Gabrielle Giffords’ doctors, husband share details on her progress
It’s quite long, but you’ll probably read the whole thing anyway.
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.
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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.
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Inside of Gabrielle Giffords’ room at TIRR Memorial Hermann in Houston.