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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