Giffords Able to Breathe on Her Own
The New York Times reports:
Gabrielle Giffords has shown no increase in brain swelling and is now able to breathe on her own, doctors said at a news conference Tuesday morning, but they said they planned to keep the wounded congresswoman on a ventilator as a precaution.
Dr. G. Michael Lemole Jr., chief of neurosurgery at University Medical Center, said Ms. Giffords remained in stable condition on Tuesday. She was hospitalized after being struck in the head with a gunshot fired at point-blank range while she was talking with constituents outside a Tucson supermarket on Saturday. Six people were killed in the shooting incident and 14 more were injured, including the Ms. Giffords, the apparent main target of the attack.
“I am happy to say that she is holding her own,” Dr. Lemole said. “She is able to generate her own breath.”
Doctors have removed nearly half of Ms. Giffords’s skull to prevent swelling from damaging her brain. “This the phase of the care where so much of it is up to her,” he said. “She is going to take her recovery at her own pace.”
Relatives of some others wounded in the shooting appeared at the hospital news conference along with Dr. Lemole. They said that though their family members continue to recover from the physical wounds they received, the emotional scarring would probably take far longer to heal.
Bill Hileman, whose wife Susan Hileman was shot three times, said that when he visited her bedside, she asked him, “What about Christina?” Ms. Hileman had been holding hands outside the supermarket with the Hilemans’ nine-year-old neighbor, Christina Green, when the shots rang out; the girl was also hit and later died of her wounds.
Mr. Hileman said that though his wife had been in a morphine-induced haze, she was clearly devastated when he told her that the girl had died. “We’re going to have that as an ongoing issue that we’ll be dealing with,” Mr. Hileman said about his wife’s feelings of guilt. Ms. Hileman had invited Christina to accompany her to the event at the supermarket that morning because of the girl’s interest in politics.
