It was hard for me to look at Terri moving and understand
what is really going on. I am certainly no medical expert.
This article might help us all understand a little what the
husband feels.


Parts of an article from St. Pettersburg Times Tampa Bay:
It had compared Terri's case with other cases.
Brain scans show that parts of Schiavo's brain have atrophied and been replaced by spinal fluid. With such severe damage, Schiavo can't show the recovery that Scantlin has, said Dr. Michael Pulley, assistant professor of neurology at the University of Florida College of Medicine in Jacksonville.

"Those types of changes don't reverse," Pulley said. "If you lose big pieces of brain, regardless of what it is - trauma, stroke, surgery - it doesn't come back."

The only documented case of someone recovering from a permanent vegetative state came in the early 1980s, said Dr. Ronald Cranford, a neurology professor at the University of Minnesota Medical School who has examined Schiavo.

And in that case, the patient's scan showed no brain atrophy, Cranford said. "The one thing we learned from that, you look at shrinkage of the brain," he said. "Terri has massive shrinkage."

Schiavo also has more severe brain damage than two patients in a New York study published this month, Cranford said. In that study, the patients diagnosed as minimally conscious showed increased brain activity when they heard audiotapes of loved ones' voices.

Cranford said it's hard for people without neurological training to accept that people in a vegetative state can't recover and aren't aware of their surroundings. They sleep. They wake. They grimace.

"It's very hard, because when you look at Terri Schiavo, you can think she's interacting, but she's not," he said. "When you have loving, caring parents like the Schindlers, you just want to deny they're in a vegetative state. It's a terrible syndrome."

- Times researcher Kitty Bennett contributed to this report, which used information from the Associated Press, Kansas City Star, New York Daily News and People magazine.