Giffords apparently doing very well

[Black]

There's some pretty good info here-- about 25% of it makes no sense or would be misleading to most, but there's enough to get a picture of how she's functioning and to start to get a sense of what her recovery will look like down the road.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110120/ap_o...shot_rehab

[WHiiP]

n/t

[Will Collier]

That's astonishing, and quite wonderful. Really is amazing what modern medicine can do; a guy I work with had a terrible motorcycle accident a few months ago. He was run over by a car, ribcage crushed, major head trauma. Wasn't expected to survive the first night.

Saw him yesterday, back at work and completely normal. Amazing.

[mattkime]

I'm hesitant to jump to positive conclusions.

his guy looked perfectly fine for a while too -

[cbelt3]

TBI is a funny thing... In her case she got excellent treatment that stopped the most dangerous part of the trauma- the bleeding and the swelling that kills off more tissue and can 'smother' the midbrain. We can survive, and in fact do just fine with half of our cerebral cortex. The brain rewires itself quite nicely, but yes, rehab is necessary. A large number of soldiers have suffered TBI's in the course of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and there is a large body of work in place to help them.

Our prayers go out to her and her family.

[deckeda]

Wow, seems remarkable. Good news.

[Numo]

mattkime wrote:
I'm hesitant to jump to positive conclusions.

his guy looked perfectly fine for a while too -

Isn't that the guy who had a metal rod go through his head? Seems to me there was a story about him in Smithstonian not too long ago.

[Black]

mattkime wrote:
I'm hesitant to jump to positive conclusions.

his guy looked perfectly fine for a while too -

I don't have time to look him up and find out what this means . . . but the key info I took from the article was "opening eyes more", "moving both arms", and the fact that they deemed her stable enough to "help" to a standing position (which, by the sound of "opening eyes more" was very likely a 2-person underarm assist with possibly not a lot of help from the patient.)
The "sitting up in a chair" is very likely a cardiac chair to which you transfer a person in supine and then adjust to whatever degree into a sitting position-- in other words possibly not much different from just adjusting the bed into a partial chair position.

I read another detailed account that described the bullet entering from behind, so I think "shot in the forehead": might be wrong. Based on other descriptions I've seen of her injuries, the statement that she's moving her right arm is surprising, but I hope it's true-- it would bode very well for her if it was.

[pinkoos]

My brother is a rehab doctor at TIRR (the facility where Giffords is going to go) and he specializes in brain injury, so he may actually end up being one of her doctors!

Of course, he won't tell me anything b/c of doctor/patient confidentiality and HIPAA.

[Jimmypoo]

I need to read about this guy again like I need a hole in the head!

Ammo wrote:
[quote=mattkime]
I'm hesitant to jump to positive conclusions.

his guy looked perfectly fine for a while too -

Isn't that the guy who had a metal rod go through his head? Seems to me there was a story about him in Smithstonian not too long ago.