TUCSON, Ariz. – Recovering from a gunshot wound to the head depends on the bullet’s path, and while doctors are optimistic about Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’ odds, it can take weeks to months to tell the damage.

Doctors say the bullet traveled the length of the left side of the Arizona congresswoman’s brain, entering the back of the skull and exiting the front.

Fortunately, it stayed on one side of her brain, not hitting the so-called “eloquent areas” in the brain’s center where such wounds almost always prove fatal.

Importantly, Giffords was responding nonverbally Sunday to simple commands in the emergency room — things like “squeeze my hand.”

That implies “a very high level of functioning in the brain,” said Dr. Michael Lemole of Tucson’s University Medical Center, Giffords’ neurosurgeon.

Now, her biggest threat is brain swelling. Surgeons removed half of her skull to give the tissues room to expand without additional bruising, Lemole said.

That bone is being preserved and can be reimplanted once the swelling abates, a technique the military uses with war injuries, added his colleague and trauma surgeon Dr. Peter Rhee.

Adding to Giffords’ good prospects is that paramedics got her to the operating room in 38 minutes, her doctors said. Now she is being kept in a medically induced coma, deep sedation that rests her brain. It requires a ventilator, meaning she cannot speak. Doctors periodically lift her sedation to do tests and said she continues to respond well to commands.

The brain’s left side does control speech abilities and the movement and sensation of the body’s right side, Lemole noted. But he wouldn’t speculate on lasting damage.

There’s no way to predict just how much disability a wound that traverses multiple regions will leave, because our neural connections are so individual.

 

Copy the Story Link