Tampa, Fla. ? Before she was the severely brain-damaged patient at the center of a legal dispute over whether she should live or die, Terri Schiavo was a young woman who desperately wanted to be thin.

At 26, she was strikingly beautiful with delicate features. But she had spent her childhood and high school years as a chubby and shy girl, standing just 5-foot-3 and weighing 200 pounds at her heaviest.

When she finally lost 65 pounds in her late teens, men started to pay attention — including the man who would become her husband, Michael Schiavo, who was tall and handsome.

But keeping the weight off was a struggle for Terri Schiavo, and years later — after her heart stopped briefly, cutting off oxygen to the brain — a malpractice case brought against a doctor on her behalf would reveal she had been trying to survive on liquids and was making herself throw up after meals. The Schiavos’ lawyer said her 1990 collapse was caused by a potassium imbalance brought on by an eating disorder.

It is a cruel twist lost on no one close to the case: A woman who is said to have struggled with an eating disorder is now in the middle of a court battle over whether her feeding tube should be removed so that she can starve to death.

Gary Fox, a lawyer who represented Terri and Michael Schiavo in the malpractice case, said the disease was the “lost lesson” in the Schiavo case.

“While there is no cure for bulimia, there were things that could and should have been done for her that would have controlled it,” he said in a recent interview.

Terri Schiavo, 41, is now locked in what some doctors say is a persistent vegetative state, with no hope of recovery. In one of the nation’s longest right-to-die disputes, her husband is fighting with her parents to have the feeding tube removed; a court order preventing its removal expires at 5 p.m. today.

Like almost every element in the case, whether Schiavo really was bulimic is in dispute. Her father, Robert Schindler, said he did not believe his daughter had an eating disorder and thinks her husband had something to do with her collapse. Michael Schiavo has denied hurting his wife.

An eating disorder is believed to have put Terri Schiavo, center, in the brain-damaged state in which she has existed for 15 years. Schiavo is pictured with her mother, Mary, and father, Bob Schindler, before her 1984 wedding.

During the malpractice case, at least one of Schiavo’s friends testified they knew she was bulimic because after meals out, she always immediately excused herself to go to the bathroom. Her husband also knew she had peculiar eating patterns but did not realize they were dangerous, Fox said.

Medical records from the hospital where Schiavo was treated after her collapse note that “she apparently has been trying to keep her weight down with dieting by herself, drinking liquids most of the time during the day and drinking about 10-15 glasses of iced tea.”

Fox said that in the months before her collapse, Schiavo went to the doctor because she had stopped menstruating. It was a silent “cry for help,” the lawyer said. But the doctor did not take a complete medical history that might have revealed an eating disorder.

The jury put the damages at $6.8 million but reduced the verdict to about $2 million because it thought Schiavo was partly at fault for her collapse.

Fox said Schiavo was a victim of medical negligence, plus a victim of societal pressures to be thin. “She didn’t want to go back to where she was from,” he said. “This was the only way she could do this in her mind and be able to eat as much as she did.”