All this took several hours, with Terri still without food or water, but finally the tube was reinserted, and Terri received water that night, food the next morning.
Still, Michael and Felos were doing their best to torment us. Here’s Bobby:
“They were playing hide-and-seek with her. The feeding tube was reinserted at Morton Plant Hospital, and I went to see Terri right afterwards. She wasn’t there. They wouldn’t tell me where she was. I called Mom and Dad and said, ‘I don’t know where Terri is. They won’t tell me anything.’
“It was just harassment. I ran outside with Pat Anderson. There were press everywhere who had been waiting for Terri to come out. They didn’t know where she was, either. So Pat let Felos have it. ‘These people are tormenting this family,’ she said. And I added, ‘I don’t know where my sister is. I don’t know her condition. They won’t tell me anything.’
“Soon after that, they told us she was back at the hospice—so we went there to see her.”
To me, these bedevilments were minor. Happiness filled my heart like sweet nectar. Terri was being fed, and while Michael had barred us from seeing her at Morton Plant and forbade any of the staff from giving us any information whatsoever, we knew that for the moment she was safe.
The tube was reinserted the day before Bob’s birthday. It may have been the best present he ever received.
CHAPTER 18
Aftermath
There was little relief.
After Terri’s feeding tube had been reinserted, Dr. Hammesfahr took Bob aside. “This is a dangerous time,” he said. “You went through a severe crisis. But it’s often after the crisis that trouble comes.”
With my brother, Mikey, I took Bob to Hammesfahr’s office for an examination. Hammesfahr took his blood pressure and literally went white. “It’s off-the-wall,” he said. “I mean, completely off-the-wall.”
In our forty-two years of marriage, I couldn’t remember its ever being so high. Between them, Bob’s regular doctor and Dr. Hammesfahr managed to get it down, but he was inactive for a while, and my brother acted as his surrogate, especially escorting me to the hospice, where perhaps two dozen people remained to keep up a vigil for Terri.
Dr. Hammesfahr also told us what to look for when we visited Terri. “You have to find out if the time off the feeding tube affected her organs,” he said. “Liver and kidneys. Try to take her pulse to see if it’s steady, and find out if she’s urinating.”
But getting information from the hospice people was impossible. Never in all our dealings with them were they this mean, this ornery. So we didn’t know how she was tolerating her feeding, if the hydration was making her sick, if she’d suffered any internal damage. As Bob said, it was almost as if they were mad because they weren’t able to kill her.
But Suzanne was encouraged. “I thought Terri looked really good. She bounced back really quickly. Her face filled out. She was fine. And after that, we were more convinced than ever that she didn’t want to die. Not that there was ever a doubt, but we said to ourselves, You know what? This is Terri. Just fighting for everything she had. She was amazing. And healthy. That’s the thing that killed us when Michael kept on trying to end her life. She was healthy!”
We had the fear of God in us because we thought Michael would try, underhandedly, to kill her. I remembered the rushed feeding, the blankets and sweaters to make her sweat when she was getting no water, the order not to medicate, and vowed such tactics would never be used again. But that meant a family member had to be with Terri 24/7, obviously an impossibility, and my anxiety was overwhelming when Terri was alone.
“I was still trying to work,” Suzanne says, “and the idea of somebody not being with Terri was haunting me. I kept thinking, Oh, God, what if we go there and they’ve done something to her? The pressure was unbelievable at this point.”
“The stress got so bad that it even affected our family dynamic,” Bobby says. “Dad and I had a terrible fight, just screaming at each other as though we were enemies. I don’t remember what we were fighting about, just the fight itself. It shows how on edge we all were. The family might have crumbled if Mom hadn’t kept us together.”
Meanwhile, Felos was waging his own fight—to have the courts declare Terri’s Law unconstitutional—and our attorneys were uncertain what the courts would do. The suspense added to the pressure.
