There’s been a lot of speculation, tidbits and just plain guessing about the condition of Arizona Rep. Gabriella Giffords, who was shot in January. And now the Arizona Republic, in an extensive report, details exactly where she is and isn’t. It is progress — and she has a way to go.
Here’s some of the beginning of the article:
Rep. Gabrielle Giffords is left-handed now.
Her handwriting looks different in the letter she recently wrote to her husband, astronaut Mark Kelly, than it did the last time he went into space. Giffords’ mother helped her pen the traditional NASA sendoff note two weeks ago. She wrote to her “sweetie pie,” and that part – those words – were the same.
Many other things are different since Giffords’ brain was pierced by a bullet during the shootings near Tucson on Jan. 8. Her hair is short, maybe 2 inches long, says Pia Carusone, her chief of staff, so there are scars on her scalp that show through. Eventually, her hair will cover them. A thin scar across the top of her forehead is healing well and fading, and her face, though sometimes swollen, is otherwise the same as before, Carusone says.
Giffords speaks most often in a single word or declarative phrase: “love you,” “awesome,” even “get out” to doctors in her room at the end of a taxing day. She longs to leave the rehab center, repeating “I miss Tucson” and wheeling herself to the doors at the end of the hall to peer out. When that day comes, Giffords told her nurse, she plans to “walk a mountain.”
Longer sentences frustrate Giffords. She must search her brain for the words she wants, which feels like trying to pull out the name of a familiar face you can’t quite place, her doctors say. Once she builds the sentence in her mind, she speaks clearly and at a normal rate, and can offer as many words as she has the patience to string together. The doctor overseeing her rehabilitation places her in the top 5 percent of patients recovering from this injury.
That is indeed progress and — amid a swirl of rumors — the progress is continuing:
But a series of exclusive Republic interviews over the past week with those closest to her captured a more complete understanding of her condition than anyone outside her closely kept circle has seen. Her doctors, staff, husband and a nurse shared Giffords’ struggles, triumphs and path forward, and details about how she looks, acts, speaks and thinks.
Early buzz about her insinuated everything from exaggerated optimism to expectations of a Senate campaign in 2012. There are rumors of a $200,000 reward should paparazzi capture a current photo, Carusone says. Staff and family have faced the difficult task of balancing intense public interest with the privacy of a woman who still is working to communicate and process complex thoughts. They think she should release her own photo, and only when she’s ready.
The details of Giffords at week 15 of her recovery are a snapshot, those close to her say, and it is important to understand that this snapshot changes.
“I can’t say I notice improvement every day,” says Kelly, her husband, “but I can every few days.”
Almost every 72 hours, she resembles more closely the woman she was before.
Her staff is pressed for definitions, schedules, firm prognoses.
“It’s unfair to set expectations on her in any way,” Carusone says. “We all want the best. We want her to make the best recovery. Would a triumphant return be amazing? Yes. But first of all, her close friends and family will take anything.”
Go to the link to read it in detail.
The key word here is expectations. It is unfair to set expectations on her, even though she has exceeded them since that awful day in January. Since the the first stories of her progress surfaced (she moved her finger….she nodded…she mouthed words..she mouthed song lyrics..she talked) the inevitable political stories emerged.
Some suggested she wasn’t fit to serve out her term. Some suggested she was or would be. Some suggested the Democrats might run her for Senate.
But politics isn’t everything and it isn’t the world world or the total meaning of life. And to the lingering question: does she know what happened the Arizona Republic has an answer: yes — but not completely:
There were hopeful language signs even on the March day that Giffords learned about the people killed on Jan. 8. She had been told there were more bullets, Kelly says, but she didn’t yet know that there were deaths. He was reading aloud to her from the New York Times – a story about Giffords herself. She followed with her eyes over his shoulder, noticed that he skipped a paragraph, and grabbed the paper out of his hand. He hadn’t realized how well she could read.
The paragraph told of six dead, many more wounded. Kelly comforted Giffords while she cried. Her grief spread over days and weeks.
“So many people, so many people,” Giffords repeated.
Her nurse Poteet would find Giffords with heavy looks on her face, repeating “no-no-no-no-no.”
“She was thinking of it like she couldn’t believe it,” Poteet says. “She kept saying, ‘I want so bad,’ and she was trying to talk about it. But it was too many thoughts in one.”
For that reason, Kelly hasn’t told Giffords that the shooting victims included her friends and colleagues Gabe Zimmerman and Judge John Roll, or a 9-year-old girl, and three others, the kind of older constituents she loves to help.
So Gabby Giffords faces more physical and emotional challenges in days to come in this story that doesn’t have a happy ending yet.
But the ending isn’t as bad as many anticipated.
And it raises hopes that with some more work, luck — and blessings — the final chapter could be a happy one.
Be sure to read Dorian de Wind’s April 16th post HERE.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.