdown brewing over Terri's Law
http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=35258

Terri: 'Where there's life, there's hope'
Girlfriend of brain-damaged woman recalls prophetic comment
--Buffalo News

Terri: 'Where there's life, there's hope'
Girlfriend of brain-damaged woman recalls prophetic comment
--Buffalo News
http://www.buffalonews.com/editorial/20031025/1043458.asp


Associated Press
Mary and Bob Schindler flank their daughter Terri on the day in 1984 that she married Michael Schiavo.

PINELLAS PARK, Fla. - Diane Meyer can recall only one time her best friend, the future Terri Schiavo, really got angry with her, and she remains haunted by that 1981 episode.

The recent high school graduates had just seen a television movie about Karen Ann Quinlan, who had been in a coma since collapsing six years earlier and was the subject of a bitter court battle over her parents' decision to take her off a respirator.

Meyer made a cruel joke about Quinlan, which set her friend off.

"She went down my throat about this joke, that it was inappropriate," Meyer said. She remembers her friend wondering how the doctors and lawyers could possibly know what Quinlan was feeling or what she would want.

"Where there's life," Meyer recalled her saying, "there's hope."

By contrast, Schiavo's husband, Michael, and members of his family have said Schiavo told them she would not want to be kept alive artificially if she were incapable of getting better.

She has not been fully conscious since collapsing in 1990 at age 26 from what doctors have said was a potassium imbalance that stopped her heart.

Theresa Marie Schindler had been born Dec. 3, 1963, into a well-to-do family in the Philadelphia suburbs. The oldest of three children, she was always shy and retiring.

Her mother, Mary, says the girl would spend hours in her room, arranging her more than 100 stuffed animals into a private zoo. Always heavy, she hated sports, except horseback riding, which fed her love for animals.

The girl never said anything about her weight, but her mother always sensed it bothered her.

"She cried a lot when she went to get clothes," Mary Schindler said.

He daughter didn't go to school dances, not even her senior prom. Instead, she and her friends would go to the movies. Meyer remembers they went to see "An Officer and a Gentleman" four times in one day.

She was a huge fan of the television show "Starsky and Hutch." Sue Pickwell figures she and Terri Schindler wrote hundreds of letters to co-star Paul Michael Glaser, and "I remember the excitement when they finally wrote back, or their people wrote back."

Father recalls a gullible girl

Terri Schindler was naive and somewhat gullible. When she couldn't get her Christmas tree to stand up straight one year, her father, Bob, told her to take it back to the lot and have them put it in the "tree straightener."

"She called me about an hour later and said, "What did you do to me? They all laughed at me.' "

She has always been very tenderhearted, especially when it came to animals.

She came home crying one night, saying she thought she had run over a rabbit or squirrel. Knowing she would be devastated if she saw the animal the next day, her brother Bobby went out and threw it in the bushes, then assured her he had found nothing.

In the girl's junior year, Mary Schindler took her to a doctor to ask about her weight, which had ballooned to more than 200 pounds on a 5-foot-3 frame. The doctor told her Terri would lose the weight when she was ready.

After graduation from Archbishop Wood Catholic School, she was ready. On a structured diet program, she initially got her weight down to 140 to 150 pounds.

College leads to romance

She enrolled in Bucks County Community College with the goal of working with animals, and there she met Michael Schiavo. Mary Schindler says her daughter went head over heels.

"It was the first guy who ever, ever paid any attention to her," she says.

Meyer says her friend talked about how gorgeous Schiavo was and how he was always telling her she was beautiful. He was the "Officer and a Gentleman" to a chubby girl who had lived vicariously through Danielle Steele romances, Meyer says.

After a little more than a year of dating, the two were married in 1984. Terri Schindler wrote to John Denver, her favorite entertainer, to ask him to sing at her wedding, but he never replied.

By a year later, Terri Schiavo had gained a little of her weight back. Meyer says her friend told her that Michael Schiavo had seen her high school graduation picture and warned her "if she ever got fat like that again he'd divorce her."

"I said, "He's probably kidding,' " Meyer said. "But it was upsetting to her."

Scott Schiavo, Michael's brother, says the Schindlers were the ones who rode Terri about her weight. He says her brother sometimes showed one of the woman's old driver's licenses for a laugh.

Friend airs talk of divorce

In 1986, the couple moved to Florida. Michael Schiavo managed restaurants, and his wife got a clerk's job at an insurance agency.

Jackie Rhodes, who worked and socialized with Terri Schiavo, says Michael Schiavo frequently called his wife at work and left her in tears. She says she and Terri Schiavo had discussed divorcing their husbands and moving in together.

But Scott Schiavo, Michael's brother, says he wasn't aware of any trouble in the marriage.

And when the couple went to his grandmother's funeral, Scott Schiavo says, Terri Schiavo told him she would not want to be put on a respirator, as the grandmother had been.

"Terri turned around and looked right in my eyes, and I can still see her sitting there on my left-
hand side," he recalled, repeating testimony he gave in court. " "If I'm gone, just let me go.' "

Bobby Schindler says his sister began talking about leaving Schiavo in 1989. "She said she wished she had the strength or the energy or the know-how to get a divorce," he said.

By this time, her weight had dropped below 120 pounds, and Mary Schindler says she confronted her daughter about it.

The reply: "I eat, Mom. I eat."

Potassium disorders and heart failure have been linked to anorexia, but family members say they do not think Terri Schiavo had a real eating disorder. Doctors never have been able to say with certainty what caused the collapse.

The day before she collapsed, Terri Schiavo had complained to her mother that she was having menstrual problems and that she wasn't satisfied with her doctor. Mary Schindler said they would get together after the weekend and find her a new one.

They never had the opportunity.

Terri Schiavo is 39 now, living in a hospice in Pinellas Park. After working so hard to come out of her shell, she spends most of her days alone in a single room.

She still has her "stuffies," only not as many as before. Just a couple of stuffed dogs and a pair of plush pumpkins her mother hung up for Halloween.

Her family says she laughs when they play John Denver for her and follows them with her eyes. Doctors say those are unconscious responses.

A special person, not a cause

Michael Schiavo, who has since become a registered nurse and has a daughter with his girlfriend, could not be reached to comment. But Scott Schiavo says his brother is merely trying to let Terri Schiavo die with dignity.

"When it sunk into Mike's head, Mike decided to stop being selfish. "I can't bring her back, and I've got to grant her wish,' " he said. "The bottom line is that Mike never wanted this to be a sideshow."

Her family and friends say they love her, too, and think she can get better with therapy. They are just as convinced that she would not want to be let go.

One thing they are sure of. She would not like all this attention and fuss over her. "She's not a cause," Meyer said. "She's a person. A very special person."