“Pat Anderson was telling us, ‘We don’t know how long we can keep Terri alive,’ because she believed the courts were against us,” Bob says. “We didn’t know if the stay was going to last a month, two months, a year, forever—we just didn’t know because Felos and his army of attorneys were doing everything they could to ramrod the system to act faster. Not knowing if Terri was going to be alive for long, the way the hospice was treating her and treating us, the media still hammering us for interviews—psychological torture. Here Terri was, reprieved, and it was just about the worst time for me in the whole affair.”
On December 3, 2003, some friends of ours threw a party to celebrate Terri’s fortieth birthday. They set up tables in front of the hospice and invited the fifty or so supporters who had kept up the vigil for Terri to attend. It was a lovely gesture, another reminder that in this world, good people outnumber the bad.
We gave slices of cake to the hospice nurses, not differentiating between those who’d been obstinate with us and those who were kind. Then the family went to Terri’s room, which I had decorated with cards and ribbons, and we hugged her and kissed her and sang “Happy Birthday.” Terri enjoyed it—so did we.
Terri had hardly aged at all. There was some gray in her hair, but her skin was still beautiful and young-looking. There were no squint lines around her eyes, no furrows in her forehead. Suzanne was amazed that she had more wrinkles than Terri did. But I wondered how many more birthdays lay ahead of her if Michael and Felos prevailed.
CHAPTER 19
Dark Doings
From the fall of 2003 to the summer of 2004, Governor Bush and his attorney, Ken Connor, worked on defending Terri’s Law, while Pat Anderson attempted not only to have Michael removed as Terri’s guardian but to take Terri’s case away from the Sixth Circuit and Judge Greer’s jurisdiction.
Professor Jay Wolfson at the University of South Florida was appointed as the new guardian ad litem mandated by Terri’s Law. But his report, saying there was value in conducting swallow therapy and continued testing for Terri, went nowhere: Felos claimed that Terri’s Law was unconstitutional and that Wolfson’s appointment was therefore inappropriate. Judge Greer turned down Pat’s motion to transfer the case to a different court. And on May 5, 2004, Judge Baird of the Sixth Circuit Judicial Court, without a trial, issued a summary judgment declaring that Terri’s Law was indeed unconstitutional, but withheld action until the Second District Court of Appeals could hear Governor Bush’s appeal.
I felt I was living in a parallel world, where a different language— legalese—spoke a set of incomprehensible rules. I felt no connection to this world, yet knew that Terri’s fate would be decided by those rules, and not by anything that governed my world, where humanity has less to do with law than with the heart. All I could do was care for and protect Terri as best I could, though it was becoming more and more difficult.
And Bob was worried because politicians on both sides were expressing opinions on the case, their often uneducated ideas duly reported in the media. If the case becomes a political issue between Republicans and Democrats, he said, the issue of Terri’s rehabilitation will be lost.
Woodside Hospice was undergoing a renovation, so in December 2003, Terri had to be moved, along with other patients, to the fourth floor of an assisted-living facility, Park Place in Clearwater.
Terri’s room was at the back of the building. You couldn’t see it from the main road—this to discourage crowds from gathering at the front. A policeman guarded her door at all times, and we had to show our ID and leave our cell phones and purses with the policeman. I felt like I was entering a max
imum security prison.1 Nobody was allowed to visit unless they were with us, so what was she being protected from? Her family?
Terri’s room was stark. It at least had a window that let in the sun, and I was able to decorate the room with pictures. But the staff was rude—and her care was appalling.
At Woodside Hospice, at least Terri was presentable. Her hair was combed, she wore a dress, she was clean. While the senior staff, nurses and administrators, were generally hostile, several of the certified nursing assistants went out of their way to be kind, both to us and to Terri; at Park Place, the CNAs were different. Terri looked like she had been discarded. Her hair never seemed to be washed. She wore terrible clothes supplied by the facility—that is, when they changed her out of her hospital gown at all. Sometimes they wouldn’t put her in her chair, but they didn’t know how to sit her up in bed, so she eventually developed bedsores and had to be taken back to Morton Plant. When she was in her chair, they moved it to a dark corner away from the window. Why? Because they didn’t want people looking in, they explained. Into a fourth-floor window at the rear!
