When I close my eyes at night, all I can see is Terri’s face in front of me dying, starving to death. Please, someone out there, stop this cruelty. Stop the insanity. Please let my daughter live.
—MARY SCHINDLER1
Acurious thing happened the moment Terri’s feeding tube was withdrawn: I call it starvation spin control. As they had done twice before when Terri’s feeding tube had been removed, Michael Schiavo and George Felos worked overtime to put a happy face on this uncivilized practice. Eight days after Terri had been without food or water, Mr. Felos emerged from the hospice and gushed, ‘‘In all the years I’ve seen Mrs. Schiavo, I have never seen such a look of peace and beauty upon her.’’2
What was his implication? That Terri was better off being starved than being fed?
Michael, during an appearance on Nightline, glibly dismissed the notion that starvation is painful, saying, ‘‘That’s one of [the Schindlers’] soapboxes they’ve been on for a long time.’’
Soapboxes?
Then, in what can only be viewed as a desperate rationalization, Michael claimed, ‘‘This happens across the country every day.’’ Unfortunately, that is true. But what Mr. Schiavo and those who use that excuse fail to grasp is that medical treatment decisions made for patients do not make the practice of dehydrating and starving an otherwise healthy but disabled woman morally right. He quickly added, ‘‘Death through removing somebody’s nutrition is very painless.’’3 Anxious to lend their endorsement of this highly controversial, public starvation, the New York Times sided with Michael Schiavo’s efforts. Two ‘‘medical experts’’ were lined up to bolster their editorial position, namely, that withholding food and water ‘‘is relatively straightforward, and can cause little discomfort.’’4 How can the Times be so sure starvation is pain free? They cited a Dr. Linda Emanuel, who founded something called the Education for Physicians in End-of-Life Care Project at Northwestern University. Dr. Emanuel made a vague reference to ‘‘the data that is available’’ and concluded that starvation ‘‘is not a horrific thing at all.’’5 Really?
It might be interesting to test out her theory in Rwanda, Ethiopia, Sri Lanka, Uganda, or any one of the world’s impoverished lands ravaged by drought and famine. I’m sure those suffering with empty stomachs and parched lips would be astonished to hear that anyone could think their daily plight is not ‘‘horrific.’’
Adding insult to injury, the Times quoted a professor from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York as saying, ‘‘They generally slip into a peaceful coma. It’s very quiet, it’s very dignified—it’s very gentle.’’ Again, I’m fairly confident most compassionate persons would not call the photos of starving people around the globe—nor what we saw of Terri as her body shriveled away—‘‘dignified’’ or a ‘‘gentle’’ way to die.
Why, then, apply such disingenuous adjectives?
I believe there are dual purposes at work here.
First, the Times wanted to assuage our social conscience for what was being inflicted upon this disabled woman. In other words, if Americans could be convinced that Terri felt no discomfort, we might be willing to accept the barbaric method of her death. Which plays perfectly into one of their frightening positions: advancing the pro-euthanasia, or so-called ‘‘death with dignity’’ movement.
Whatever their motivation for running a ‘‘news’’ story that failed to introduce an opposing point of view, the question remains: Does starvation lead to a ‘‘painless’’ or ‘‘gentle death’’ as argued by the Times?
