WASHINGTON - By most accounts, Terri Schiavo, whose plight has triggered an unprecedented mobilization of the White House and Congress, would not have approved the fuss over her plight.
The debate over whether to cut off the life-sustaining feeding tube of the Florida woman, who has been persistent vegetative state for 15 years, placed Schiavo at the center of a bitter battle between her parents and her husband.
And as protesters faced off outside her Florida hospice, and Internet users mobilized to trade rumors and accusations online over the weekend, Schiavo's plight also turned into a political battle in Congress and the White House.
Amid political arguments over the "right to die" and the "right to life", Terri Schiavo's parents and husband Michael Schiavo have traded accusations of monetary greed.
Meanwhile, on the Internet, ultra-conservative Christians level unsubstantiated accusations of violence against her by her husband, who several years after the incident had two children by another woman.
"You know what Terri would say right now?" asked Diane Meyer, a close friend, quoted in the Miami Herald. "She would say, 'All this for me?' ... Terri never dreamed of saving the world."
Official accounts, summarized by her government-appointed guardian, on the night of February 25, 1990, Terri Schiavo, then 26, suffered cardiac arrest that cut off the oxygen to her brain, resulting in deep cerebral cortex damage.
According to Dr. Jay Wolfson, the heart seizure was brought on by "a dramatically reduced potassium level", the probable result of an "aggressive weight-loss program".
Doctors say Schiavo may have suffered from the eating disorder bulimia, in which sufferers gorge themselves on food and then induce vomiting, in order to keep their weight down.
According to a portrait of Terri Schiavo in the Miami Herald, she was a young, simple woman, deeply in love with her husband and extremely close to parents Bob and Mary Schindler.
She was a lively brunette of 19 when the couple met when they studied in Pennsylvania in 1982. Her friends described her as obsessed about her weight, becoming extremely thin in the years after school.
She had only met Michael Schiavo twice when she told a friend, "I'm going to marry him." Two years later they married.
When her parents, who owned an industrial equipment company, retired to Florida in 1986, the young couple followed and moved in with them. Terri Schiavo got a job as an insurance clerk, while Michael Schiavo, whose life remains somewhat of a mystery to the public, reportedly managed restaurants.
The couple attempted to start a family, involving medical consultations which, Michael Schiavo said in a CNN television interview last October, should have led to a correct diagnosis of her eating condition that could have avoided the brain-damaging seizure.
"They could have prevented it," he said of the doctors.
In November 1992 he was awarded 1.2 million dollars as a result of a medical malpractice suit, an amount that gave rise to the accusations of greed between him and Terri's father.
Schiavo recalled that in February 1993, meeting in his wife's room, Bob Schindler demanded a share of the settlement.
After Schiavo told him to go to court the settle the matter, the father exploded in anger.
"He wanted to go out in the hall and fistfight. It was crazy," Schiavo said.
Michael Schiavo's lawyer has said that the money was Terri Schiavo's, and has been put toward her therapy.
But according to the Terri Schindler-Schiavo Foundation, started by her parents, Michael Schiavo has taken more than 500,000 dollars from the sum, and his lawyer 400,000 dollars, while Terri Schiavo has allegedly received little but artificial feeding.
03/22/2005 04:43 GMT