A Life That Matters

by Terri's Family:

  “What happened,” Bob remembers with outrage, “was that Felos went to the airport to pick up Bambakidis and bring him to the hospital later that night, once we’d left and without our knowing about it. Felos! Picking up the neutral doctor!

  “Michael said that he arrived back at the hospice around 6:30 that evening and that Bambakidis arrived to observe Terri. Not only did they not videotape the session, but none of our family was there to see it. We had only the word of Felos and Michael that Bambakidis actually examined Terri.”

  By contrast, Hammesfahr’s examination, witnessed by all, was thorough—and thrilling. Suzanne describes the session best:

  “Hammesfahr spent the better part of three hours with Terri and videotaped it all. At first, he worked on Terri’s arms, which were contracted—he spent maybe a half hour working on one elbow, just massaging it with his hands. He got her to extend her arm, a hugely important feat on her part, because it meant that with therapy—the kind of therapy we’d been begging Michael to allow—Terri wouldn’t have to be shriveled up. Then he worked on the other arm, which didn’t extend completely, but most of the way.

  “Then he told Terri to open her eyes really wide. This is one of the most powerful videotapes we have of Terri. People that have brain injuries like Terri, it takes them a little longer. They don’t respond immediately; it takes them a while to process the command. So you have to literally give them time to understand what they’re being asked to do, and then to respond. So he’s telling her, ‘Terri, open your eyes really wide.’ And he’s repeating the command and repeating the command. Then you see him watching her and saying, ‘Come on, Terri.’ And then you see Terri open her eyes really wide, almost leaning out of the chair. ‘Oh, that’s great!’ he says. I mean, she opened them so wide, like saucers. And it was, like, wow!

  “Everybody was like ‘Oh, my God. Look! She just responded to him.’ It was such an effort for her, and yet she followed the command.”

  Bob adds, “Then he had his hand on her leg and was pushing against it and telling her, ‘Terri, okay. Lift your leg.’ And while he was doing that, he was talking into the videotape, ‘I can feel her pushing against my hand.’ And she was! Which meant she can understand the command, and she was obeying his command to push against his hand.

  “Then Dr. Maxfield examined her and put on some music. The videotape shows her reacting to the music by moving her body. It wasn’t as dramatic as her reaction to Dr. Hammesfahr’s commands, but it was striking all the same.”

  Bobby summed up:

  “Five doctors examined her. Only three of the doctors videotaped—our two doctors and Dr. Cranford. And in every one of the videotapes, Terri reacted! The two doctors who didn’t videotape her were Greer and Bambakidis? We had to go by their word. So when they testified in court, what do you think they said? ‘Terri did nothing. No reaction whatsoever.’ We couldn’t disprove their claim because they didn’t take videotapes of her. But I felt betrayed.”

  After the doctors’ examinations, my fears lessened. After all, we now had visual proof that Terri wasn’t PVS. Even Michael would have to admit it. Even Felos!

  Instead, Felos immediately tried to get Judge Greer to keep the videos away from the media. Which he did.

  The media aren’t so easily put off. The local TV stations had their legal representatives in the courtroom, and one of them insisted that Greer had no legal right to deny his station access to the videotapes. Bob, who was there, remembers Greer’s face going red with anger, the two men shouting at each other. The media knew the law, and Greer couldn’t duck them.

  He came back with a compromise. He wouldn’t release the videotapes to the TV stations, but if they wanted, they could televise off the courtroom monitors on which the tapes would be shown.

  The first witness in the October 11, 2002, trial was Dr. Victor Gambone, Terri’s treating physician. Every time he was asked why he chose a particular course of treatment—or nontreatment—he answered that he was acting on Michael’s wishes. Pat went to Greer after Gambone had testified arguing that Michael should appear at the trial. For it was only Michael who could have answered Pat’s questions: Why wouldn’t he allow therapy? Why did he restrict our time with Terri? Why did he deny her antibiotics when she had her UTI? But Felos was determined that he not take the stand. Greer denied Pat’s request, and Michael stayed out of sight.

