Gabby_ A Story of Courage and Hope - Alison Hanson [139]
About three months earlier, a nurse at TIRR had inadvertently told Gabby that a young girl had died in the shooting. So Gabby was aware of Christina’s death. But she’d never seen photos of Christina or the other victims until I showed them to her that night on my computer.
I held on to Gabby as she digested the news and cried. She didn’t ask questions; she had a hard time saying anything. So I just continued talking to her.
I told her about the funerals I had attended, and she listened. “At Gabe’s funeral, his brother spoke, along with his dad and C.J. from your office. I said a few words on your behalf.”
I tried to give Gabby a sense of what I had said at the funeral—about how Gabe was a great young man who wanted to help people. I told her about the bipartisan resolution to name a meeting room at the U.S. Capitol’s Visitor Center in Gabe’s memory. Gabby knew Ross Zimmerman, Gabe’s father, because he sometimes came in to the office. “Would you like to call Ross one of these days?” I asked her.
“Yes,” she said, and we made plans to do that.
Before she went to sleep, I asked Gabby how she was feeling.
“I’m sad,” she said. “Sad, sad, sad.”
I was sad, too. The rest of us already had six months to grieve for those who died. For Gabby, the grief would be fresh and raw. Still, it was a relief that she finally asked the question we’d all been waiting for. She needed to know who was lost on January 8. Now she did.
It was remarkable, really, that despite everything, Gabby kept soldiering on, giving her all in therapy.
To me, it seemed she was making excellent progress, day by day, but I wanted to better understand the extent of her cognitive abilities, and how all of us could help her continue to improve. I heard good things from several people in the brain-injury field about Dr. Nancy Estabrooks, an expert in neurological communication disorders at Western Carolina University. I invited her to spend the day with us, getting to know Gabby and testing her.
At age seventy, Nancy had studied brain trauma and recovery for decades. Her insights were very helpful. She explained that most people with aphasia—an impairment of language ability—are the victims of strokes or they have head injuries from falls or car accidents or, among soldiers, from IEDs. As I knew, those with brain injuries from bullets rarely live, and if they do, their prognosis is often very bad. Gabby was very much an outlier.
Nancy explained that during World Wars I and II, a large number of soldiers survived being shot in the head, and so there was useful research on the treatment of “traumatic aphasia” based on their cases. Many of these soldiers made a relatively good recovery from aphasia. Some recovered fully. In more recent wars, however, the caliber and velocity of bullets increased. Advances in battlefield medicine have kept more soldiers alive with devastating injuries, but for the few who survive being shot in the head, the gravity of their brain damage tends to be more pronounced. They often have a tougher time recovering than those injured in past wars, which is yet another burden for the health-care system, and their families.
In Nancy’s many decades working with aphasia patients, she’d seen more than one thousand cases of stroke-related aphasia, but only a handful of cases involving shooting victims. As a result, she said, in order to treat the rare survivors like Gabby, aphasiologists still turn to research done in the 1940s, with World War II vets who were shot in the head.
Nancy explained that Gabby appeared to have a form of “nonfluent aphasia,” which meant she had good auditory verbal comprehension but had trouble saying complete sentences. Nancy got up to speed on Gabby’s progress: the “zombie” she was early on, the repetition of the word “chicken,” the great strides she had made since then, both physically and verbally.
Nancy sat with Gabby at the kitchen