A former Trinity Health hospital could be named after Terri Schiavo, a Florida woman whose story of being in a persistent vegetative state for 15 years captivated the nation in the early 2000s, the Detroit Free Press reported.
Livonia, Mich.-based Trinity Health said May 31 it agreed to sell its Livingston hospital in Howell, Mich., to Wildwood, Mo.-based Catholic Healthcare International. The nonprofit may turn the facility into the Terri Schiavo Home for the Brain Injured, according to the June 8 article.
"That's been the plan from the beginning ... if the hospital was established, we would home a rehab center in there in my sister's memory," Ms. Schiavo's brother, Bobby Schlindler, president of the Terri Schiavo Life & Hope Network, told the news outlet. "That is the hope, but it's going to be a lot of work. Obviously, we have to raise the money, and a lot of questions still need to be answered before the doors open."
Ms. Schiavo became the subject of legal and political wrangling after entering a vegetative state due to cardiac arrest in 1990. After her husband elected to remove her feeding tube, her parents fought the decision, eventually leading to intervention from politicians including then-Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and President George W. Bush. A federal appeals court ultimately allowed the tube's removal in 2005, after which she died at the age of 41.
Trinity Health declined to comment to the Free Press, while Catholic Healthcare International, a nonprofit also aiming to build a hospital and Catholic medical school in the U.S., told the newspaper the facility is still in the "exploratory stages."