Hey, Alanis: This is Ironic. Don’t ya Think?
My sister nearly slapped me for my heartlessness in pointing this out last night. Lucky for me, USA Today picked up on it, too.
Terri Schiavo, darling of the media, is in a vegetative state due to a heart malfunction resulting from a potassium imbalance. That potassium imbalance was the result of an eating disorder; the media won’t say for sure which one it was, but bulimia seems to be the favorite.
“…keeping the weight off was a struggle for Terri Schiavo, and years later after her heart stopped briefly, cutting off oxygen to the brain a malpractice case brought against a doctor on her behalf would reveal she had been trying to survive on liquids and was making herself throw up after meals. The Schiavos’ lawyer said her 1990 collapse was caused by a potassium imbalance brought on by an eating disorder.”
“It is a cruel twist lost on no one close to the case: A woman who is said to have struggled with an eating disorder is now in the middle of a court battle over whether her feeding tube should be removed so that she can starve to death.”
Here’s the kicker: Had her heart not faltered, Schiavo probably would have died of starvation anyway. She had stopped having her period; this is one of the end stages of death by eating disorder.
My point: Why keep her feeding tube in and force feed her if she had made the choice years ago to starve herself? Isn’t starving to death what she had planned on doing? Plus, this malpractice suit that is briefly mentioned by the media is a complete breach of patient confideniality. But that’s another blogging for another time.
