Cuz We Said So

Eight years ago, [Kate] Adamson was lying in a U.S. hospital intensive care unit after a near-fatal brainstem stroke. Doctors described her as being in a "vegetative" state.

Unable to move or communicate, yet fully aware and sensitive to hunger and pain, the 33-year-old, New Zealand-born athlete and mother of two heard people around her discussing her condition, whether she should undergo surgery - and her death.

"It was terrifying," she recalls. "It's the loneliest thing you could imagine. I had to find some way to be able to let people know I could understand what was going on around me. I was completely paralyzed."

Adamson was also acutely aware on the day she underwent surgery - without sufficient anesthetic - to have a feeding tube inserted.

"I was aware of what was going on around me, hearing the chit chat between the doctor and the nurse," she told CNSNews.com from her Los Angeles home. "It's a difficult place for me to revisit and the horror of having to live through that ... I could only endure and survive and pray that I could somehow live through it."

In Florida, Terri Schiavo was not fed for six days last October, after her husband Michael obtained a court order to have her feeding-tube removed. It was reconnected after the Florida Legislature passed a bill empowering Gov. Jeb Bush to intervene.

Adamson also went without food during her ordeal, in her case for eight days.

The memory remains vivid, and painful.

"It's not accurate to say I was hungry after the tube was turned off," she said. "It was much more painful than just being hungry. You could feel it in your whole body, every thought was about eating. I just wanted something to take the hunger pains away."

Schiavo has been in her present condition for 13 years since she collapsed at home in February 1990. Exactly what that condition is, is in dispute. Her family say she is neither in a coma nor a persistent vegetative state, but is "a responsive and aware woman suffering from cognitive disability."

Adamson's case was considerably different in many respects. Nonetheless, for around seven weeks in 1995, doctors around her, too, assumed she was in the state that some argue Schiavo is in now.

...In time, she began communicating through blinking her eyes while those around her pointed to the letters of the alphabet. (One of the messages she blinked to her doctor: "Am I going to die?")

She wonders today where Terri Schiavo, who turns 40 this week, would be had she been given "a chance at recovery."