My friend Tivo-ed it and I watched it late last night.
One man had no frontal lobes (one of the four lobes of the cerebral cortex). All the rest of his cerebral cortex was there, though one part was shrunken. But the frontal lobes (located right behind your forehead) were gone, replaced with spinal fluid.
Which means he has no short-term memory, his personality has been greatly changed, and he has very little impluse control.
When he had his car accident, he was 19 years old. You cannot convince him he is not still 19 years old. At the time of the accident, his daughter, Amber, was just a baby. He still thinks she's a baby. The now-adult Amber has tried to tell him who she is, but he often thinks she is his wife (who left him a couple of years after the accident and is now living in another state).
They flew him to New Jersey and New York for testing, but he got angry when people told him where he was, because he kept insisting he was still in Arkansas. Why? He couldn't remember the plane ride from just that morning. One of the doctors said "each day just washes over him, brand new, he has no sense of yesterday or tomorrow or thirty minutes ago." (Anyone thinking of the movie "50 First Dates?" But Drew Barrymore's character didn't have a body so atrophied she couldn't even walk around, like this guy's body.)
He sometimes begins speaking in a very sexually explicit way or his language is very aggressive and threatening.
Another man they showed still has all of his brain, but his car accident left a tiny, microscopic nick on his frontal lobe. As a result, he feels no emotion for his wife or young son. He is now verbally abusive towards them and sometimes aggressive as well. He is not physically impaired, he was only unconscious for 10 minutes. But that tiny little nick on his frontal lobes (found on CT scans) completely changed his personality. He feels no concern for others at all. Completely indifferent to everyone around him. He cannot hold a job because of his personality and his inclination to aggression towards others.
Terri Schiavo has no cerebral cortex at all.
From a recent article:
Brain scans show that parts of Schiavo's brain have atrophied and been replaced by spinal fluid.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."End snippet.
I watched that Discovery show and thought damn, one of those guys still has ALL of his brain and that little bit of damage means he isn't even the same person, and the other guy is missing one lobe and is stuck in a time warp and has no sense of today AND has a greatly modified personality.
Here's Terri Schiavo, with her cerebral cortex completely missing, and people think she's just going to grow it back? Or just wake up and start talking without one? Without one, your body can do nothing but involuntary things. Your heart can beat, you can breathe, you can regulate your body temperature (sweat, etc), because all those things are things our "lower" brain tells our body to do automatically (you don't will your heart to beat, right?).
Anything beyond that, she is simply completely incapable of doing, lacking any brain tissue to tell her body to do those things.
She can't even form a thought. (We don't think with our lower brain.) She has no consciousness.
And shame on the people who have preyed on her parents and made them believe otherwise. Seriously, that's just about criminal. It's like taking the engine out of a car and saying "ANY day now, it's just going to start up and we'll be able to drive it around! If you just pray hard enough. And fight the court system hard enough, and get enough publicity about it. Maybe if we lit some more candles that car with no engine will start and drive around."
Now how crazy is that? I know most DUers understand all these things, but the show I watched last night only verified for me how....out of touch with reality/basic biological facts it is to think someone in her condition could ever re-grow a cerebral cortex or just start speaking and become conscious without one.
And here's an interesting bit of information I found:
"In 2003, a court-appointed guardian for Terri wrote that during the years-long legal struggle, the Schindlers had ''voiced the disturbing belief that they would keep Terri alive at any and all costs," even if that required amputation of her limbs. "As part of the hypothetical presented," the guardian's report stated, "Schindler family members stated that even if Terri had told them of her intention to have artificial nutrition withdrawn, they would not do it.''"
http://www.nndb.com/people/435/000026357/So the parents would NOT have honored her wishes even IF she had stated them to them.
WTF? And people support that?
Lastly, please, if you don't have a living will and you don't want this to ever happen to you (or your loved ones fighting over it), please get one done. It's not as expensive as you might think to do a quick consultation with an attorney, or in the situation of not having any money to do it, at least type up your wishes, have a family member witness them (with a signature and preferably by your next of kin) and go to the bank and get it NOTARIZED. A couple of copies of it, too. Then place one copy in safekeeping and give another copy to your next of kin.