  We were all convinced that Michael was avoiding questioning, but oh, how I wanted him to testify! His lawyer had referred to Terri as a vegetable, a houseplant—descriptions that stuck my heart like thorns. What would Michael say after he was shown the videotapes? How could he dismiss the evidence of his eyes?

  Dr. Hammesfahr described his examination of Terri; how she responded to his physical therapy and to his commands. He stated she did not collapse from a heart attack.

  Pat asked him what he thought she did collapse from.

  Possibly from strangulation, he testified:

  A (Dr. Hammesfahr): Anoxic and hypoxic encephalopathies are characterized by multiple small strokes. So depending upon where that stroke is, is where your deficiency is. In your average stroke, the entire side of the body is affected. But in a hypoxic or anoxic episode, or cerebral palsy, you will see lots of different areas affected. And there may be another injury, a neck injury, which compounds her examination.

  Q (Pat Anderson): Compounds what, her condition?

  A: Her condition, yes. There is a neck injury. There may be spinal cord injury, also.

  Q: How were you able to determine a neck injury?

  A: By physical examination. On physical examination, she has several characteristics that are not typical of a stroke. First, she has very severe neck spasms. That’s typical of the body’s response, splinting the area to prevent injury to that area.

  Q: Splinting the area?

  A: Yeah. If you injure your arm, you will move it. Your muscles will contract around it to keep that area from moving. Her muscles around the neck are heavily contracted to help prevent movement around that area. Later on in the videotape, we actually show that it’s almost impossible for her to bend her neck. You can pick her entire body up off the bed just by putting pressure on the back of the neck area, which is not typical in brain injury patients but in neck injury patients. In addition, her sensory examination is nothing like a typical stroke patient or typical anoxic encephalopathy.

  Q: Are you experienced in treatment of patients with spinal cord injury?

  A: Yes, I am.

  Q: You said you had never felt a neck like that except for one other patient, right?

  A: Correct.

  Q: What was the cause of injury in the other patient?

  A: The person had an anoxic encephalous due to attempted strangulation.

  A neck injury! Attempted strangulation! We hadn’t known about it. Did this mean Michael had choked her?

  Dr. Hammesfahr was on a “quack list,” Felos said; his nomination for the Nobel Prize had been withdrawn. But Hammesfahr’s was the most cogent explanation for Terri’s collapse, and we believed him.

  Felos argued that the tapes showed Terri as un-responsive, that there were hours of video that showed her unmoved by anyone or anything around her. True enough. But as Pat stressed time and again, Florida law says that for a patient to be declared PVS, she must be shown to have absolutely no interaction with her environment. Ever. The tapes that showed Terri responding proved that there was interaction, at least some of the time. And that was all that was necessary.

  Dr. Cranford, whose tapes we used to show Terri was not PVS, and who was so encouraging to Terri when he examined her at the hospice, had testified frequently in major right-to-die cases as a proponent for euthanasia. All we had seen in the videotapes, he told the court, were reflex actions.

  Cranford’s testimony stunned me—it was as though he had said the sky wasn’t blue. Am I insane? I wondered. Is he seeing the same tape I am? Does he remember what went on in the hospice? From the tape, Pat had blown up
a picture of Terri looking adoringly at me, which she kept on display in the courtroom—it was the picture that became famous nationwide. Cranford said there was no way Terri could recognize me. Her reaction was “an involuntary subcordal response.” He branded the picture as “cheap sensationalism—I’ve seen it done over and over again.” Pat was so disgusted she stopped questioning him.

  I felt that he had dishonored my bond with my daughter. How dare he claim that Terri’s look of love, which she never gave to anyone else, was reflex? I wanted him to apologize to Terri and to me. He had taken something pure and covered it with mud.

  Exactly a month after the end of the trial, Greer ruled against Terri. Once again we learned that the feeding tube was to be removed. The date set this time was January 3, 2003.

