Gabrielle Giffords's Recovery

I promised to update on Representative Giffords.

Here's this report at WaPo, "Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’s road to recovery includes stop on House floor":

On Monday, the Arizona Democrat flew on a commercial jet from Houston to Washington, where she surprised her colleagues by showing up to vote — her first vote since the Jan. 8 shooting. After a meal with her staff Tuesday, Giffords boarded a plane back to Houston, where she is
still undergoing five days a week of intensive outpatient physical therapy.

The simple one-day journey provided new insights into her progress since the incident that left her with a significant brain injury, friends and specialists said Tuesday.

“In the beginning she could hardly get one word out,” recalled Richard Carmona, a family friend and former surgeon general who is not treating Giffords but has kept tabs on her recovery. Now, “she can speak and put a sentence together. Sometimes, she’s a little slower and a little more thoughtful.”

The mobility on the right side of her body was damaged, much like a stroke patient’s, he said. But she can now walk largely un­assisted. Her improvement has been “really quicker and better than anybody expected,” he said.

Giffords is undergoing three types of rehabilitation, Carmona said: physical therapy to strengthen her right side, occupational therapy to help her with day-to-day tasks such as using a knife and fork, and cognitive therapy including reading and word games. All are “meant to strengthen all the functions that were diminished or lost,” he said.

Giffords still struggles to communicate, a limitation that sometimes leaves her frustrated, friends said. But they said they do not doubt her cognitive abilities and are confident that she understood the debt issue when she voted Monday.

“I guess the most astonishing thing has been how her cognitive abilities seem never to have been affected in the first place. Her ability to know what is going on around her is complete,” said Michael McNulty, her friend and campaign chairman, who has visited with Giffords about every few weeks since she moved from her district in Tucson to Houston, where her husband is based. “She continues to have a lot of speech therapy. And she will continue to until she returns to her eloquent self.”

Still more at that top link.