Dr. James H. Barnhill would think so. He’s the neurologist and ‘‘expert witness’’ used by attorney George Felos in this and other ‘‘right-to-die’’ cases. The first time Terri’s feeding tube was removed in 2001, Dr. Barnhill explained his belief that Terri felt no pain to Greta Van Susteren on CNN’s Burden of Proof:
| VAN SUSTEREN: | To the best of your medical knowledge, can she feel pain? |
| BARNHILL: | Not feel pain in the sense that she has consciousness of it, but react to pain in the sense that there are reflexes that will be provoked in response to pain. Similarly, if you step on a nail, you will move your foot before you have awareness that you have pain. |
| VAN SUSTEREN: | If you remove this feeding tube, in essence, she will starve to death. Is that a kind of pain that she could feel in her state? |
| BARNHILL: | Actually, she won’t starve to death. What will happen is there will be initially dehydration. There will be chemical changes in the electrolytes— the sodium, the potassium. And generally, death will ensue from complications related to the dehydration and the chemical imbalances before someone starves to death. |
| VAN SUSTEREN: | Okay, dehydration, I assume, is some level of pain to someone who is—I mean, unless you’re in a particular state. Is she likely to feel the discomfort from that? |
| BARNHILL: | No. As people dehydrate—and unfortunately I’ve seen this many times—they just kind of go to sleep. They become less conscious— or since she’s not conscious, that’s maybe not the right [word]—they’re less alert and gradually become unresponsive.6 |
You can almost feel Greta’s exhaustion from Dr. Barnhill’s verbal gymnastics after three attempts to get a direct answer. Perhaps a more credible—and certainly a more compelling—viewpoint would be to hear from someone who, like Terri, was once diagnosed as being without hope of recovery and who, like Terri, had experienced eight days without sustenance, but who differs from Terri in that she lived to tell about it.
I’m referring to the incredible testimony of Kate Adamson.
NOTHING BUT SHEER TORTURE
At age thirty-three, Kate Adamson, a remarkable, healthy young mother of two, was in the prime of her life. Without warning, a near-fatal and massive stroke left her categorically unresponsive. She was rushed to the hospital, placed on life support, a feeding tube, and a ventilator. After performing an emergency tracheotomy, her doctors gave Kate no hope of surviving. Her husband, Steven, disagreed. He insisted that his bride would recover despite seemingly impossible odds. In fact, a notation was made in Kate’s medical records suggesting Steven was delusional. Why?
Because he wouldn’t give up on Kate.
Completely paralyzed, Kate remained in the intensive care unit for approximately seventy days. Each day initially brought with it a contest of wills: Husband Steven valiantly fought for medical treatment. The hospital and the insurance company pushed to cut their losses. After all, she was nonresponsive, unable to communicate. Nothing would change that. Ever. But Steven refused to walk away and, instead, literally set aside his successful legal practice to remain at her side. Likewise, their church rallied behind them, providing an around-the-clock prayer vigil in the hospital waiting room as well as sacrificial help with meals and other obligations at home.
Several months passed.
Still no progress.
The doctors initially pressured Steven to let Kate die. They predicted— on the off chance that Kate should beat the one in a million odds of survival—she’d remain a vegetable hooked up to machinery for the next fifty years. Steven wasn’t buying what they were selling. His faith was unwavering. As he hovered close to pray over his comatose wife, something happened.
She wiggled the tip of one finger.
At first the nursing staff and doctors insisted Steven was just seeing what he wanted to see. Kate was incapable of responding, her doctors maintained. Incidentally, doctors told Terri Schiavo’s parents the same thing—that they were only imagining Terri’s responsiveness. (I saw it with my own eyes, and I know she was responsive, as did my colleague Barbara Weller.)
The medical team was completely baffled when, in time, Kate regained the ability to eat, speak, and walk. Today, Kate travels widely to address crowds of thousands with her inspirational message of hope. One of her opening statements is this: ‘‘The only difference between me and Terri Schiavo is I had a husband who loved me and wouldn’t give up on me.’’
As you might expect, Kate has deep feelings about the tug-of-war over Terri Schiavo. She should. Like Terri, Kate had been diagnosed as having no chance of recovery—let alone a meaningful life as a nationally acclaimed public speaker. Like Terri, at one point in her ordeal Kate had her feeding tube removed for eight days. What’s more, Kate reports that not only did she endure unspeakable pain, she was totally aware of everything going on around her.
