Giffords moves arms, survival odds at '101 pct'

One of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords' doctors declared Tuesday she has "a 101 percent chance of surviving," as she made more progress, moving both arms and breathing on her own for the first time — just three days after a bullet shot through her brain. Doctors emphasize she is in for a long recovery, and her neurosurgeon repeated his cautionary phrase of "she's holding her own."

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Goshin said:

She is remarkably blessed to have survived such a critical wound. I hope she recovers fully.

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repeter said:

Giffords moves arms, survival odds at '101 pct'



This sort of thing makes me feel good inside. Now if we could just see Loughner on death row

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Rep. Gabrielle Giffords is communicating through facial expressions and gestures, but is unable to speak in complete sentences, her chief of staff told The Arizona Republic in a rare discussion of the Arizona Democrat’s condition. Five months after Giffords, 41, was shot in the head outside a Tucson supermarket, chief of staff Pia Carusone said the third-term congresswoman is not close to being healthy enough to return to Congress and said the only timetable for determining if she’ll seek re-election is Arizona’s May 2012 filing deadline.

“Short of that, we’d love to know today what her life will be, what her quality of life will be, which will determine whether she’ll be able to run for office and all sorts of other things involving her life. But we just don’t know yet,” Carusone told the paper.

Carusone said Giffords struggles to speak. “We do a lot of inferring with her because her communication skills have been impacted the most,” Carusone said. “If you think of it as someone who is able to communicate with you clearly, it is easy to test them. You can ask them a series of questions, and you can get clear answers back. Whereas with Gabby, what we’ve been able to infer and what we believe is that her comprehension is very good. I don’t know about percentage-wise or not, but it’s close to normal, if not normal.”

Carusone said Gifford relies on nonverbal means of communicating. “She is borrowing upon other ways of communicating,” Carusone said. “Her words are back more and more now, but she’s still using facial expressions as a way to express. Pointing. Gesturing. Add it all together, and she’s able to express the basics of what she wants or needs. But, when it comes to a bigger and more complex thought that requires words, that’s where she’s had the trouble.”

Doctors have been unable to determine the full extent of the damage done to Giffords’s brain, Carusone said, because bullet shards lodged in her brain prevent her from undergoing an MRI examination. Carusone said doctors remain optimistic about Giffords’s progress, but warned that her condition is now far from her normal condition before the shooting.

“She’s living. She’s alive,” Carusone said. “But if she were to plateau today, and this was as far as she gets, it would not be nearly the quality of life she had before. There’s no comparison. All that we can hope for is that she won’t plateau today and that she’ll keep going and that when she does plateau, it will be at a place far away from here.”

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"When she is trying to come up with a word or a sentence and she's clearly struggling, putting everything she's got into it … sometimes she's not successful," Carusone says. "When she is, there's a relief that comes across her face that she has found the word. But when she can't come up with that, it is absolute frustration."

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Loose Feather said:

Im sick of hearing about this mindless twit. Pardon the pun.

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