"Terry and Terri"

[achebeautiful]

What's the Difference Between Terry and Terri?
by Terence P. Jeffrey


On a July evening 22 years ago, 20-year-old Terry Wallis climbed into a pickup truck with two friends and rode off down a rural Arkansas highway. He never came back -- or, more precisely, he never came back the same.

The truck went off a bridge.

One of Wallis’s friends was uninjured; the other died. Wallis barely made it. First, he was in a coma, then in what doctors called a “vegetative state,” and then in what they called a “minimally conscious state.”

He was paralyzed from the neck down and couldn’t talk.

His parents assumed legal guardianship from his wife, made sure he was cared for at rehabilitation center and brought him home for regular visits.

Then on July 11, 2003, when Mrs. Wallis went to see her son, as the Chicago Tribune reported it then, Terry spoke his first word in 19 years: “Mom.” Soon, he was able to converse.

“There is nothing I know of to explain scientifically what happened,” Terry's doctor, James Zini, told USA Today. “I think it was a miracle.”

Understandably, a group of medical researchers decided to seek a natural explanation. They did two sets of scans of Terry’s brain 18 months apart and compared these to scans from healthy people and from another man who had suffered a similar injury six years ago, but had not recovered. They published their findings this week in the Journal of Clinical Investigation (JCI). Their conclusion: “We propose that axonal regrowth may underlie these findings and provide biological mechanisms for late recovery.”

In other words, they believe Terry's brain is repairing itself.

Since this revelation some media reports have cited doctors keen to draw a distinction between Terry Wallis and Terri Schiavo, the Florida woman whose deliberate killing by dehydration last year ought not to have been allowed even if she had had no hope of recovery. Nonetheless, these reports suggest that Terri Schiavo could not have experienced a recovery like Terry Wallis did because her brain injury was more severe.

“CBS Evening News” reported: “Now this discovery will change the way doctors think about patients in the so-called minimally conscious state. But it won’t affect all patients, like Terri Schiavo who was in a kind of coma known as a persistent vegetative state.”

The Associated Press noted of Wallis’s recovery: “[D]octors said the same cannot be hoped for people in a persistent vegetative state, such as Terri Schiavo."

This type of not-like-Terri claim is not new.

Donald Herbert, a New York State firefighter, went into a “decade long stupor” in 1995, according to the Buffalo News, after “a roof collapsed on him” and "he was deprived of oxygen for up to 10 minutes." Herbert, who died of pneumonia this February, suddenly began talking again in April 2005 after his doctor, Jamil Ahmed, treated him with a drug cocktail. Ahmed told the New York Times his patient’s pre-recovery condition had been “close to the persistent vegetative state.”

But NBC’s “Today Show” quickly cited doctors who drew a line between Herbert and Schiavo. “Neurologists who examined Terri Schiavo say her case was different, that she was in something called a persistent vegetative state from which there is almost no chance of recovery,” the show reported

Yet, truly the most telling fact about Terry Wallis’s recovery was stated by Dr. Nicholas Schiff of Cornell University, who co-authored the JCI study of Wallis’s case. “We read about these widely publicized cases of miraculous recovery every few years, but none of them -- not one -- has ever been followed up scientifically until now,” he told the New York Times.

Dr. Steven Laureys, a Belgian neurologist, who co-authored a commentary in JCI that accompanied the Wallis study, told the Los Angeles Times: “It obliges us to reconsider old dogmas.”

So why should anyone now want to draw a bright line between Terri Schiavo and almost-unstudied recoveries like the one Terry Wallis made?

Lady MacBeth could never rub out the spot of a king's blood she imagined on her hand -- and no matter what science tells us tomorrow, there’s no erasing what’s already been done to Terri Schiavo.


~Terence Jeffrey is Editor of HUMAN EVENTS.

[achebeautiful]

Tammy Bruce comments:

Newsflash for Michael Schiavo

And every other freak out there who made it their life's work to hustle along death for Terri Schiavo--another Terry has proven that it just might be a bit premature to cut off that food and water. Especially as one's brain might be trying to repair itself.

Docs: Comatose Man's Brain Rewired Itself

Doctors have their first proof that a man who was barely conscious for nearly 20 years regained speech and movement because his brain spontaneously rewired itself by growing tiny new nerve connections to replace the ones sheared apart in a car crash.

Terry Wallis, 42, is one of the few people known to have recovered so dramatically so long after a serious brain injury. He still needs help eating and cannot walk, but his speech continues to improve and he can count to 25 without interruption.

Fascinatingly, while doctors admit they have no idea how this has happened, they insist that it absolutely couldn't have happened to Terri Schiavo. And while they also note that this is like "winning the lottery" perhaps we would have more cases like this if we actually gave them a chance.

Doctors, like scientists, are loathe to admit that there may be things they do not know or can account for. That perhaps there is something divine about the human being and life itself that has a bit more going on than what doctors can imagine.

"Most neurologists would have been willing to bet money that whatever the cause of it, if it hadn't changed in 19 years, wasn't going to change now," Bernat said. "So it's really extraordinary."

Wallis' father said his son is now able to make jokes. "That was something he wasn't able to do early in his recovery," Jerry Wallis said. "He now seems almost exactly like his old self. And he very often tells us how glad he is to be alive."

Yes, indeed.

[ocelot]

I was one of those people who did not support keeping Terri Schiavo alive. All that money was spent on keeping somebody "alive" when they had not chance of living when it could have gone towards feeding the hungry. I found it interesting when the talk was about Keeping Terri alive and people said that we shouldn't play God by taking away her breathing tube and food tube. How alive is someone if they can't talk, they can't breathe on their own, and they can't eat on their own. I believe God gave us these advances in technology to save people's lives and improve their way of life not keep them alive in pain or alive in nothing. I felt that we shouldn't be playing God by keeping her alive. If God wanted her alive I believe He would have created a miracle or at least given a sign that a miracle was to come.

I don't like the fact that Michael Schiavo is treated as a criminal because the dehydration killing of Terri. People are making it seem to be a cruel death but the truth is that it's often used in hospitals when someone has had enough pain and wants to die before the pain is so great that they can't enjoy life anymore. (For instance, they often use it when someone is dying of cancer so they die before the final painful stages). It's actually not as bad as they have made it seem (my mother is nurse and she was mad at how death by dehydration was treated in the media).

I think it's beautiful that Terry is alive but I agree with the doctors that the individual cases are different.

[achebeautiful]

Well, we disagree about a few points that you make Leona, but thank you very much for sharing your views about this subject.