Docs: Giffords Walking and Speaking
The New York Times reports:
Representative Gabrielle Giffords, an eloquent speaker before she was shot in the head last month, is relearning the skill — progressing from mouthing words and lip-syncing songs to talking briefly by telephone to her brother-in-law in space.
With a group of friends and family members acting as a backup chorus, Ms. Giffords has been mouthing the lyrics to “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” and “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love, Baby.” And as a surprise for her husband, who is celebrating his birthday this month, a longtime friend who has been helping her through her rehabilitation videotaped her mouthing the words to “Happy Birthday to You.”
“It’s not like she’s speaking the way she spoke, but she is vocalizing and making progress every day,” Pia Carusone, Ms. Giffords’s chief of staff, said in a telephone interview on Sunday. “She’s working very hard. She’s determined. It’s a tight schedule. A copy of it is hanging on her door.”
Outside specialists say it remains unclear, despite the hopeful early signs, what functions in Ms. Giffords’s mind were affected by the traumatic injuries she suffered when she was shot at point-blank range on Jan. 8 at a constituent event in Tucson.
It is not uncommon for patients with a similar injury to have trouble communicating or undergo personality changes, brain specialists say. Everything from ambition and concentration to short-term memory and social inhibitions can be affected, doctors say.
But relatives and friends who have been at Ms. Giffords’s side as she undergoes rehabilitation at a hospital in Houston said in interviews and e-mail exchanges that though her recovery was slow and exhausting, it was marked by significant progress.
Ms. Carusone said that on Sunday afternoon, Ms. Giffords’s husband, Capt. Mark E. Kelly, put the congresswoman on the phone to talk to his twin brother and fellow astronaut, Scott, who is aboard the International Space Station.
“She said, ‘Hi, I’m good,’ ” Ms. Carusone said.
With the help of therapists at TIRR Memorial Hermann in Houston, the congresswoman known for her active, outdoorsy ways now labors through the halls clutching a shopping cart and does squats and repetitive motions to build her muscles, her mother, Gloria, said in an enthusiastic e-mail she sent about a week ago to friends that recounted her daughter’s progress. Others who have visited Ms. Giffords recently have left similarly upbeat.
Aides conduct bedside briefings for her, telling her about the events unfolding in Egypt, for instance, and the decision by Senator Jon Kyl, Republican of Arizona, not to run for re-election next year.
“We tell her everything that’s going on,” Ms. Carusone said. “Don’t get the idea she’s speaking in paragraphs, but she definitely understands what we’re saying and she’s verbalizing.”
In long days that begin with breakfast at 7, Ms. Giffords, 40, has beaten one of her nurses at tic-tac-toe and transformed herself, her mother wrote, from “kind of a limp noodle” to someone who is “alert, sits up straight with good posture (in fact anyone in the room observing unconsciously sucks it up and throws back their shoulders) and is working very hard.”
Ms. Giffords’s mother says doctors are regularly surprised by her latest achievement. They say, “She did WHAT?” she wrote in her e-mail, adding that “Little Miss Overachiever is healing very fast.”
Reached by telephone on Sunday, the congresswoman’s mother offered a one-word assessment of her daughter’s road to recovery. “As far as Gabby’s progress, you can quote me as saying, ‘Yippee!’ ” she said.
The rehabilitation center referred requests for comment to Ms. Giffords’s staff.
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