In her book, Kate’s Journey: Triumph Over Adversity, Kate reveals what went through her mind while her doctors discussed her fate with husband, Steven:
I’m treated as if I’m a dead person already. Why are people talking in front of me as if I’m not here? I can hear and understand everything being said.7
Unfortunately, like Terri, Kate had no means of vocalizing her thoughts or wishes. Come to think of it, at least Terri was able to make her ‘‘lemon face’’ when anticipating the tickle of her dad’s mustache and cry when her mother left the room. Kate was paralyzed and had no outward contact with her world. She was ‘‘locked in,’’ utterly alone with her thoughts, her feelings, and her fears.
What about the question of pain?
Did Kate feel anything after the doctors suspended her nutrition? Was she thirsty? Did she crave food? Or are Michael Schiavo, George Felos, and the New York Times right when they claim starvation is a ‘‘painless,’’ ‘‘gentle’’ way to die? Here’s Kate’s exchange with Bill O’Reilly, host of The O’Reilly Factor:
| O’REILLY: | When they took the feeding tube out, what went through your mind? |
| ADAMSON: | When the feeding tube was turned off for eight days, I thought I was going insane. I was screaming out in my mind, ‘‘Don’t you know I need to eat?’’ And even up until that point, I had been having a bagful of Ensure as my nourishment that was going through the feeding tube. At that point, it sounded pretty good. I just wanted something. The fact that I had nothing, the hunger pains overrode every thought I had. |
| O’REILLY: | So you were feeling pain when they removed your tube? |
| ADAMSON: | Yes. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. To say that—especially when Michael [Schiavo] on national TV mentioned last week that it’s a pretty painless thing to have the feeding tube removed—it is the exact opposite. It was sheer torture, Bill. |
| O’REILLY: | It’s just amazing. |
| ADAMSON: | Sheer torture. . . .8 |
Why didn’t the New York Times invite Kate Adamson to weigh in on their article before perpetuating a myth? Why did Michael Schiavo feel compelled to discount the concerns and feelings of his in-laws about the inhumane treatment of their daughter—calling it one of their ‘‘little soapboxes’’? And why does George Felos, who is a learned man, continue to this day to misrepresent the reality of Terri’s suffering?
FELOS: ‘‘ SHE LOOKS BEAUTIFUL’’
To say that attorney George Felos has some unusual ideas about life, death, and making the transition from one world to the other would be an understatement. His cold, clinical view of Terri’s slow, torturous death and his ongoing efforts to put a positive spin on her unbearable pain can be traced back to his first right-to-die case, that of Estelle Browning.
Like Kate, Mrs. Browning suffered a stroke. In her case, she remained comatose or, as Mr. Felos described her, a ‘‘total care’’ patient for eighteen months. Here’s the complication. Although Mrs. Browning left an advance instruction declining a feeding tube, both the nursing home and the doctors in charge of her care insisted that the tube remain in place. The year was 1990. The Florida legislature had not yet declared that a feeding tube was ‘‘medical treatment,’’ which a patient could refuse. Removing the tube would have been illegal in 1990.
At that juncture a cousin of Mrs. Browning sought legal assistance from George Felos to use the courts to remove the feeding tube in a first-ever state ‘‘right to privacy’’ case to decline food and water. Felos agreed to take the case, with one condition: He wanted to visit Mrs. Browning first. In his book, Litigation As Spiritual Practice, Mr. Felos described his quest to understand what Mrs. Browning’s true wishes were in the matter. He writes:
I stared as far into her eyes as I could, hoping to sense some glimmer of understanding, some hint of awareness. The deeper I dove, the darker became the blue, until the blue became the black of some bottomless lake. ‘‘Mrs. Browning, do you want to die? . . . Do you want to die?’’—I near shouted as I continued to peer into her pools of strikingly beautiful but incognizant blue. It felt so eerie. Her eyes were wide open . . . but instead of the warmth of lucidity, they burned with the ice of expressionlessness.9
Oddly, he interrupted the poetic, trancelike narrative in order to spend almost an entire chapter vilifying the feeding tube as if it were a living, monstrous thing. He described this medically essential tool as nothing more than ‘‘a plastic sack half filled with sickly beige-looking fluid’’ that ‘‘snaked down’’ into Mrs. Browning’s stomach.
