Dad’s Take on the Terri Schiavo Case
My Dad sent this. Hope he doesn’t mind if I blog it!
Terri Schiavo had a severe case of Bulemia. Maybe everyone knows this, but I sure didn’t. She had been an overweight teenager (5′-3″, 200lbs) and lost a lot of weight by becoming Bulemic and living on liquids much of the time. Not long before her ‘collapse’ 15 years ago, she went to a doctor for ammenorrhea. Her collapse followed a binge-purge episode and her heart apparently stopped from hypokalemia (low serum potassium from vomiting and or laxative abuse). In the malpractice suit, there was a $2 million malpractice payoff because the doctor didn’t diagnose her eating disorder – which she didn’t mention. Her husband didn’t know about it either. She has been in a vegetative state for 15 years with, in the most bizarre of ironies, a feeding tube. Her CAT Scan, shown above, shows massive brain damage, with cortical thinning between the extremely dilated ventricles and the skull.
What has all this been about? A parent’s wish to ‘feed’ her?
What an incredibly sad story, but it’s not the sad story that’s been all over our news…
I’m not sure why I’m forwarding this. It was just something of a shock that this has not been a part of the news stories, and it should have been. Karen Carpenter’s death in the late 70’s in similar circumstances jolted a lot of people who needed help into treatment.
