Terri Schiavo was born Teresa Marie Schindler on December 3, 1963, in Pennsylvania where she grew up going to Catholic school and enjoyed interests including art, music, and animals, per terrischiavo.org. As a teen, she struggled with obesity, weighing 250 pounds at one point, and had lost more than 100 pounds according to a death investigation report that accompanied her autopsy. She kept the weight off, and by all witness accounts she was a healthy eater, but it is speculated that an eating disorder was what led to her initial collapse.
Part of this speculation came from very low potassium levels found in her blood after the initial resuscitation, but the medical examiner wrote that the low potassium could have been caused my several other factors, and her dramatic weight loss was years prior to the incident so there was no real evidence proving an eating disorder caused her collapse. There was also no evidence of trauma or toxicity. All they were able to determine in the years since Terri’s catastrophic medical episode is that she “suffered a severe anoxic brain injury, the cause of which cannot be determined with reasonable medical certainty.”