  Pat Anderson had expected this ruling. Over the course of the trial, she had come to believe that out of anger, humiliation, stubbornness—whatever—no amount of evidence would sway Judge Greer.3 He had conducted the hearing only because he had been ordered to by the appellate court, but he was going through the motions, she felt. This isn’t a case to determine whether she was PVS or not, Greer said in his ruling (though it patently was). This is a case to determine whether she can be helped by rehabilitation. He admitted that Terri showed “signs of cognizance,” but that they were not enough to prove Terri wasn’t PVS.

  It was clearly not a trial to determine what had caused Terri’s collapse. In her preparation, Pat had gone through thousands of pages of medical information and so must have initially missed the MediPlex bone scan, conducted in 1991, which showed bruises on Terri’s bones that indicated possible abuse, perhaps over a span of years. After the trial, however, haunted by Hammesfahr’s testimony that Terri might have been strangled, she asked two volunteer nurses to go through the records again. One of them, Eleanor Drechsel, discovered the bone scan in one of the boxes containing Terri’s medical records handed over to Pat by Michael’s attorneys.4

  Pat called us. “You’re not going to believe this. There was evidence that Terri might have had broken bones all over her body.”

  The news made me frantic. Had my daughter been the victim of ongoing marital abuse? Had she covered up marks as so many abused women do, and kept quiet about it? It was too much; I could not believe it was true.5

  Bob could. “In 1990, you and Michael were joined at the hip,” he told me. “You knew everything, supposedly. When I heard about the bone scan and the fact they’d found all those bruises, I figured that Schiavo was hiding the scan and the fact they’d found all those bruises. MediPlex might have hidden it if they were responsible for the bruises. If Michael had caused the bruises, however, then their silence helped him.”

  Before Judge Greer issued his ruling on the trial to determine if Terri was PVS, Pat filed a motion requesting time to investigate the recent evidence suggesting that Terri’s heart failure might have been caused by physical abuse.

  Her plea was passionate: “Look, the very person who’s trying to have her feeding tube removed—the very person who’s trying to kill her—might have put her in this condition in the first place.” She asked for a discovery period to find out what the bone scan was all about.

  Greer denied the motion. The evidence was interesting, he granted, but irrelevant to the question of whether Terri’s feeding tube should be removed.

  While Greer didn’t follow up on the possibility that Michael had abused Terri, the media did. “Do you think Michael did this to your sister?” they asked Bobby.

  “It is still undetermined what caused Terri’s collapse,” he said. “However, the growing amount of evidence suggests that something violent might have happened to Terri the night she collapsed. Surely the question calls for a thorough investigation.”

  The investigation has never been made.

  Pat would use the doctors’ hearing, particularly the videos of Terri, to build up a solid record so that we’d have the strongest possible case when we appealed. She was actually cheerful as the trial progressed. But I, more than any of my family, became gloomier, more depressed. How much hope do I have in me? I wondered. How many trials are there going to be?

  As it turned out, what changed our lives had less to do with the appeal than with the perception of the public. Forces I was only dimly aware of were beginning to emerge.

  CHAPTER 14

  Frustrations

  When the doctors’ trial started, we were struck by the fact that there were so many people, friends and strangers, on our side of the courtroom and so few on Michael’s. The reporters, who had taken up the story and whom Bobby recognized, sat on Michael’s side because there was no more room on ours. We would at least have emotional support, I thought, if not Greer’s.

  One of the most vocal supporters was Glenn Beck, who had left Florida for Philadelphia when his talk show went national. He set up shop at one of the restaurants across the street from the courthouse, and he sometimes came into the courtroom, the better to give his listeners an accurate picture of what was happening.

  When the videos came on, showing Terri responsive, I looked at Glenn. The audience was gasping, murmuring, turning to each other, weeping, cheering—the commotion was out of a Hollywood movie—but Glenn simply sat there, his eyes on a monitor, tears streaming down his face. He was crying—it seemed like he couldn’t stop. I looked at the monitor myself, and when I turned back to see him, he was gone, I suppose to tell his listeners what he had just seen. But I’ll never forget his tears and what they meant to me.

  We began to receive messages of support from across the country. We put the picture of Terri looking at me on our Web site, and the videos of Terri responding and interacting drew an emotional and passionate response.

