Word: terries
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Much of the ammunition in the battle over Terri Schiavo's fate has been medical language that's fairly new in the public realm. The terms can mean one thing to experts and another thing entirely when wielded by passionate partisans in the debate. On the basis of interviews with specialists in the fields of neurology and palliative care, we offer answers to some of the most perplexing questions...
...DOES TERRI SCHIAVO OPEN HER EYES, BLINK AND APPEAR TO SMILE IN THE VIDEO HER PARENTS MADE? The most difficult thing to understand about a vegetative state is that it allows one to be awake but not aware. (In a coma, you are unresponsive and your eyes are closed.) Because the sleep-wake cycle and certain eye movements are not controlled by the cortex or the thalamus, they can continue without conscious awareness. Even acts of crying and smiling may be reflexive events that do not occur in response to specific stimuli...
...Robertson called the removal of her feeding tube "judicial murder," and House majority leader Tom DeLay described it as an "act of medical terrorism." Representative Christopher Shays of Connecticut, one of only five House Republicans to vote against Congress's emergency legislation throwing the Terri Schiavo case into the federal courts, declared that "this Republican Party of Lincoln has become a party of theocracy." Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry, acting as spokesman for the parents of the severely brain damaged woman and making even his counterparts on the conservative right wince in embarrassment, inveighed in a mass e-mailing that...
...holding strong beliefs about her right to live or die, passions were understandably running high. But as the endless barrage of inflammatory rhetoric and sometimes blatant posturing continued, the Florida woman at the center of the bitterly fought case seemed to have become a sideshow. "This is not about Terri Schiavo," says George Annas, chairman of the health law department at Boston University School of Public Health. "I think this is about abortion and stem cells. Congress wants to say that we need pro-life judges because the judiciary is out of control and favors death over life." Most Americans...
...wishes not to be kept alive in such an incapacitated state. She has been dependent on a feeding tube, though not a ventilator, and according to most medical experts, lacks a consciously functioning brain. Although Michael Schiavo and the Schindlers were initially united in seeking extensive treatment for Terri's condition, the two sides have been estranged since February 1993, when they apparently had a falling out over the $300,000 malpractice settlement that Michael won from Schiavo's gynecologist, who failed to detect the potassium imbalance that led to her collapse. (An additional $750,000 from the case...