883 A first hand account

Tom Brodersen met Terri Schiavo, the brain injured woman whose husband is attempting to end her life by removing her feeding tube, in the fall of 2002. After reading his account of her abilities, I think I was wrong in saying her condition is the same as the church member with whom I volunteered for several years in a nursing home. She actually has a higher level of functioning and can respond to more stimuli than my friend who has been on a feeding tube since she was 18. Here’s Tom’s story.

“During the period of September to November 2002 I spent time with Terri Schiavo, as a person briefly on her visitors list. During that time I . . .sang to her, played music for her, and encouraged her to vocalize. Over the twenty days or so that I visited with Terri . . . she gradually warmed up to me.

Terri responds to a variety of stimuli, including responding to both her mother's and my voices, both in person and over the phone, by fixing her attention and frequently by laughing. When I sang to her, she often vocalized, in her best effort to sing along with me. She recognizes and takes great pleasure in certain singers and songs which are her favorites—most especially John Denver singing "Country Roads." She learned to love several songs I sang to her with which she didn't seem to be familiar with, but others she never learned to appreciate. . .

She responded to gentle requests if given time and patience, such as lifting her right leg (three times out of four requests, the other time she lifted her left leg instead). While she does not have consistent control over her eyes to blink or look this way or that, she has excellent control over her breathing, diaphragm and voice, and will vocalize in various patterns if asked. While trying to work out a yes/no system with sounds, Terri initially answered the question "Terri, are you ten feet tall" by moaning twice, which is the response for "No," then she spontaneously whispered the word "No" in response to the question "Terry, are you purple?"
At that point I abandoned the sounding system and started trying to teach her to say "Yeah" as best as she could. Bob Schindler has several recordings of her sort of saying the word "Yeah" shortly after that.”

That’s a lot of progress in just two months, isn’t it? Terri will never be a perfectly functioning worker or employee or wife or mother, able to meet the challenges of the world, but who among us is? Perfect, that is. Can you really be completely self-sufficient and require no help from anyone else to meet your daily needs? She is a human being who has a God given soul, and no one, not the state or her husband or public opinion or general apathy about the misfortune of others should end her life. She's one of the people in Matthew 25 we are specifically told to serve. And she's one of the people our Constitution says is protected by our legal system.