Simon and Garfunkel
Die-man and Starving's-fun-shill
Posted on 04/06/2005 5:03:58 AM PDT by johnny7
I spent much of last Thursday trying to sort out my feelings about the death of Terri Schiavo. Had I been her mother I would have done my utmost to preserve my daughter's life, just as Mary Schindler did. I would have fought the doctors and the courts and Terri's husband, Michael. I would have railed and screamed and prayed. To watch your precious daughter die by starvation is far more painful than accepting your own mortality: this is a child you have nurtured and played with and shepherded through the turbulence of teenhood and dressed in a wedding gown.
Had I been her husband, Michael, I would have found it equally painful to watch my beautiful wife descend into a form of torpor and to remain in this state for 15 years. Michael has been vilified for starting a relationship with another woman and having children with her. But for the first years of Terri's hospitalization he did his utmost to seek special therapies for her; he bought her comfortable, stylish clothing so she would look her best; he enrolled in nursing school so he could understand the complexities of her medical care. I can't judge him for entering another relationship. He was a young man; he wanted children. Why he didn't divorce Terri, I don't know. Clearly he still felt responsible for her.
The reasons for Terri's death, however, go beyond the removal of a feeding tube and family and court battles. They go beyond medical ethics and religion. Terri suffered from an eating disorder that led to dangerously low potassium levels that led to cardiac arrest. Her brain was not fed with enough oxygen and this led to severe damage to her cerebral cortex, the seat of reason and emotion. She lapsed into a vegetative state. Her brain could make her heart beat but it couldn't make her sensible to her surroundings. Terri had been an overweight teenager, at one point weighing 250 pounds. Didn't her loving parents worry when they saw their daughter shrink to 110 pounds? Didn't her husband notice she ate very little and purged after meals? Did her family or her friends question her extreme eating habits?
It is likely Terri was complimented by how terrific she looked and this would have encouraged her to continue to deprive her body of food. It is true the bloated features in her high school class picture had been transformed; the bulimia had allowed her to become a delicate beauty. She resembled the young Elizabeth Taylor. Her weight loss was validated, at a horrible cost. Terri Schiavo's case, like that of singer Karen Carpenter who died of anorexia, is an excruciating reminder to parents to be vigilant about their children's eating habits -- even if those children are young adults and tell us to mind our own business. We need to persist in helping them. According to the National Eating Disorders Association, "anorexia and bulimia affect nearly 10 million women and 1 million men (primarily teens and young adults)." That is a huge number of our children.
If Terri's parents or her husband or her family doctor had stopped for a moment and wondered about her swanlike transformation, maybe she never would have suffered that cardiac arrest and lapsed into catatonia. But our society admires thinness -- the Rubenesque Marilyn Monroe likely would be considered too plump these days -- and so some of our children, in the quest to look attractive, may starve themselves. Even to their death. That is what Terri Schiavo's story has communicated so clearly.
Her husband said under oath that she did not suffer from a eating disorder, early in the trial.
Shorten your nomer to just 'Aleck'.
Do you now? Inside and out?
Well if you want to shift what appears to be MURDER to death-by-bulemia, then you should answer the following (but won't, as you ignored the previous post)
What are the cause of bulemia?
What electrolyte disorders (and range of kalemia) result
from the range of bulemias?
And please tell us FReepers whether your information is from your interviews
or standard medical/surgical literature.
Let the Furies descend.
:-)
Let'em squirm!
Die-man and Starving's-fun-shill
My co-worker's daughter has an eating disorder. It's supposed to be hell on your bones. If Terri had an ED bad enough to bring on a heart attack (and that's a BIG IF), then it's plausible it could have weakened her bones as well.
All the binge foods and sticky toilet seats. Long trips to the bathroom. My sister was 5'6" and down to 85 lbs and could still point out how fat her forearms were.
The irony was, I was the fat sister. From age 7 to 16 I was taken from one doc to the next and put on all kinds of meds to make me lose weight (none worked). Once I understood what my sister was doing, I even tried..but couldn't develope bulemia (by the Grace of God). It's always been curious to me that in a time period where society was aware of eating disorders, no one close to her caught on. Yet I also read that when Terri fell in her kitchen, Michael didn't attempt CPR, which even the untrained will attempt in an emergency.
Are you comparing Terri to a murderer? Why?
Terri ping! If anyone would like to be added to or removed from my Terri ping list, please let me know by FReepmail!
First of all, it's spelled bulimia, not bulemia.
Bulimia has its roots in psychological stressors. Superficially, a bulimic wants to lose weight because she or he thinks they're overweight. But it has deeper causes. In general, bulimics feel they have no control over their lives or their bodies. Or they have problem with feelings of anger and don't feel they can express it. On the outside, they are smiling and act perfect and can fool people for a long time - they present a picture that nothing is wrong. A woman who became the first person at my college to become a Rhodes Scholar was bulimic. Another woman I know did indeed die from being bulimic. She was 23.
The binge/purge cycle is addictive and it also becomes a weird way to manage anxiety and rage, and also to distract yourself from it. Ultimately, at some point, your life becomes all about getting the next "Fix" or binge/purge.
Some people also binge/purge through overuse of laxatives. That can really deplete you of potassium. There was an article in New York Magazine last year about a woman who took 100 laxatives a day and died from potassium deficiency.
Anyway, if you want to read more about it, just google "bulimia" (not "bulemia.")
One last point - if Michael Schiavo was as controlling as everyone says he was, it would make sense that Terri would become bulimic. Her body was the one thing he couldn't control. Also and I don't know if this is true- I read that he said if she ever got heavy again, he would leave her.
I'm not blaming Terri for her bulimia. I feel sympathy. It's a horrible horrible disease.
How about 1.3 million proofs?
Those statistics are amazing! While I've certainly known nice male nurses, I have noticed how some of them seem to turn into angels of death. Thanks for the info!
There's no particular reason to think she had an eating disorder, either -- at least not for some years. The reason for the "eating disorder" story is that it's about the only alibi available for the only suspect in a probable case of domestic violence.
And, please note that the bone scan reported "trauma," not bone disease. It wasn't from dieting, it was from brutal force.
Speaking from experience, when a woman takes on a husband (who values and equates "thinness" to "prettiness") she instantly took on (back then) housekeeping, cooking, grocery shopping, laundry, ironing, dishwashing, adjustment to a sex life and a husband's wishes in that department, AND a full-time job outside the home depending on how good a provider she had. All that is enough to make a woman lose weight and keep it off real easy. - Terri wasn't skinny when she married him. In fact, he seems to have been the only one who just happened to remember stuff about Terri years later, after the fact.
So her parents didn't know she was bulimic, her husband didn't know it either, or her friends, but the author of this piece of crap does??
And as Christine Hoff Sommers has pointed out in her books, bulimia death figures in the U.S. are completely cooked by politically correct feminists and their statisticians. Read Joyce Maynard's memoir "At Home in the World" (or Jane Fonda's new book) and see how she spent most of her life as a bulimic - without managing to drop dead of a heart attack.
Michael Schiavo, 1/2000 Direct Testimony: states bulemia was never proved see p 27. (large file)
Terri did not have a heart attack.
Michael's hired physician, Bambakidis, testified Terri never had heart attack
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