For the past fourteen years, calling every day to ask about Terri’s condition was part of my routine. When Terri was at Sabal Palms and Palm Gardens, I’d often get a tidbit of information, at times enough to put my mind at ease. At Woodside Hospice, I’d call and get a polite “Sorry, I can’t tell you anything about your daughter.” But when I called Park Place asking for information, they were not as civil. I was given the runaround. It was like shouting into a void. It made me sick. Once, Terri was taken to Morton Plant because her feeding tube had fallen out. We found out about it only because we saw that Terri was still wearing the hospital bracelet on her wrist when she was back at Park Place. I had called that day as always and was told she was fine. Fine? She was at the hospital. Another time she experienced a bout of vomiting. I asked what had caused it. The staff told me they couldn’t give out information. Michael’s orders. His control at Park Place was as absolute as it was at Woodside.
In February 2004, Suzanne quit as a stockbroker for TD Waterhouse. “I felt like I was chained to my desk,” she told me. “There was just so much going on that I couldn’t handle my life. I was having anxiety attacks. I couldn’t breathe. Something had to go—my job.”
Bob had stopped working in 2000. Bobby was still teaching at Tampa Catholic. I was tempted to leave the Hallmark store but chose not to. For one thing, we needed the money; for another, I had flexible hours, letting me spend as much time as I wanted with Terri. Besides, the store was a refuge where I was able, briefly, to not worry about what was happening to Terri.
On one of his early visits, in January 2004, Bobby saw that one of Terri’s teeth was broken in half, and she was in pain. Years earlier Pat Anderson had brought up that Terri’s teeth were being neglected. Now her teeth were rotting, and Pat brought up the matter to Judge Greer to no avail. A short time later, Bobby ran into Terri’s doctor. “What’s going on with her teeth?” he asked. The doctor said he had contacted Michael about it. It wasn’t until April—April!—that we got a letter from Deborah Bushnell telling us that Terri had five teeth extracted.
Each day, we reported on Terri’s care on our Web site. People, outraged, started calling the Agency for Health Care Administration, and they sent investigators to Park Place. What happened? Nothing. They found Terri well groomed, her charts in good order.
It seemed that the facility had put on a facade for the inspectors. As soon as they left, Terri’s care reverted to warehousing. We were told that some of the nurses and administrators couldn’t understand that we didn’t want Terri to die. And those who had come over from the hospice resented the crowds we had drawn and the bloody nose the press gave them. One local radio station had been reporting accurate information about Terri almost daily. One morning, they had Pat Anderson on, and our lawyer lambasted the hospice and its cruel treatment of Terri. Suddenly, the station began broadcasting ads for the Hospice of the Florida Suncoast all day long. The reporting of Terri’s story continued, but the live interviews ceased.
George Felos’s tactics up to this time were underhanded, unscrupulous, and cruel. But what he did next—and Michael must have approved—was evil.
On the evening of March 29, a Monday, a local CBS reporter called Suzanne. “There was nothing particular going on with Terri,” she says. “It was quiet.
“‘Have you guys seen what’s coming over the wire?’ the reporter asked.
“‘No.’
“‘Mr. Felos sent out a press release accusing your mom and dad of harming Terri. Have you any comment?’
“I was stunned. ‘Gotta go,’ I mumbled, and hung up on him.”
Suzanne told us the news. We had no idea what “harm” Felos meant. Bob found out almost immediately.
“The CBS guy called me up,” Bob says. “Extremely friendly. Claimed not to be looking for an interview. ‘I just want you to know what’s going on. That you’re being accused of trying to inject Terri with some type of foreign substance. The implication is you’re trying to kill her.’”
The press release read as follows:
Schiavo Puncture Wounds Found after Parents’ Visit
Dunedin, Florida, March 29, 2004. Immediately after a forty-five minute visit from her parents, Theresa Schiavo was found by medical personnel to have been the victim of numerous wounds, five of them apparently caused by a hypodermic needle. Mrs. Schiavo was found in a disheveled state, with her feeding tube wrapped around her back, and an allergy band pulled up very tight on her arm like a tourniquet. On one arm were four fresh puncture wounds, with another fresh puncture wound on her other arm. Also found were fresh scratch wounds over the puncture wounds, as if an attempt were made to conceal the puncture wounds.