With great passion, he railed against the feeding tube as ‘‘an instrument to cruelly perpetuate, a painful, degrading, and horrific existence.’’ In his view, it was nothing more than ‘‘an unwelcome agent’’ artificially prolonging ‘‘the natural process of her death.’’
Mr. Felos then moved on to describe what he calls ‘‘soul speak’’— that’s the moment when his soul allegedly communicated through some mystical union with the soul of Mrs. Browning on an unseen, higher dimension. That encounter would forever change his life’s work. He writes at length about his unexpected brush with the spiritual realm:
As I continued to stay beside Mrs. Browning at her nursing home bed, I felt my mind relax and my weight sink into the ground. I began to feel lightheaded as I became more reposed. Although feeling like I could drift into sleep, I also experienced a sense of heightened awareness. As Mrs. Browning lay motionless before my gaze, I suddenly heard a loud, deep moan and scream and wondered if the nursing home personnel heard it and would respond to the unfortunate resident. In the next moment, as this cry of pain and torment continued, I realized it was Mrs. Browning.
I felt the midsection of my body open and noticed a strange quality to the light in the room. I sensed her soul in agony. As she screamed I heard her say, in confusion, ‘‘Why am I still here . . . Why am I here?’’ My soul touched hers and in some way I communicated that she was still locked in her body. I promised I would do everything in my power to gain the release her soul cried for.
With that, the screaming immediately stopped. I felt like I was back in my head again, the room resumed its normal appearance, and Mrs. Browning, as she had throughout this experience, lay silent.10
In case there might be any who find such a narrative a tad eccentric if not difficult to embrace, Mr. Felos adds:
My first thought shouted, Did this happen . . . did I imagine it?
Quite typical for the rational mind, wouldn’t you say? I knew without a doubt what had transpired was real.11
Are you beginning to understand where Mr. Felos is coming from? His belief system, which enables him to engage in such ‘‘soul speak,’’ is, by his own admission, rooted in an unorthodox blend of mysticism, Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, and a heavy sprinkling of yoga. Based upon this personal construct, he asserts that in ‘‘reality you have never been born and never can die.’’12 That view might explain why he is able to exhibit such a skilled, otherworldly detachment for the very real-world suffering and death of Terri.
It might also explain why he is now on a crusade to advance the right-to-die movement and views the death of Terri Schiavo as a satisfying accomplishment. As he would comment later in an address to fellow lawyers and judges in West Palm Beach, Florida, ‘‘She died a dignified and peaceful death. To the extent that the law was ultimately able to provide that for her, I’m very proud.’’13 Challenging Mr. Felos’s assessment that she didn’t suffer and that she died peacefully, Terri’s brother, Bobby Schindler, hit the nail on the head when he said, ‘‘This is heinous what’s happening . . . absolutely barbaric. If she is in fact dying so peacefully and easily, why not allow a camera in there to videotape it?’’14 I’ll tell you why. If the networks had broadcast even sixty seconds of Terri’s suffering, the public outcry would still be ringing in our ears today.
After a valiant fight against death, Terri’s body finally shut down on March 31, 2005, after thirteen days of dehydration and starvation. At that point George Felos displayed an amazing exercise in illogic. Approaching the swarm of cameras just outside the hospice, he spoke with a mortician’s unflappable monotone: ‘‘Patients don’t starve to death by removal of artificial nutrition and hydration.’’15 That’s true. They dehydrate first.
Now who’s on a soapbox?
