Posted on 03/18/2005 10:22:14 PM PST by nickcarraway
TAMPA, Fla. - (KRT) - Two dark scenarios haunt Jay Wolfson even now, a year and a half after his brief appointment to be a neutral arbiter, a guardian, an unbiased observer, the one man asked by the state of Florida to stand in Terri Schiavo's shoes.
One is that the severely brain-damaged woman is in a terrible lightless place, aware of nothing but a yawning, endless hopelessness.
The other is that even though he never elicited a response from her, despite all the pleading and cajoling he did at her bedside, that he might have missed some subtle, nearly invisible signs that she was somewhere in there, aware.
"Imagine not having hope and being aware that's all you had was no hope. The horror. It's like not being, but knowing that you're not," said Wolfson recently in his Tampa-area office. "That's one thing. The other is, what if she's knocking on a door somewhere and I was walking through all the wrong corridors and I missed it. What if?"
Wolfson was appointed by a Florida court in the fall of 2003 to be Schiavo's guardian ad litem, or guardian at law, to deduce Schiavo's best interests and represent neither her husband nor her parents but Terri Schiavo herself.
This makes Wolfson one of the very few people to have spent extended time with Schiavo and gauged her level of awareness without having a vested interest at stake.
In the end, after long hours at Schiavo's bedside and after poring over 30,000 pages of legal documents, Wolfson concluded that Schiavo was indeed in a permanent vegetative state.
It wasn't the conclusion he'd hoped to make.
"You want to weigh in on life as opposed to death," Wolfson said. "You want some way to elicit a response."
Wolfson was appointed Schiavo's guardian after the Florida Legislature passed "Terri's Law" in 2003, a move that allowed doctors to reinsert her feeding tube, despite a judge's ruling that it should be removed. The law has since been struck down as unconstitutional.
Wolfson, who has a law degree and a PhD and is a distinguished service professor of public health and medicine at the University of South Florida, was asked to decide whether Schiavo's feeding tube should be removed and whether more tests should be done to assess her ability to swallow.
He scoured 13 years' worth of legal documents and extensively interviewed Schiavo's husband, Michael, and her parents, Bob and Mary Schindler. His time with Schiavo was spent trying to determine whether she was aware of and interactive with the world.
At first, walking into Schiavo's room, he was struck by her presence, even though he knew in advance that she drifted between wakefulness and sleep.
"She's a person, like you or I, and the first disconcerting part is that she's awake," said Wolfson.
When awake, Schiavo's eyes rolled about the room. She made random noises that sounded like groaning or the start of a laugh or cry.
But court documents said Schiavo's cerebral cortex, where reason and emotions are housed, had degenerated to fluid. So Wolfson set about trying to determine whether Schiavo's noises and jerks were merely reflexive or if they indicated something more.
He played Elton John CDs for her, and Bach and Mozart and music from the late 1980s, when she was in her 20s, prior to her collapse. He held her hands, squeezing them, and stroked her hair and face.
He put his face close to hers and tried to make eye contact, pleading desperately, trying to will her into giving him any kind of sign.
"I would beg her, `Please, Terri, help me,'" he said. "You want to believe there's some connection. You hope she's going to sit up and bed and say, `Hey, I'm really here, but don't tell anybody.' Or, `I'm really here, tell everybody!'"
But Schiavo never made eye contact. When Wolfson visited her when her parents were there, she never made eye contact with them either, he said. And for all of Wolfson's pleadings and coaxing, he never got what he most wanted: a sign.
"I felt like there was something distinctive about whoever Terri is," said Wolfson. "But I was not clear that it was there, inside the vessel."
Wolfson was dismayed to learn Friday that Barbara Weller, an attorney for the Schindlers, claimed that Schiavo tried to speak. "Terri does not speak," he said. "To claim otherwise reduces her to a fiction."
One thing Wolfson never doubted was that for all their intense, mutual antagonism, both Michael Schiavo and Terri's parents love and adore her.
She was cared for incredibly well, Wolfson said. Her hair was always combed, and after 15 years of being incapacitated, she never developed a bedsore. In fact, Wolfson said until about seven years ago, Michael Schiavo had Terry's makeup and hair done regularly, and her clothes changed every day - to the point that hospice staff protested that he was being overly demanding about her care.