What appeared to be a purple needle cap was found in Mrs. Schiavo’s gown, confirming the belief that the puncture wounds were caused by a hypodermic needle. It is not known whether something was injected into Theresa Schiavo or fluids were withdrawn from her. Mrs. Schiavo has been taken to Morton Plant/Mease Hospital for toxicology testing and other blood work.
A forensics team had examined the crime scene, and the Clearwater police are investigating.
Mrs. Schiavo’s husband and guardian had issued orders stopping all persons visiting his wife until the police investigation is completed.
For more information, contact Felos & Felos, P.A.—(727) 736-1402
Rage is an inadequate word for my feelings. Years earlier, two of the Palm Gardens nurses had said in their affidavits that they believed Michael had injected Terri with an overdose of insulin; perhaps this was his way of getting back at them. More likely, it was another fabricated incident created solely to bar our visits, thereby stopping the flow of information about Terri’s medical abuse. Whatever, the insinuation that we had deliberately harmed her blindsided me. When a smear is so blatant, there is virtually no defense.
“Needle Marks on Schiavo’s Arm Prompt Investigation,” blared one headline. “5 Needle Marks Present Mystery. How, and Why, the Wounds Appeared on Schiavo’s Arms,” screamed another.
We called Pat. She said that she wished they had called her first, as a matter of courtesy.2
Instantly none of us, not even Bobby and Suzanne, who were not “under suspicion,” were allowed to see Terri. I had no idea how long we’d be prevented from visiting. A lie walled us off. I felt as if I had run into that wall. The injustice was so immense I could barely breathe.
A criminal lawyer, George Tragos, agreed to defend us. The next day, there was a knock on the door. Two detectives from the Clearwater Police Department stood outside. I invited them in and called Tragos, who asked to speak to Bob.
“Tell them to get out of your house,” he told Bob. “Don’t you or Mary open your mouth to them.”
Bob was very polite to the police. “My attorney says you should leave,” he said. “And we’re not allowed to answer any questions.” “Fine,” they said mildly, and left.
On
Wednesday, we met with the detectives in Tragos’s office. Bob and I were interviewed separately in Tragos’s presence. Both of us could only tell the truth: We had never, would never, inject Terri with anything. Yes, we had seen Terri on Monday, as we had on many Mondays. There was nothing special about the visit. Terri was the same as always. There was no elaboration, nothing to add.
Terri was released from the hospital that day. Every test came back clean. The doctor said that the marks on her arm were not fresh.3 Nevertheless, the investigation continued, and we were kept from Terri and she from us for over two months.
This was the first time in my life that I hadn’t seen one of my children for that length of time. Since we weren’t allowed in, I feared she wouldn’t be taken care of, and in fact she developed the bedsores that rehospitalized her. I pictured all sorts of calamities, imagined my girl lying helpless and ignored. I was sick to my stomach every day, barely able to function at work. She wasn’t being taken care of, and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. It was psychological and physical torment. It was hell. I prayed that she didn’t think we’d abandoned her.
The police report, issued after some sixty days, completely exonerated us. One of Michael’s lawyers, Deborah Bushnell, immediately questioned the report—we were still under suspicion, she said, and the ban on seeing Terri persisted, though we would be allowed in under supervision. (I’m not sure who the supervisor was supposed to be.) I would have been willing to accept the compromise, but Pat cautioned against it. She didn’t want it to seem that we needed supervision.
We went to court. Even here Bushnell argued that we were still a danger to Terri. But—a miracle!—Judge Greer ruled for us. I guess he didn’t want to contradict the unambiguous police report that said we were innocent.
From then on, whenever we visited Terri, we were hypervigilant. As we were getting ready to leave, we’d ask a nurse to check her carefully and made sure the police officer on duty heard her report. And the nurse would look her over: “Yes, she’s fine.”
A Life That Matters Page 16