A Life That Matters by Terri's Family: & Robert Schindler

Author:Terri's Family: & Robert Schindler [SCHINDLER, MARY]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO000000
ISBN: 9780446555197
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2008-12-21T05:00:00+00:00

Pat Anderson had expected this ruling. Over the course of the trial, she had come to believe that out of anger, humiliation, stubbornness—whatever—no amount of evidence would sway Judge Greer.3 He had conducted the hearing only because he had been ordered to by the appellate court, but he was going through the motions, she felt. This isn’t a case to determine whether she was PVS or not, Greer said in his ruling (though it patently was). This is a case to determine whether she can be helped by rehabilitation. He admitted that Terri showed “signs of cognizance,” but that they were not enough to prove Terri wasn’t PVS.

It was clearly not a trial to determine what had caused Terri’s collapse. In her preparation, Pat had gone through thousands of pages of medical information and so must have initially missed the MediPlex bone scan, conducted in 1991, which showed bruises on Terri’s bones that indicated possible abuse, perhaps over a span of years. After the trial, however, haunted by Hammesfahr’s testimony that Terri might have been strangled, she asked two volunteer nurses to go through the records again. One of them, Eleanor Drechsel, discovered the bone scan in one of the boxes containing Terri’s medical records handed over to Pat by Michael’s attorneys.4

Pat called us. “You’re not going to believe this. There was evidence that Terri might have had broken bones all over her body.”

The news made me frantic. Had my daughter been the victim of ongoing marital abuse? Had she covered up marks as so many abused women do, and kept quiet about it? It was too much; I could not believe it was true.5

Bob could. “In 1990, you and Michael were joined at the hip,” he told me. “You knew everything, supposedly. When I heard about the bone scan and the fact they’d found all those bruises, I figured that Schiavo was hiding the scan and the fact they’d found all those bruises. MediPlex might have hidden it if they were responsible for the bruises. If Michael had caused the bruises, however, then their silence helped him.”

Before Judge Greer issued his ruling on the trial to determine if Terri was PVS, Pat filed a motion requesting time to investigate the recent evidence suggesting that Terri’s heart failure might have been caused by physical abuse.

Her plea was passionate: “Look, the very person who’s trying to have her feeding tube removed—the very person who’s trying to kill her—might have put her in this condition in the first place.” She asked for a discovery period to find out what the bone scan was all about.

Greer denied the motion. The evidence was interesting, he granted, but irrelevant to the question of whether Terri’s feeding tube should be removed.

While Greer didn’t follow up on the possibility that Michael had abused Terri, the media did. “Do you think Michael did this to your sister?” they asked Bobby.

“It is still undetermined what caused Terri’s collapse,” he said. “However, the growing amount of evidence suggests that something violent might have happened to Terri the night she collapsed.

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