First, here is how the Buffalo News reported on the press conference yesterday:
The news conference, which drew a sizable national media contingent, showed how difficult it is to understand and explain the severity of a brain-injured person. During and after the press conference, various physicians politely disagreed about whether Herbert actually had been in a persistent vegetative state. … And no one even came close Wednesday to tackling the question of how Herbert’s condition compared with that of Terri Schiavo, who had been in a persistent vegetative state.
The AP wire story, however, had this feature:
There have been a few other widely publicized examples of brain-damaged patients showing sudden improvement after a number of years. In 2003, an Arkansas man, severely disabled and largely silent for 19 years after a car accident, stunned his mother by saying “Mom” and then asking for a Pepsi. His brain function remained limited, his family said months later.
And Tennessee police officer Gary Dockery, left paralyzed and mute after a 1988 shooting, began speaking to his family one day in 1996, telling jokes and recounting annual winter camping trips. But after 18 hours, he never repeated the unbridled conversation of that day, though he remained more alert than he had been. He died the following year of a blood clot on his lung.
None of these people were in a “persistent vegetative state” like Terri Schiavo, the Florida woman whose feeding-tube case raised anguished end-of-life ethical discussions.
