Young woman sought sunshine, made headlines

Terri Schiavo enjoyed her last ray of sunshine in 1990. She loved the Florida sun so much that she spent her days lying by the pool with a glass of iced tea and a radio.

She was a clerk for Prudential Life Insurance and drove a Toyota Celica. Then early one morning when she was 26, she collapsed in her St. Petersburg apartment. Her husband, Michael, called 911, but she went without oxygen for several minutes and never regained consciousness.

For the next 15 years, home was a bed with rails.

"Persistent vegetative state" is how she often was described in medical reports. She could breathe, sleep, arch her eyebrows and even smile. Her brown eyes would scan her room. She opened and closed her mouth. She turned her head. Contractions caused her fists to ball up so hard that nurses put padding on her hands.

Her parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, played music in hopes of stimulating a response. The staff was instructed to leave the TV on at night because the sound might stop her from moaning. Stuffed animals were perched on the window ledges.

At least 5 moves

Schiavo lived in at least five facilities, most in Pinellas County on the west coast of central Florida. At Palm Gardens in Largo, her room faced a retention pond. At Hospice House Woodside in Pinellas Park, the lobby had plastic plants and green carpet like a budget hotel, but the homey touches gave way to polished corridors and a nurse's station.

At one facility, she shared a room with a woman who barely survived a car accident.

The places were nice, but they always were the same. "People moaning and just sitting in the hallway in wheelchairs," Schiavo's friend Jackie Rhodes said. "It was very depressing."

Schiavo's family would visit often. Her husband took her laundry home. He dabbed her with perfume and played audiotapes of relatives' voices through headphones. Her parents sang her songs. All three tended Schiavo with devotion.

In a 38-page report prepared in 2003 by Jay Wolfson, Schiavo's court-appointed guardian, he wrote, "It is notable that through more than 13 years after Theresa's collapse, she has never had a bedsore."

But bitterness descended, and the family that brought her new blouses or placed a barrette in her hair became divided.

In 1993, the Schindlers tried to have Michael Schiavo removed as the legal guardian, but a judge ruled against them.

In 1998, Michael Schiavo filed the first legal petition to remove his wife's feeding tube. The Schindlers accused him of wanting to end their daughter's life so that he could keep the money she was awarded in a medical-malpractice suit.

Always in the middle

Throughout the legal battle, Terri Schiavo always was in the middle. Back and forth she went to the hospital to have her feeding tube removed and then reinserted when the courts or Gov. Jeb Bush intervened.

The irony was that food had been a central tension in Schiavo's life before her collapse.

She grew up in suburban Philadelphia, the oldest of three children in a middle-class Catholic family. Her father owned an industrial-equipment company, and her mother, a homemaker, attended Mass on Saturday evening.

As a girl, Schiavo was chubby and hated clothes-shopping. She was 5-foot-3 and weighed more than 200 pounds during her junior year at a Catholic high school.

She liked dreamy TV stars and wrote them fan letters. She did not attend her prom. She lost more than 50 pounds with NutriSystem during her senior year.

At Bucks County Community College, she caught the eye of Michael Schiavo, tall, blond and handsome. One of five brothers from an athletic family, he was Schiavo's first boyfriend. They were engaged after six months. The bride was 20.

Years later, he told CNN: "She had this presence, this aura, that just attracted you. She was shy and outgoing at the same time."

When the couple moved to St. Petersburg in 1986, Schiavo became thinner still. She went from brunette to blond and started wearing a bikini. She drank 10 to 15 glasses of iced tea a day to lose weight. She boasted that she had a good metabolism. She weighed 110. She saw a fertility specialist about her inability to conceive.

No one ever proved Schiavo suffered from bulimia, the practice of eating and then purging. Her parents have said they don't think their daughter had an eating disorder, and Michael Schiavo for the longest time simply said his wife had strange food habits.

In 1992, two years after Schiavo's collapse, the couple won a $6.8 million medical-malpractice suit after a jury found Schiavo had been the victim of substandard medical care that led, in part, to her collapse. The jury reduced the verdict to $2 million after also finding Schiavo partly at fault.

$1 million left

Legal fees and other expenses left Schiavo with $640,000 and her husband about $360,000.

The attorney in the malpractice case, Gary Fox, later wrote in an op-ed piece for the St. Petersburg Times that Schiavo suffered from a chemical imbalance caused by bulimia. "One night, Terri purged, which caused her potassium level to drop low enough to cause a heart attack," Fox wrote.

He also said doctors who treated Schiavo for infertility failed to detect her eating disorder and refer her for treatment.

Wolfson, the guardian, also linked Schiavo's cardiac arrest to a chemical imbalance possibly brought on by her "aggressive weight loss, diet control and excessive hydration."

After her collapse, her diet became simple: vitamin-enriched beverages and water, fed through a gastric tube.

Schiavo lived longer than anyone predicted, longer than medical literature suggested she would. She was taken for countless neurological tests, CT scans and swallowing tests. For the first three years she received physical, occupational, speech and even recreational therapy.

Makeup makeover

As the legal fight intensified and national right-to-life groups joined the campaign in 2003, cameras came into her room. She was made over with lipstick, eye shadow, mascara and gold earrings for a photo entered into evidence by her parents to counter Michael Schiavo's contention that his wife was in persistent vegetative state.

The vivaciousness of the glamour shot is stunning, except for the ruby-red mouth that is half open.

Nurses stacked pillows around her in bed to keep her from rolling. Her family, speaking only through lawyers, took turns visiting. The money once in contention had dwindled to $70,000, according to one of Michael Schiavo's lawyers.

On March 18, they removed her feeding tube for the last time.

Outside her hospice, police kept crowds back. Inside her room, they kept her lips moist with balm. Without sustenance, she lasted 13 days, and then she died.

Washington Post reporter Manuel Roig-Franzia contributed to this report.