Friday, March 25, 2005
CNN Plays "Let's Pretend"
Check out the transcript of the March 24, 2005 CNN "American Morning" interview with Kate Adamson.
Adamson is a woman who, though her medical case was completely different than
Terri Schiavo's (for one thing, unlike Terri Schiavo, her cerebral cortex wasn't destroyed due to lack of oxygen), was falsely presented during the interview with CNN's Bill Hemmer as a woman whose medical case was exactly like Terri Schiavo's:
ADAMSON: Well, I had a huge catastrophic experience just like Terri. You're looking at a woman who has had years of rehab. And I think that's the key point, getting the patient into rehab early.
The catastrophic experience Adamson refers to was a massive stroke that left her paralyzed, a situation conducive to rehabilitation. But all the rehab in the world is not going to regenerate Terri Schiavo's dead brain tissue, a fact Adamson and Hemmer fail to mention. They also fail to mention the one part where Terri Schiavo's case actually is just like Kate Adamson's: that Michael Schiavo had given Terri years of rehab as well, just like Adamson had. And he got Terri into rehab early and kept her there for four years, until her doctors finally told him that there was no living brain tissue to rehab. But I digress. Oh, and guess what? Adamson also had a feeding tube removed, "just like" Terri!
HEMMER: At one point your feeding tube was removed. First of all, why was it taken out, Kate? ADAMSON: Well, Bill, let me just back up here, because it was removed eventually when I was in rehab. But in those early days of the 70 days in ICU, 69 of those I was listed critical on life support. The feeding tube had been inserted without complete anesthesia. So I felt everything and was unable to cry out or communicate. I had to endure the pain. And then that feeding tube was turned off for eight days. So I literally went through the starvation. I'm lying there. My whole body was screaming out, feed me; do not let me starve. I do not want to die. I was clinging to everything. My husband was beside the bed.Oh, no! Just like Terri Schiavo! She could feel it all! Her evil money-grubbing husband just sat there-- oh, wait a minute:
ADAMSON: Now, the feeding tube was turned off because of my medical condition. My digestive system had basically shut down.So the reason the feeding tube was turned off was to save her life. A little different, wouldn't you say? Not according to Adamson!
HEMMER: Do you believe Terri Schiavo can recover out of her condition if that feeding tube is reinserted? ADAMSON: ...let me ask you this, OK? If you were in that state and you're cut off from sunlight and you don't have any no human contact, no radio, no TV, no one to stroke your hair and say it's going to be OK and tell you things are going to get better and praise you for every little thing you do, do you think you could get better in that environment?"No human contact"? So all the hospices and hospitals Terri's been at have been staffed by robots? Plus, Michael Schiavo has been visiting Terri regularly for over fifteen years, as have her parents and siblings. Oh, and even after he finally heeded her doctors and gave up on therapy after four years, Michael Schiavo continued to sit by her bedside for another four years, until he was told that it was time to let her go. Why didn't Bill Hemmer bring this up? Why did he sit and uncritically swallow everything Adamson told him? Could it be that Hemmer was enabling Adamson because of her association with Beverly LaHaye's neo-conservative evangelical group? And why didn't Hemmer mention this affiliation -- an affiliation which would give Adamson a strong motive to fudge the facts? University of Minnesota neurologist Ronald Cranford, who is one of the eight doctors to have actually given a full medical examination of Terri Schiavo (as opposed to making quick bedside visits, or diagnosing-by-edited-videotape without looking at the CT scans), states that the religious beliefs of the people working with the Schindlers are warping their judgement:
Cranford says this is a perfect example of religious beliefs muddying medical waters. "Terri's not there. She's been like this for 15 years," he says. "There's no doubt about the diagnosis and all the pro-lifers and Christian bio-ethicists in the world aren't going to change that." Cranford and other neurologists say brain scans show massive damage to her cerebral hemisphere.By the way, I urge everyone to read Matt Conligliaro's analysis of the case. He notes that the Schindlers didn't start accusing Michael Schiavo of beating Terri up until 2002; Judge Greer rightly dismissed their accusations. (And the bone scans they used as "evidence" of their slanders mostly showed the stress that Terri's severe bulimia -- a 250-pound person as a teen, she starved herself to get down to 150 pounds and routinely vomited up her meals and drank dozens of glasses of iced tea a day in order to reach 110 pounds -- had put on her body. There's a reason that doctors hate crash diets: they deprive the body of essential nutrients and throw its chemical balance out of whack.)
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