A Life That Matters (15 page)

By now, Bob and I were positive that our healthy, blooming daughter had had neither bulimia nor a heart attack. Without our knowledge, several of our supporters petitioned the Department of Children and Families to investigate what she
had
suffered from, and the DCF assigned an investigator to the task. His report—kept confidential under DCF rules—was never revealed. When Pat Anderson subpoenaed him to appear in court and reveal his findings, Judge Greer stopped it cold.
¹

Bob and I both believed that Michael had done something bad to Terri the night she collapsed, but we had no evidence. We didn’t suspect he planned to harm her but had hurt her in one of his rages, causing her to fall. The lapse between the time Michael said Terri collapsed (somewhere between 4:30 and 5:00 a.m.) and the time the paramedics arrived (5:52, approximately six minutes after the 911 call, according to their log) leaves at the very least more than fifty minutes unaccounted for. We wonder what Michael was doing in that period. Trying to revive Terri by himself? Panicking because he had fought with his wife and she had collapsed? We don’t know, and will probably never know. We
do
know that Michael gave different versions of what happened that night, and this deepened our suspicions. If he had called 911 immediately, as he claims, why did Bob have to tell him to do it, and why was it almost an hour before the paramedics arrived?

The legal maneuvering continued. Pat petitioned Greer for another guardianship hearing attempting to remove Michael as guardian; Greer upheld Michael when he moved to prevent the hearing. Michael filed with the Florida Supreme Court to overturn the appellate court’s ruling requiring medical testing; the supreme court denied his motion. Our doctors produced a list of medical and neurological tests they wanted Terri to undergo; Judge Greer approved three of them, denied a dozen others. Judge Greer approved payment for Michael’s appointed doctors but denied payment for ours.

On October 2, 2002, nine days before the trial was to begin, Michael petitioned the court to authorize Terri’s “cremation upon her death.” Greer approved the petition.

I remember Bobby’s outrage. “It’s against our faith,” he cried. “And against Terri’s faith, and Michael knows that.”

Did he do it out of spite? we all wondered. And Bobby, in his misery, asked, “Or did he want to hide something he may have done to Terri the night she collapsed—something only flames could hide?”

His question remains unanswered.
²

Meanwhile, Felos mounted a campaign against Dr. Hammesfahr, the Nobel-candidate neurologist who was the first medical authority to say that Terri was not in a persistent vegetative state. Felos pointed out that Hammesfahr’s name was included on a Web site listing incompetent doctors, calling him Dr. Quack.

“It was terrible,” Bob says. “I had been to Hammesfahr’s office, and I’d seen some of the astonishing work he’d done with stroke patients. And here Felos is painting him like he’s insane. Dr. Hammesfahr has contributed more to humanity than most doctors could ever dream of doing.”

Nevertheless, we had faith that Judge Greer would see through Felos’s tactics.

The medical examinations were held over the summer prior to the October trial. Dr. Hammesfahr was one of our examining physicians, Dr. William Maxfield—chosen by Pat—the other. Michael’s doctors conducted the first examinations. One of them, Dr. Melvin Greer (no relation to the judge), spent at best twenty to thirty minutes with Terri. The other, Dr. Ronald Cranford, a right-to-die activist who calls himself Dr. Humane Death, spent an hour with her, examining and videotaping her.

During his examination, Dr. Cranford asked Terri to look at a balloon and to follow it with her eyes. “Good, Terri,” he said. “You see the balloon. You’re doing it. Good job.” He asked her to do other simple tasks, and each time complimented her. “Great, Terri. You hear what I’m saying. You’re following my orders.”

We
knew what she was capable of, for we had witnessed it many times before, but it thrilled me to see her react so clearly to a “hostile” doctor.

Judge Greer’s choice of doctor—the man ostensibly without bias, beholden to neither side—was Dr. Peter Bambakidis, who was to arrive in Tampa the same day Michael’s doctors examined Terri. He was supposed to get to the hospice somewhere around 4:00 p.m. Bob and I waited for him in Terri’s room. Felos and Michael were in the waiting room, stone-faced and silent. We must have waited an hour for Bambakidis to show, and when he didn’t, we went to the waiting room. Michael and Felos had left, so we went home. Perhaps Bambakidis would appear the next day.

