Terri Schiavo's Death - A personal experience

I heard about Terri Schiavo's death in the USA and couldn't help but to remember a personal experience of mine with a lady who was in the so-called "persistent vegetative state". I would like to share this story with you.

About 12 years ago, I was working part time in a department store. One of the girls there knew that I was doing complementary medicine and asked me if I would have a look at the daughter of one of her friends. I was taking on a number of weird or unsolvable cases then and decided to have a go.

As I entered the house of the client, I couldn't help but notice the many photos of a beautiful young lady on all the walls and in frames, scattered around the house. She must have been around 22. This beautiful young lady was the client. She did not look anything like the photos.

As I entered her room, I was shocked to see a scruffy woman with body hair laying on a bed. This woman was that beautiful girl in the photos. She had been a promising student with a bright future, good looks, boyfriend, friends and so much more when she was struck down by a car and her life changed. She was now in the so called persistent vegetative state.

Her mother was by her side and had been ever since the accident. She seemed very caring and very attentive. She kept talking about her daughter, the accident and how there is no hope for her. The accident had happened some 3 years before.

Strangely, the mother was talking about her daughter in the third person; as if she was not there.

Anyhow, I asked the mum to leave the room, but she would not. I wanted her to leave as I really wanted to assess the girl on my own without outside influences. I was all too aware of the power of relatives (which can be both negative or positive).

I worked on the Reflex Zones of the girl's feet and her hands. I also stimulated her nerves through her meridians running along her legs. You could almost see a difference there and then in that she was more alert and was looking around more. I never once talked to her as if she was dumb, deaf, a vegetable, stupid or whatever else that people had assumed.

I visited the family 2 more times and really started to notice a big difference in her. Her eyes were doing most of the talking as far as I was concerned.

I received a call before my 4th visit from her mother, saying that her daughter had ripped the tube out of her stomach and was in hospital and would be back in a few days. "Strange", I thought at the time. She had never done such a thing in 3 years of being in that state.

I visited her a 4th time and started to notice that her mother, as caring as she seemed, was actually probably hindering any progress. She kept saying how her daughter will never recover, how she is a vegetable, how she will care for her no matter what and so on. I asked the mother to leave the room under the pretence of her calling an associate of mine.

In that brief period, I went close to the girl and told her the following: I said "Listen, I KNOW you can hear and understand me well. I can't help you any more but if you want to help yourself, I want you to use your hands and massage the end of the fingers on both hands daily, as often as you can. Use other fingers and your nails and dig in, massage the ends. This will stimulate your brain and motor functions."

I said this because under the theory of Zone Therapy, this is a great stimulus for the brain. The brain was an area I had concentrated on and had seen improvements in this girl.

Do you know what she did at that moment? She lifted her hands and started using her fingers to rub the end of her fingertips. This was not a shock to me as it was evident to me as a person familiar with holistic medicine, that she could understand things. Her mind was ok, her body had failed her.

I explained what had happened to the mother when she came back and unsurprisingly, she brushed it off as coincidence.

The mother's attitude was the reason I never went back there. I knew from personal experience that it is almost impossible to try and heal someone when their relatives are around and they generate negative force.

I never found out what happened to her. Sometimes I wished I had carried on working on her, but the disappointments and frustrations would have probably been too much for me at the time.

This bring me back to Terri Schiavo and why I wrote this article. I don't know the circumstances of her case but judging from what I have seen, I can't help but to wonder if she was anything like the girl I saw.

Many people stay in a coma or a vegetative state for years but then they recover. What if their life-support or food was cut off before this recovery? Wouldn't that be a tragedy? How can we allow ourselves to play god? How can we deprive someone of food when there might be a slight chance that they are 100% alive in their mind but that their body has just failed them?

May you rest in peace Terri Schiavo.