Gabby_ A Story of Courage and Hope - Alison Hanson [83]
Ten days later, I tried again. “Gabby, there’s something important that you need to know,” I said. “I’m going to tell you what happened to you.”
She looked at me and waited.
“You were at your first Congress on Your Corner event of the new term,” I said. “It was January eighth at the Safeway on Oracle. This man came up to you with a gun and he shot you. He shot you in the head. We don’t know why he did that. I’m sorry it happened. We all are. But he’s in jail. You’re safe.”
Gabby looked shocked and surprised, but only for a minute. Then it was as if the news wore off and escaped from her mind. She gave no further indication she had heard me.
I tried a third time a week or so later, and it didn’t go well. After I spoke, Gabby began crying uncontrollably, and she kept crying for about a half hour.
I told her neuropsychologist what happened, and he was pleased. “Great,” he said. “That’s an appropriate response. She understood what you said and she cried about it. I’m happy to hear that.” But again, her sadness passed and within hours Gabby seemed to have forgotten what I told her.
Then on March 12, a Saturday, I was sitting with Gabby, and as usual, I was encouraging her to try to ask a question. She looked at me for a while in silence before she spoke. “I wonder,” she said. “I wonder what happened to me.”
It wasn’t really a question, but I gave her credit for it.
I decided to take a different approach to help her understand what she was wondering about. This time, instead of telling her what happened to her, I’d tell her what happened to me. I’d share the story of the shooting from my perspective.
So I didn’t start by mentioning the Congress on Your Corner event. Instead I said, “A couple months ago, I was home on a Saturday morning and the phone rang.” I explained that Pia, her chief of staff, was on the line. “She told me you’d been shot, and that I needed to get to Tucson.” Gabby seemed to be following the story more closely this time.
“Do you remember being shot?” I asked her.
“Yes,” she said. It was hard to know if she really remembered, but she was insistent. “I remember.”
“What do you remember?” I asked.
“Shot. Shocked. Scary,” she said, very clearly, pausing between each word.
I still didn’t tell her that others had been injured and killed. Her doctors had warned us that she might hold herself responsible for their deaths, having hosted the event. How would she handle feelings of guilt and sadness, given her inability to say much or ask questions? We were told we had to proceed very carefully.
A little later that morning, however, Gabby took charge of the flow of information into her life.
For a few weeks, I had been reading articles to her from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Arizona Republic, and Tucson’s Arizona Daily Star. Every day, she seemed to be getting a clearer sense of the stories. She even looked at the front-page headlines and photos on her own, and read the words to herself. It was hard to know just how much she comprehended, but she was definitely engaged in the newspapers.
On this Saturday, there happened to be a teaser at the bottom of the front page of The New York Times: “Doctors Detail Giffords’s Progress.” It pointed to a story on page A-13.
Gabby saw that and started frantically leafing through the paper to find the page. Just then, Angie, her speech therapist, came into the room to bring her to a session. Sitting in her wheelchair, Gabby latched her good left hand onto the railing of her bed, giving all of us the firm message “I’m not going anywhere!” To me, it seemed as if she was thinking, “Everyone has been lying to me about my condition. But now I’m going to get the real story!”
“OK, Gabby,” I said. “Let’s find the story and I’ll read it to you.”
I turned to page A-13 and Gabby watched as I read the story aloud, paragraph by paragraph. Her eyes remained focused on the newspaper. The story was mostly about a news conference held by her doctors at TIRR the previous day. Saying