“What happened,” Bob remembers with outrage, “was that Felos went to the airport to pick up Bambakidis and bring him to the hospital later that night, once we’d left and without our knowing about it.
Felos! Picking up the neutral doctor!

“Michael said that he arrived back at the hospice around 6:30 that evening and that Bambakidis arrived to observe Terri. Not only did they not videotape the session, but none of our family was there to see it. We had only the word of Felos and Michael that Bambakidis actually examined Terri.”

By contrast, Hammesfahr’s examination, witnessed by all, was thorough—and thrilling. Suzanne describes the session best:

“Hammesfahr spent the better part of three hours with Terri and videotaped it all. At first, he worked on Terri’s arms, which were contracted—he spent maybe a half hour working on one elbow, just massaging it with his hands. He got her to extend her arm, a hugely important feat on her part, because it meant that with therapy—the kind of therapy we’d been begging Michael to allow—Terri wouldn’t have to be shriveled up. Then he worked on the other arm, which didn’t extend completely, but most of the way.

“Then he told Terri to open her eyes really wide. This is one of the most powerful videotapes we have of Terri. People that have brain injuries like Terri, it takes them a little longer. They don’t respond immediately; it takes them a while to process the command. So you have to literally give them time to understand what they’re being asked to do, and then to respond. So he’s telling her, ‘Terri, open your eyes really wide.’ And he’s repeating the command and repeating the command. Then you see him watching her and saying, ‘Come on, Terri.’ And then you see Terri open her eyes really wide, almost leaning out of the chair. ‘Oh, that’s great!’ he says. I mean, she opened them so wide, like saucers. And it was, like, wow!

“Everybody was like ‘
Oh, my God. Look!
She just responded to him.’ It was such an effort for her, and yet she followed the command.”

Bob adds, “Then he had his hand on her leg and was pushing against it and telling her, ‘Terri, okay. Lift your leg.’ And while he was doing that, he was talking into the videotape, ‘I can feel her pushing against my hand.’ And she was! Which meant she can understand the command, and she was obeying his command to push against his hand.

“Then Dr. Maxfield examined her and put on some music. The videotape shows her reacting to the music by moving her body. It wasn’t as dramatic as her reaction to Dr. Hammesfahr’s commands, but it was striking all the same.”

Bobby summed up:

“Five doctors examined her. Only three of the doctors videotaped—our two doctors and Dr. Cranford. And in every one of the videotapes,
Terri reacted!
The two doctors who didn’t videotape her were Greer and Bambakidis? We had to go by their word. So when they testified in court, what do you think they said? ‘Terri did nothing. No reaction whatsoever.’ We couldn’t disprove their claim because they didn’t take videotapes of her. But I felt betrayed.”

After the doctors’ examinations, my fears lessened. After all, we now had visual proof that Terri wasn’t PVS. Even Michael would have to admit it. Even Felos!

Instead, Felos immediately tried to get Judge Greer to keep the videos away from the media. Which he did.

The media aren’t so easily put off. The local TV stations had their legal representatives in the courtroom, and one of them insisted that Greer had no legal right to deny his station access to the videotapes. Bob, who was there, remembers Greer’s face going red with anger, the two men shouting at each other. The media knew the law, and Greer couldn’t duck them.

He came back with a compromise. He wouldn’t release the videotapes to the TV stations, but if they wanted, they could televise off the courtroom monitors on which the tapes would be shown.

The first witness in the October 11, 2002, trial was Dr. Victor Gambone, Terri’s treating physician. Every time he was asked why he chose a particular course of treatment—or nontreatment—he answered that he was acting on Michael’s wishes. Pat went to Greer after Gambone had testified arguing that Michael should appear at the trial. For it was only Michael who could have answered Pat’s questions: Why wouldn’t he allow therapy? Why did he restrict our time with Terri? Why did he deny her antibiotics when she had her UTI? But Felos was determined that he not take the stand. Greer denied Pat’s request, and Michael stayed out of sight.

