Posted on 03/19/2005 9:18:52 AM PST by EveningStar
Wolfson's report is based on court files, depositions, medical records and interviews with everyone involved.
That said, I begin with the most explosive allegation:
Did Michael try to kill Terri?
Wolfson laughs. "No!"
-----
Wolfson's report states that in the four years after her collapse, Michael "had insistently held to the premise that Theresa could recover and the evidence is incontrovertible that he gave his heart and soul to her treatment and care . . . In late autumn of 1990, following months of therapy and testing and formal diagnoses of persistent vegetative state with no evidence of improvement, Michael took Theresa to California, where she received an experimental thalamic stimulator implant in her brain. Michael remained in California caring for Theresa during a period of several months."
Says Wolfson now: "Michael was adoring of her. One nursing home complained he was hostile and abusive of the staff in championing her care. She was immaculately kept. In 13 years, she never had one bedsore."
(Excerpt) Read more at orlandosentinel.com ...
Just posted what I read at NR, and I trust them. They're not going to lie about this. I'm conflicted about this too, somewhat because while it may seem an isolated incident, it has the power to set a mighty precedent which can and will be used against those who have no advocate for their life. It's a very dangerous road to go down, IMO.
You are wrong.
You do a diservice to your cause by posting unsustantiated rumor and stating it to be fact.
The fact is more than HALF of that money went to her care, the rest is unaccounted for as of now.
A CAT scan is worthless in diagnosing brain damage because the resolution is not clear enough.Terri should have already had an MRI done to examine her brain in detail.
How does Wolfson know that Michael Schiavo didn't try to kill Terri? And he finds it amusing, even laughs about it? Does anyone know if he is related to Lester Wolfson?</p>
I thought her best friend's name was Joan, but as I mentioned it was a month or so ago that I read the court testimony.
There is an accounting. It's been posted a million times here. It went mostly to lawyers.
'Enemy' is a specialized term that is used in a political sense. The bigamous husband should not be seen as the enemy, because he is not in opposition to the State but is actually using the processes and institutions of the State in an ordinary way.
The concept of justice; the rule of law; God, Honor, Country on these our country was founded. No one is above the law.
Except Judge Greer.
The judge decided years ago that Terri should die, her life was not worth living, she stood between her husband and happiness, her husband and prosperity. She should have the decency to get out of his life. That is what she would have wanted. After all, we have his word for that. The judge relied on "expert" testimony from the foremost expert in the field, Dr. Death, a man who never met a sentient being.
If you believe them, the Governor of the Great State of Florida, the President of the United States, the Senate Majority Leader and the Speaker of the House are all powerless in the face of some mindless appointed judge in Florida. They can do nothing to keep a clearly innocent lady from being publicly murdered in a cruel and certainly unusual manner. Criminals convicted of the most heinous and despicable murders have rights to almost endless appeal and can be pardoned. Innocent people in the way of a scumbag have no right, no recourse.
According to the talking heads, Terri's fate is in the hands of her "husband", a man living in adultery with another woman, fathering bastards. Perhaps the world would be a better place if her "husband" were separated from his hands. Seems like they do that in countries ruled by the religion of peace, so it should be okay with the left.
Be left with this thought, if the Governor of the Great State of Florida, the President of the United States, the Senate Majority Leader and the Speaker of the House are really all powerless in the face of some mindless appointed judge in Florida, do you want to give up your right to keep and bear arms?
I am assuming Michael will soon unlist his phone number due to the barrage of hate calls he is probably getting.
God help me if anyone tries to keep me alive in that condition. And God help them, I might add. What nobody wants to talk about is WHY the rift between Michael and the Schindlers, who actually lived together for the first four years of so. Do you want to know why? MONEY. The Schindlers were mad they didn't get any.
If you will read my post to you about this matter carefully, you will see that I said at the end of the article there is a web site named where you can read court testimony.
This article was posted in February. At that time, the web site mentioned worked. This morning I could not get the web site to work. Perhaps you can.
yeah, so much for till death do us part...
or maybe he wants her to die so he can marry his new quasi-wife!
Boy, that's for sure!
Indeed. Thanks for injecting some sanity into this discussion, Howlin, Peach, et al.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1365979/posts
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."
Care to elaborate?
NOT proven. No one KNOWS what happened to Terri. NOT EVEN YOU!
Banner on FNC says Senate to reconvene at 5:00 to discuss Terri. Don't know if that's today?
I certainly take issue with the term kill, but if you must use it, use it with more class.
Last I heard, there was about 50k left in the trust. Terry is on the indigent care list at the hospice and that means the state is already beginning to front her medical care.
Michael Shiavo has very likely preplanned all the funeral costs, just as I would have, and have in my own case.
Other than that, I have no clue what you are trying to say....
The funeral will somehow tell us what???????????
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