8mm
Posted on 03/11/2007 7:40:49 PM PDT by EternalVigilance
Here's how forum works. I say what I say and you say what you say. You do not put words in my mouth thus because they aren't my words or my thinking. They are your words and your thinking. I don't care for them myself.
I would like to point out to anyone reading this that the offending passages quoted are indeed your words, not mine. Those interested in my thoughts should look at my own words, for recent instances, in posts 896, 892, 883, etc.
I have no idea - I haven't looked at the malpractice case. My only interest is the medical information, not the judicial.
Those were questions, not quotations. I hope you will answer them.
They weren't real questions. They were rhetorical baiting and take this form: "Do you believe this stupid, self-serving thing, then? Is this the idiotic conclusion you reach?"
Knock it off.
> What was it based on?
>> My only interest is the medical information, not the judicial.
It's a fascinating case and in a sense, it was all about medical information. There was a lot of testimony about Terri's condition and prognosis. For the duration of the 1992 trial, she was not in the "PVS" condition we heard so much about in recent years. In 1992, she was attested to be grievously hurt, yes, yet alert and precious and conscious enough to be rehabilitated to some degree. Of course later, when the lawyers were trying to kill her, they had a different story. Then she was a "house plant." (That's a quote from George Felos.)
Michael made a moving speech to the jury about how he loved her, he took his marriage vows seriously, and he would spend the rest of his life taking care of her. The jury questioned him about that and he said -- Yes yes yes, that is my only goal in life, just give me the money to do it.
Perhaps you can guess the next chapter :-) They did give him the money -- whereupon he stopped all therapy, warehoused her, and tried to kill her only a few months later by ordering the facility not to give her antibiotics for a UTI. (That is not speculation -- he admitted in sworn testimony that he was trying to kill her. He claimed he didn't know it was illegal.) Of course, the doctors overruled him and gave Terri the medicine.
Terri never got therapy again except for a few friendly nurses who did it on the sly, knowing it was against Michael's orders. The last five years of her life were in a hospice room with a shaded window. He wouldn't let her out and wouldn't even let her see the sun.
The malpractice charge (against two doctors) was failure to diagnosis the "bulimia" that allegedly caused Terri's "collapse." There was never any bulimia and Michael knew it (that has also showed up in other testimony of his). Dr. Thogmartin debunked the bulimia theory at length, as we have both read. This was the most interesting autopsy finding by far, in my opinion, because it marks the malpractice suit as completely fraudulent.
The "bulimia" theory was the invention of a trial lawyer named Gary Fox. It worked because there was no other theory to explain Terri's injuries. Nobody could refute it, and even if it couldn't be proven, a sympathetic jury wanted to take care of Terri. However, the lawsuit would have fallen apart if the defense had been given access to incriminating documents like the bone scan (which was hidden away until nearly a decade later). The scan, of course, provided an alternative and exculpatory explanation of Terri's injuries -- trauma. Obviously there would have been no malpractice.
The malpractice trial was therefore based on a fraudulent claim. Michael knew it was fraudulent. Dr. Thogmartin went through the testimony, as perhaps you noted, in concluding that the "bulimia theory" was false. If you will forgive a moment of legal talk, Michael was also a "fraud on the court" afterward because he did not use Terri's trust fund for the therapy for which it was awarded, and did not keep his promises to the jury to take care of her for the rest of his life. (The jury calculated something like 50 more years of life for her.) Civil rights attorney Wendy Murphy pointed out later that Judge Greer should never have given credence to claims from a man who was a demonstrable "fraud on the court."
Michael and his lawyers, with Judge Greer's ever-obliging consent, raided Terri's therapy award trust fund -- trust fund! -- for half a million dollars worth of legal help to put her to death. Michael stood to inherit anything left. He said there was nothing left but literally ran to court to claim it three hours after Terri died. It was like a bounty hunter collecting a big reward for a big kill.
So we wonder anew: what happened to Terri in the first place? How did she go from asleep in bed to dying on the hallway floor right after her husband came home late one Saturday night? Dr. Thogmartin's conclusion that it wasn't bulimia took away Michael's only alibi. There is no innocent explanation of her injuries. There is no other suspect but Michael Schiavo.