We were all convinced that Michael was avoiding questioning, but oh, how I wanted him to testify! His lawyer had referred to Terri as a vegetable, a houseplant—descriptions that stuck my heart like thorns. What would
Michael
say after he was shown the videotapes? How could he dismiss the evidence of his eyes?

Dr. Hammesfahr described his examination of Terri; how she responded to his physical therapy and to his commands. He stated she did not collapse from a heart attack.

Pat asked him what he thought she did collapse from.

Possibly from strangulation, he testified:

A
(Dr. Hammesfahr): Anoxic and hypoxic encephalopathies are characterized by multiple small strokes. So depending upon where that stroke is, is where your deficiency is. In your average stroke, the entire side of the body is affected. But in a hypoxic or anoxic episode, or cerebral palsy, you will see lots of different areas affected. And there may be another injury, a neck injury, which compounds her examination.

Q
(Pat Anderson): Compounds what, her condition?

A:
Her condition, yes. There is a neck injury. There may be spinal cord injury, also.

Q:
How were you able to determine a neck injury?

A:
By physical examination. On physical examination, she has several characteristics that are not typical of a stroke. First, she has very severe neck spasms. That’s typical of the body’s response, splinting the area to prevent injury to that area.

Q:
Splinting the area?

A:
Yeah. If you injure your arm, you will move it. Your muscles will contract around it to keep that area from moving. Her muscles around the neck are heavily contracted to help prevent movement around that area. Later on in the videotape, we actually show that it’s almost impossible for her to bend her neck. You can pick her entire body up off the bed just by putting pressure on the back of the neck area, which is not typical in brain injury patients but in neck injury patients. In addition, her sensory examination is nothing like a typical stroke patient or typical anoxic encephalopathy.

Q:
Are you experienced in treatment of patients with spinal cord injury?

A:
Yes, I am.

Q:
You said you had never felt a neck like that except for one other patient, right?

A:
Correct.

Q:
What was the cause of injury in the other patient?

A:
The person had an anoxic encephalous due to attempted strangulation.

A neck injury! Attempted strangulation!
We hadn’t known about it. Did this mean Michael had choked her?

Dr. Hammesfahr was on a “quack list,” Felos said; his nomination for the Nobel Prize had been withdrawn. But Hammesfahr’s was the most cogent explanation for Terri’s collapse, and we believed him.

Felos argued that the tapes showed Terri as
un
-responsive, that there were hours of video that showed her unmoved by anyone or anything around her. True enough. But as Pat stressed time and again, Florida law says that for a patient to be declared PVS, she must be shown to have
absolutely no interaction
with her environment. Ever. The tapes that showed Terri responding proved that there
was
interaction, at least some of the time. And that was all that was necessary.

Dr. Cranford, whose tapes we used to show Terri was not PVS, and who was so encouraging to Terri when he examined her at the hospice, had testified frequently in major right-to-die cases as a proponent for euthanasia. All we had seen in the videotapes, he told the court, were reflex actions.

Cranford’s testimony stunned me—it was as though he had said the sky wasn’t blue. Am I insane? I wondered. Is he seeing the same tape I am? Does he remember what went on in the hospice? From the tape, Pat had blown up a picture of Terri looking adoringly at me, which she kept on display in the courtroom—it was the picture that became famous nationwide. Cranford said there was no way Terri could recognize me. Her reaction was “an involuntary subcordal response.” He branded the picture as “cheap sensationalism—I’ve seen it done over and over again.” Pat was so disgusted she stopped questioning him.

I felt that he had dishonored my bond with my daughter. How
dare
he claim that Terri’s look of love, which she never gave to anyone else, was reflex? I wanted him to apologize to Terri and to me. He had taken something pure and covered it with mud.

Exactly a month after the end of the trial, Greer ruled against Terri. Once again we learned that the feeding tube was to be removed. The date set this time was January 3, 2003.

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.