First Gabrielle Giffords images since Tuson shooting published on Facebook

Arizona congresswoman suffered serious head injuries in January shooting in which six people died and 13 were injured The first photographs of US congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords since she was shot in the head in Tucson in January have been published. The imagesappeared on Gifford’s Facebook page on Sunday. The Republican congresswoman for Arizonahas spent nearly five months in a Houston rehabilitation centre, following the mass shooting on 8 January in which six people were killed and 13 were injured. The only previous time she had appeared in the public since the shooting was on 27 April, when she took a flight to Florida to see her husband, the astronaut Mark Kelly, launched into space. Grainy footage, taken from afar, showed Giffords slowly but purposefully walking up the aircraft’s stairs. Last month, as Kelly was orbiting Earth, doctors operated on Giffords’ skull, finally freeing her from wearing a cumbersome protective helmet that her staff members said she hated. Giffords has made remarkable progress, asking for her favourite foods, singing her favourite songs and learning again how to walk and talk, although she struggles to string sentences together. In an interview with The Arizona Republic, Giffords’ chief-of-staff Pia Carusone said Giffords’ limited speaking ability means she relies primarily on facial expressions and hand gestures to communicate. “She is borrowing upon other ways of communicating. Her words are back more and more now, but she’s still using facial expressions as a way to express. Pointing. Gesturing,” Carusone said. “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.” Carusone also said that if Giffords’ recovery were to plateau now “it would not be nearly the quality of life she had before”. “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,” she said. Jared Lee Loughner, 22, has pleaded not guilty to charges stemming from the shooting and is being held in a Missouri jail. A judge declared him incompetent to stand trial, but prosecutors still hope he will eventually be declared fit to answer the charges against him. Gabrielle Giffords United States US politics Republicans Arizona Arizona shooting Gun crime guardian.co.uk

Posted by on June 12, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.