I have been asking how Terri, a healthy young woman, asleep in bed, ended up face down on a hallway floor, in cardiac arrest, unconscious and dying, late one Saturday night right after her husband got home from work. There is no innocent explanation for her injuries, which were severe. No natural cause for them was ever found. The one alibi her husband could offer -- a very, very, very bad one -- was ruled out in the autopsy report. So, Michael has no alibi. There is no other suspect.
Do we suspect foul play? Some of us definitely do.
I accept the word of the pathologist that they were once listed among the records. Chances are very good that he got that right.
We do not know what they showed or whether Dr. Thogmartin examined them. If they still exist, they are sealed from public view. We won't know anything until they are unsealed and made public.
>> I also accept that the pathologist reviewed the hospitalization records - he talks extensively about the initial hospitalization.
So have many, including me. (At your request, I told you how to search for the lab results, remember?) For example, a great number of the documents were published by Cheryl Ford, RN and Dr. J. E. Craddock in their book, OurFight4Terri. Dianna Lynne investigated extensively in her excellent book, Terri's Story: The Court-Ordered Death of an American Woman. There have been numerous articles as well. The literature at this point is very large.
We do not know what they showed
On the contrary - as the autopsy report says, "no fractures or trauma were reported or recorded." When x-rays are taken, they are read by the radiologist (and often by other doctors as well, particularly in the emergency room.) If the radiologist sees a fracture, you can bet it would be recorded. Medical records exist for a reason - to record what was found. The autopsy report tells us that no fractures were recorded. You can argue that the radiologist(s) missed the fractures on all the x-rays. But they were read and the results recorded, unless you think the autopsy report fabricated that. And now I really am out of here.
And there's the inevitable "if." What "if" means is that you don't know. You are guessing -- which, to be sure, is all anyone can do when we don't have anything tangible to work with. And a first-rate guess it is! I can agree with your guess, but two guesses, or a thousand, will not produce one fact. We still don't know anything. All "you can bet," therefore, is that we aren't going to know what is on those radiographs until we can see them.
Now, I have as much confidence in medical science as you do, doc, but we agree, from experience, that it is imperfect. We can both think of a dozen thing that COULD go wrong. We don't really KNOW that everything was just so at Humana, that everything we want to look at today was covered then, that everybody did exactly what the textbooks say to do, that nobody missed one little teeny detail, and so on. We are asking retrospective questions that were not raised at Humana and they primarily concern an area that was was not x-rayed at the time. (Actually, the lack of an x-ray at that point strongly suggests the docs in 1990 didn't suspect any injury at L1 and were concentrating their search elsewhere. It does seem an odd place to look for trouble in a patient with anoxic ischemic encephalopathy. But we don't know any of this either. Just a good guess :-) )
To answer today's questions with any certainty we need to see the original 1990 x-rays. Many people, including this forum, have asked again and again to see test results, unreleased medical records, x-rays, all the missing info. But Michael Schiavo has control of them if he hasn't already destroyed them. I fancy he will release them one day after pigs grow wings.
The bone scan tells us that one was recorded later, with correlative radiographs, in a place where Humana doctors did not look. Medical records exist for a reason - to record what was found.
But decidedly rare in bulimia nervosa where the patient, late at night, sound asleep, without purging, ends up on the hallway floor just about dead.
Story here:
God is good.
That I think is impossible to separate. The courts got involved with medical decisions. One example of many is that they ruled Terri could not have a MRI or a PET scan.
Another one that comes to mind quickly is that the judges decided medical decisions themselves by watching Terri's video tapes, and then made a cold calculation that she was not worthy of life.
Why would the rehap doctor send her in for a nuclear bone scan if all they needed was an x-ray? Also, didn't the medical examiner say that a lot of records were "lost and destroyed"?
"Before Treatment. After Treatment."
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Before Treatment.
.
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After Treatment.
This makes a very powerful statement.
What Mikey put on Terri's gravestone makes me want to vomit!
"If I didn't rule him out before, I have now"
I feel exactly the opposite. I now rule him in. Shows Mitt is a rational human being, not ruled by emotion.
For a guy courting the right-wing, this was a bad, bad move.
Depends on which section of the right wing you are courting. Lots of the right wing think the gov't had no business sticking its nose under the Schiavo tent.
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