I understand she isn't really in a vegetative state but I was lacking the proper words to really describe it other than using brain dead. I guess really my question is what the professionals have said would happen does not appear to have happened to this girl and its been 3 years. What if they were wrong? How can you keep a body going when the brain can't support it? We know she will never wake up but what if?
I don't know if anyone really knows what condition her body is in. At least not outside the family and caregiver group. And I'm really not sure what happens when a brain liquefies. I doubt there are too many cases to compare this to, either. So I gues it's anyone's guess. Maybe someone with neurology experience knows more. As for the rest of her body, not sure what claims were made but if they take care of her, then apparently they can sustain it. It would involove a lot of care, though, as she would get bedsores and such if she wasn't turned and repositioned virtually constantly, every two hours round the clock. (Maybe she has them, we don't know, but from outward appearances, such as in that video above, it looks like she's getting good care.) She is likely getting a lot of medications to help sustain her functioning and treat her high blood sugars, etc.
There has been a judge (one or more, can't remember details now) that has been given ALL of the medical information and has made a determination that there is no evidence to support a reversal of the brain death decree, so that is what we have to go on. I would think that if there was evidence, a judge would want to give the benefit of the doubt. But that hasn't happened, over and over again. The heart is on a different nervous system, independent of the brain, and can continue to beat as long as it has oxygen. She is getting oxygen through a breathing tube, or ventilator.
In brain death, the expectation is that she will never wake up. This is an issue that people struggle with often when their loved ones are declared brain dead. Organ donor registries have a lot of information on it in order to help people understand it so they can have closure if and when it happens, and it happens a fair amount. (I've had it happen in my family twice now.) In most cases, the ventilator would've been turned off and eventually the heart would stop beating, and that would be it. It would likely happen in this case, too. Could it happen that she wakes up? Well I'm not going to be the one to say never, but I think the likelihood of it, by everything reported, seems to be essentially nil.