Neurologist says Terri Schiavo could eat orally if court allowed it

PINELLAS PARK (FBW)—A doctor close to the Terri Schiavo case told Florida Baptist Witness Mar. 19 Terri Schiavo, the 41-year-old disabled woman who lay inside Woodside Hospice could actually eat on her own if a judge had not also ruled she be denied food and water after her feeding tube was removed Mar. 18.

“The important thing for people to understand is that she can eat and swallow right now,” said William Hammesfahr, a neurologist who has examined Terri and is in many of the videos circulated through the news media showing Terri responsive and alert at times.

“They are truly withholding food from a person who is awake, alert, and can eat and swallow,” Hammesfahr said. After spending at least 10 hours with Terri several years ago, he told Sixth Circuit Court Judge George W. Greer Terri can improve with therapy.

Hammesfahr said his credibility had been questioned at the time, but he has since been vindicated in court and currently maintains a thriving private practice in Clearwater. He said he has never lost his license to practice medicine and is currently involved in litigation surrounding the ordeal. He was also nominated for a Nobel Prize for his work in the area of brain injury or stroke and considered a leader in the therapy of improving blood flow to the brain, resulting in measurable gains in patients, according to an area attorney who is familiar with the case.

Standing with a handful of supporters outside of the hospice late in the evening Mar. 19, Hammesfahr told the Witness Terri has previously swallowed pudding and daily swallows almost two liters of water by virtue of being able to process her own saliva and sinus drainage.

“That’s liquid and that’s the most difficult thing to swallow,” Hammesfahr said of her saliva. “If she can swallow that she can swallow food or pudding.”

Other doctors who testified before Judge Greer in 2003 had limited exposure to Terri and did not complete standard evaluations for brain injuries, Hammesfahr said. The court-appointed doctors maintained Terri is in a persistent vegetative state (PVS), with no chance for recovery.

“Terri’s not that bad,” Hammesfahr said. “She is like a child with cerebral palsy. She can speak. At least when I saw her, she would speak very slowly. She would sort of form words, she would move her arms and legs at command. She could understand questions in English.”

Hammesfahr said there are at least 50 physicians he knows of, in private practice and related to medical universities who have said Terri is not in a PVS or in a coma.

Terri Schiavo is the 41-year-old brain-damaged woman at the center of a debate over what some say is the most definitive case yet for legalized euthanasia in the United States.

Terri’s husband and legal guardian, Michael Schiavo, nearly a decade ago petitioned the court to halt the dispensing of nutrition and hydration through a feeding tube to his disabled, but otherwise healthy, wife.

In 1990 Terri suffered brain damage after her heart stopped. Her supporters and parents, Bob and Mary Schindler disagree and have said she could improve were she provided rehabilitation services. Michael Schiavo has refused to provide those services since about 1993, they say.

Although Michael Schiavo says his wife would want to die, no written request from Terri exists and only he and his relatives have testified saying she would not wish to live. Terri’s parents and supporters have cited a conflict of interest in an ongoing court challenge to his continued guardianship of their daughter on several points—one of which is that Michael has lived with his girlfriend, with whom he has fathered two children, for 10 years.

Sixth Circuit Judge George W. Greer ruled Feb. 25 that Terri’s nutrition and hydration be discontinued March 18, and in a flurry of decisions since that time also has ruled Terri cannot undergo more medical testing and cannot be fed by mouth. Greer also rebuffed a request by Florida’s Department of Children and Families for a 60-day stay of his motion to begin the starvation process, so that they could investigate allegations that Michael Schiavo has abused and neglected Terri.

Hammesfahr said that about 30 percent of his cases are more severe than is Terri’s, and whether it is his approach or another technique, Terri can most likely improve.

“You can get almost anybody with a brain injury or a stroke better,” said Hammesfahr. “I think that’s the long and short of it.

“It’s not that [Terri] deserves a chance, she deserves rehabilitation,” Hammesfahr continued. “She’s not going to get the rehabilitation if she gets killed off here.”

Each day that goes by there is the chance that Terri will actually end up in a coma, Hammesfahr said. Launching a person in Terri’s situation into a coma is the only way to avoid a painful death by starvation, he said, describing what happens to the human body when it is deprived of food and water.

“People who die of starvation, their acid eats through their stomach, they develop infections in their body, their body starts to dissolve from the inside out, they develop seizures, [and] frequently it breaks their back,” he said. “They have to have medications to essentially put them into a coma to not have their body break their back or something of that nature.”

Explaining that the process of putting someone in a coma after withholding nutrition and hydration is part of an “Exit Protocol” involving delivering powerful drugslike Morphine and Valium to the patient when they are expected to die. The danger for Terri is that if she is in a coma, she will not have the type of monitoring that could help her recover if the feeding tube is reinserted.

“Putting a person in coma is very dangerous,” Hammesfahr said, and after 7-8 days she might end up in an irreversible coma or with further brain damage.

Angel Watson, a Pinellas Park resident who works with the Caring and Sharing Center for Independent Living said she was considered to be in a PVS and has made remarkable improvements because of her strong will to live after a skiing accident which left her paralyzed. Referencing the two other times Terri’s feeding tube has been removed and surgically re-inserted, Watson said it is wrong to treat Terri as if she would not want to live or given a chance to improve.

Critical of Michael Schiavo’s insistence that he loves Terri and cares deeply for her, Watson said he’s had ample proof that she has a strong determination to live. “She’s the embodiment of a living will,” Watson said. “She is a living will. He’s tried to kill her twice and she has the will to live.

“What more could you possibly want?”