Autopsy: No hope for Schiavo
Nothing—not a Mickey Mouse balloon, not even a mother's soothing voice—would have gotten a response from Terri Schiavo, the comatose Florida woman whose right-to-die case entangled the courts and mesmerized America for months. That's according to an autopsy report released today. Any message from the world would have had to travel the neural pathway to her neocortex, where it would then have been processed and a response generated. That first step, the initial incoming route, was destroyed some 15 years ago when, with her brain deprived of oxygen, she slipped into a persistent vegetative state.
The medical examiners found no evidence of strangulation or abuse—another question raised in the legal proceedings. "They did an extremely thorough job of ruling that out," says Karen Weidenheim, chief of neuropathology at Montefiore Medical Center in New York. And the autopsy concluded that the vision centers of her brain were dead, rendering her blind.
Her death on March 31 ended a familial, legal, and political struggle over removing her feeding tube. The autopsy showed that her brain was half the size of normal, and examiner Jon Thogmartin said at a press conference: "No amount of therapy or treatment would have regenerated the massive loss of neurons."
Examiners could neither confirm nor rule out bulimia as the initial cause of her collapse on Feb. 25, 1990.
"I think it's very important for society to understand that sometimes these unfortunate things happen and you can't repair the damage," says Weidenheim.
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