  I was deeply touched by the public’s voice. It didn’t matter to many of those we heard from what Terri’s actual condition was, or to what extent she would recover. They simply understood a mother’s love and devotion. When I read the court transcripts today, I’m struck by how emotionless they are, how bloodless. I realize they are meant to be factual documents. The messages from the public showed the other side, the emotional side. The letter writers empathized with the pain in my soul; to them, the law was secondary.

  Nevertheless, it was in court that the battle for Terri’s life would go on.

  After a dizzying four months of motions and appeals, Greer’s ruling on the October doctors’ trial was scheduled for oral review by the appellate court. These were cruel days. As each decision came down, I felt tossed and turned by a whirlwind that would not stop blowing, one day encouraged, the next depressed, my mood dependent on the actions of lawyers and judges whose language I barely understood.

  Pat went into the appellate court on April 4 full of optimism. She had provided the appellate judges with CDs made from the doctors’ videotapes, which were clearer and had more definition than anything seen in Judge Greer’s courtroom, and she now expected a favorable verdict. The judges this time were Altenbernd (once again) and new arrivals Carolyn K. Fulmer and Thomas E. Stringer. Altenbernd looked like the king of the court when he walked in. His presence was ominous. If anything, he seemed angry.

  Our side, as usual, was packed with our supporters, Michael’s with few. Michael himself was there (he seldom came to the hearings and indeed showed up less and less as time went on) and more of the press. The national news services had picked up Terri’s story, and there were continuous pieces on local television, but the national networks were not yet interested.

  The judges sat down. “I viewed the videotapes of Theresa Schiavo and I didn’t see anything there,” Judge Altenbernd announced.

  I looked at Pat. She had melted like a snowman in the blazing sun. The courtroom went quiet. Pat didn’t know what to say, what to do.

  It’s peculiar, but I don’t remember my own emotions when Altenbernd said those devastating words. I had melted along with Pat, incapable of feeling, incapable of thought.

  The court criticized us for failing to provide ad
equate evidence for our argument, in particular why we hadn’t included testimony from Dr. Jacob Green, one of the neurologists who had sided with us earlier. This made Pat all the angrier because the only reason we didn’t was that Green had recently had hip replacement surgery and couldn’t make the trip.

  On June 6, 2003, the appellate court affirmed Judge Greer’s ruling.

  Two weeks later, Pat filed for a full appellate court hearing. Denied. But the court later granted Terri the thirty-day stay so Pat could appeal to the Florida Supreme Court. To do so, she would need new evidence, new facts. The court would not overturn the appellate court’s decision unless we had them.

  With time running out, we were forced into desperate measures.

  A year earlier, in 2002, Bob had learned of a Texas-based therapist, Dr. Joseph Champion, who was doing state-of-the-art speech therapy with patients like Terri.

  “One day I smuggled in an audiotape recorder and put Terri on the cell phone with him,” Bob remembers. “Terri talked to him. She wasn’t saying words, just making sounds—you couldn’t understand what she was saying.

  “All of a sudden I see Terri rise up and almost fall out of her chair. When I grabbed her and sat her back down, I took the phone and put the earplug in my ear.

  “‘What in the world did you say to Terri?’ I asked Dr. Champion.

  “‘I told her, if she doesn’t get out of her chair, they’re going to kill her.’

  “The reason I was making the tapes,” Bob went on, “was so I could get them to Pat’s paralegal, Tom Broderson. He’d make copies and send them out to speech therapists across the country.” Champion’s testimony wouldn’t have held as much weight, Pat told us, because the therapy he was practicing was experimental, less in the mainstream.

  One of the people Broderson sent the audiotapes to was Sara Green Mele, a speech/language therapist at the renowned Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, who wrote an affidavit saying that within a reasonable degree of clinical probability, Terri would be able to comprehend spoken language and follow one-step commands— if she were given appropriate therapy and training. Pat and Broderson also included information on Terri’s ability to swallow, and in her affidavit, Mele added that she thought Terri could do so—a vital piece of the growing evidence that contradicted the diagnosis of PVS.