Terri the Truth by Schiavo Michael & Hirsh Michael

Author:Schiavo, Michael & Hirsh, Michael
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Antenna Books
Published: 2015-03-18T16:00:00+00:00

12Now for Something Completely Different

The Schiavo-Schindler battle was a lot like the way soldiers describe combat: periods of total boredom punctuated by episodes of pure chaos. The winter of 2001 was the former, at least as far as the legal battles went. In late October the Second District Court of Appeals had ruled that five doctors were to examine Terri to determine if she might improve with new medical treatment, and I'd begun to adjust to the fact that nothing was going to happen quickly. My attorney was planning appeals to the State Supreme Court to try to stop the five-doctor exam, but that was an exercise in filing paperwork that didn't require my participation. As things turned out, it was going to be almost a year before we were back in court hearing from the doctors.

My relationship with Jodi was as solid as ever. What had begun in 1993 as two lost souls looking for friendship had grown into a marriage in everything but the eyes of the law. Early on, in accepting my situation with Terri, Jodi told me that she understood that it was possible for a man to love two women at the same time. And I was the luckiest man alive to have discovered that she really meant it.

Jodi knew I had a wife, and whether or not that changed did not matter to her. Let me be perfectly clear—that's not to say she was thrilled with the chaos. But she'd told me many times that the circumstances with Terri were what they were, and now that she loved me, she didn't have any right to change the rules. And that was it.

Jodi said, "Mike had a wife and her name was Terri. She came before me, and I knew that. That was just that. Not that there weren't issues here or there. Not like there wasn't anger. Sometimes I was mad at her, because I felt she did this to herself, and look at what she left Mike to deal with."

One of the things we were dealing with was the rumors that were spread about us. There was always a new one cropping up. One nurse in particular at Sabal Palms was one of the best at inventing stories. Years earlier in my relationship with Jodi, I'd heard her claim Jodi and I had a child with one more on the way. Others elaborated on the story, and claimed that I was paying child support for a secret daughter named Gina whom I'd had with another woman twelve years earlier. One of the nurses supporting the Schindlers even told a story that I'd brought this imaginary daughter to work in order to show her off.

By late 2001, we'd gone from the national trauma of the attacks on our country to the personal devastation of dealing with my dad's cancer to the discovery that Jodi's mom, Ellie, also had the disease. Perhaps it's too dramatic to say that these events compelled us to think about

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