Also, Wolfson concluded, Schiavo would never have tolerated the enormous, "omnipresent" acrimony between her husband and parents.
In the 38-page report he wrote afterwards, Wolfson said the best decision for Schiavo could be made only if both sides agreed to fresh, independent medical testing. If the new testing showed she couldn't swallow on her own and that Schiavo had no hope for improvement, then the feeding tube should be pulled.
Both parties were on the verge of agreeing to these new conditions, Wolfson said, but once the Florida Supreme Court struck down Terri's Law his efforts were moot.
Wolfson still refuses to give his personal opinion on whether Terri's feeding tube should or should not have been pulled.
But he will say, as a parent of three sons, that after doing everything one can, sometimes the time comes to let go.
"When it evolves beyond that person into issues that are other people's issues or are broader issues, it becomes less objectifiable," said Wolfson. "It's hard to be objective anyway. This is the kind of thing you don't wish on anybody."
ping
If I end up in the hospital, don't call this guy, ok?
This is utter nonsense.
This sort of meaningless hyperbole passes for information.
Video List
Terri laughing with dad
Videos don't lie, and they are publicly available for anyone to see.
Sounds like she was sedated when he came to visit.
He might be. But it seems the reporterette slanted it this way too.
That's too easy an answer--from what I've seen, she has had no consistent behavior. I don't see who would have drugged her for his visits, when they'd have the opportunity, or why.
Like many on either side of this case, he seems like an opportunist. In our Oprah Nation so many people think stories that are about other people are really about them.
If I am in a hospital, I never want these demons of death to come and visit me. I changed my living will to make more clear that I would not want to be starved to death under any conditions. I feel that a swift bullet to the head would be much kinder. I feel that Michael Schiavo is a man like Scott Peterson, who wanted rid of his wife.
I agree with your position; it's my choice to decide when I go in such a circumstance. A husband who refused the full spectrum of treatments for his wife isn't the person I want making such decisions for her.
This case is riddled with self-centeredness. Michael's words of Friday morning "I just want to get this behind me." Never mind the welfare and comfort of the woman he's starving.
It is riddled with self-righteousness too: the line of argumentation that says "She must be in awful pain"; or, "That must be a hellish existence." Clearly, many in this group have never been around severly learning disabled, the mentally retarded, or brain-damaged people. They are very special folks, and vary widely. They have feelings, pains and pleasure, just like we do. They are people, just like us. They are us.
Jesus said "Whatsoever you do unto the least of these, you do it unto me." Pilate expressed some regret, and maybe even anguish, at his decision to put Christ to death. Pilate still committed a horrific act, albeit according to God's will. Wolfson sounds very much like Pontius Pilate.
Wolfson's a liar who WANTS Terri DEAD. He says he's NOT going to give his opinion about Terri's feeding tube being removed and then proceeds to do precisely that.
What? How dare someone post the views of an independent guardian on FR? Wolfson will rot in hell for even thinking to counter the collective wisdom of FR. AM...Pull this post!
Who would do this?
For what reason?
Michael might want it done but he can't do it so he asked the folks at hospice to do it for him?
And why on earth would they honor such a request?
Is this guardian ad litem just one more to be added to the long list of conspirators in this culture of death that we are all living in?
He reminds me of "Bib Sugar," the guy who fires Jerry Maguire in that movie; when firing Maguire he doesn't apologize but says to the guy he's firing "How about thinking about the position you put ME in? Stop being so self-centered" (or words to that affect).
Like jurors in certain cases, some of these people need to forget this isn't just an opportunity for them to have A Moment.
The one person that could actually help Terri and she plays the vegetable just to spite him?
Or the people at hospice drug her so she can respond because they want her dead?
Or her husband or someone working for him come in and drug her so she can't respond?
I can't make any sense of this.
You're obviously angry, but the videos of Terri tell a very different story from Wolfson's.
Don't rule out sedation. And, following this since 2003, I do remember some dismay from Terri's supporters when Wolfson was appointed instead of another guardian.
By who and for what reason?
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