Unshaken by Terri’s loss, Mr. Felos turned a corner in his thinking. He actually believes what was done to Terri has the support of the American people. He said, ‘‘In a world of conflict people crave peace and understanding. I’m gratified to receive the overwhelming support and heart-felt response to my message of healing.’’16 Let me ask you a question: How is depriving a person of food and water until they die a form of ‘‘healing’’?
Thankfully, his view isn’t very widely shared—yet.
FORCE - FEEDING FELONS
In the fall of 2002, the nation was gripped by a series of random, yet deadly, sniper attacks against innocent civilians in Washington, D.C., Maryland, and Virginia. With ten dead and three wounded, residents in the area held their breath wondering when the next senseless shots would claim another life.
A break in the case led to the capture and conviction of John Allen Muhammad, who had converted the trunk of a 1990 Chevrolet Caprice into a private shooting arcade. Each of his victims was murdered by a single .223-caliber bullet fired from a Bushmaster rifle. Muhammad, an expert marksman, pulled the trigger while his younger partner in terror, Lee Malvo, drove the car.
In 2003 Muhammad was convicted and sentenced to die for one of the shootings in Manassas, Virginia. He was then transferred to the Montgomery County jail in Maryland, where he remains incarcerated to face six additional murder charges. The case took an interesting turn, however, when Muhammad decided to stop eating.
Upset about the rules governing access to his legal files as well as his disapproval over the food served, Muhammad refused to eat or drink. That is, until Montgomery County Circuit Court Judge James L. Ryan stepped in and ordered the convicted sniper to be force-fed. Corrections officials warned that their prisoner was ‘‘in imminent danger of very serious bodily harm, including death, if he does not begin to receive nourishment within the next several days.’’17 Let’s not miss the irony.
In Florida, a judge ordered the starvation of Terri Schiavo, an innocent woman, who left no written instructions that she wanted to die that way. Meanwhile, a Maryland judge ordered the forced feeding of John Muhammad, a convicted murderer who had been sentenced to die, even though he was in full control of his faculties and had made it perfectly clear that he wanted to starve. Why didn’t the legal system protect his ‘‘right to die’’ in the same way that judges imposed this ‘‘right’’ on Terri?
Let’s set aside the absurdity of a legal system that permits this inexcusable paradox. Even if we really knew what Terri wanted, Florida law makes aiding and abetting a suicide a criminal action. Rather than starve Terri Schiavo, the state of Florida should have examined how New Jersey dealt with the intentional starvation of fellow humans. What would they have learned?
Read on.
HUNGRY FOR JUSTICE
In October of 2003 Bruce Jackson was nineteen years old but had the body weight of a seven-year-old child; he weighed just forty-five pounds. Measuring just four feet tall when authorities from New Jersey’s social services spotted him, Bruce was rummaging through a neighbor’s trash can for something to eat. Bruce and his three younger brothers had been adopted by a family who allegedly refused to feed them properly.
Bone thin and suffering from severe malnutrition, Michael, nine, weighed a mere twenty-three pounds. Brother Tyrone, ten, fared slightly better, weighing twenty-eight pounds. Their fourteen-year-old sibling Keith weighed forty pounds.18 All four children were taken into protective custody while the adoptive parents were charged with twenty-eight counts of aggravated assault and child endangerment. Published reports indicate that the children had frequently relied on a diet of uncooked pancake batter and discarded gypsum wallboard.
While the physical and mental damage is possibly irreversible, the state of New Jersey wants to make sure the Jackson brothers receive a fighting chance at survival. In September 2005 the state agreed to award $12.5 million19 out of the treasury for their rehabilitation, education, and care; Bruce Jackson will receive $5 million since he suffered the most damage. His brothers will net $2.5 million each.
Clearly, the state of New Jersey takes a dim view of starving people. If Terri had been abused by her parents in New Jersey, or if she had been a felon in Maryland, she never would have been allowed to be dehydrated and starved. This inconsistency demonstrates for me the uncomfortable irony of Terri’s case.