IN MY SHOES: What It’s Like To Hold A Bedside Vigil
On Saturday, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’ family joined a club no one would ever seek to become members of: Caregivers who spend their days staring at a loved one’s face and fingers, simultaneously praying and searching for signs of responsiveness after a grievous brain injury resulting from a criminal assault, an accident or a stroke. “[M]uch of the nation has been focused on the shootings, the victims who died, the political vitriol, gun control, the path that brought the accused gunman to Giffords's community event that day,” The Washington Post reports, “[but inside her hospital room, a different reality has unfolded”:
On the second floor of the intensive-care unit, behind a phalanx of police officers and a shuttered glass door, they sit by her bed all day and night, a rotating circle that includes her husband, her mother and father, her chief of staff, and her rabbi.
They talk to Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, hoping she can comprehend what they are saying. They take note of every movement of her fingers and legs. They celebrate when she opens her eyes. They sing and pray. They weep. …
Inside the room, amid the humming and beeping of machines monitoring Giffords's condition, her husband and parents and closest aides traverse a treacherous emotional path, balancing each apparently positive development against the knowledge that she may never fully recover.
"Everyone is kind of stranded between a trembling hope and despair," said Stephanie Aaron, Giffords's rabbi.
Giffords's doctors say that she has achieved the "major milestone" of opening her eyes spontaneously, moved her arms and legs, scratched her nose and even sat on the edge of her hospital bed with help. Perhaps next week, doctors will be able to remove Giffords's breathing tube and both they and her loved ones will find out whether and how well she can talk.
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