Giffords’ office releases first photos of Gabby since shooting

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

On Sunday, the public got its first look at Rep. Gabrielle Giffords since she was shot on January 8 at a Congress on Your Corner event near Tucson.

Rep. Giffords' staff provided two photographs to The Arizona Republic Photos reflect Giffords' recovery and to the Arizona Daily Star First photos of Gabrielle Giffords released, and posted the photos on Giffords' Facebook page.

According to her staff, the decision to share them was made by Giffords and her husband, Mark Kelly, who hope the photos will help Giffords avoid the glare of camera lenses when she begins outpatient therapy later this month.

The photographs were taken on May 17 in the hours before Giffords' cranioplasty surgery by P.K. Weis of SouthwestPhotoBank.com, who photographed Giffords in the garden of the Houston rehab hospital where she is recovering. Weis, the former photo editor of the Tucson Citizen, is also Giffords' friend and said the photos were not altered.

The Arizona Republic published this photo:

The Arizona Daily Star published this photo:

In addition, the East Valley Tribune published this AP article Aide: Time nearing for Giffords' hospital release:

An aide to U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords said Saturday that she could be released from a rehabilitation hospital in Houston as early as this month, offering the latest indication that the Arizona congresswoman is making progress in recovering from a gunshot wound to the head.

Chief of Staff Pia Carusone told The Associated Press that doctors and family are considering "many factors" while making the critical next-step decision to release Giffords from TIRR Memorial Hermann, the hospital where she has been undergoing intensive daily rehabilitation since late January.

"We're looking at before the end of the month. We're looking at early July," Carusone said. "We don't have a date."

The Arizona Daily Star published an editorial opinion on Sunday for all of those mean-spirited nasty sonsuvbitches who keep writing letters to the editor and posting comments that Rep. Giffords should resign from Congress because, oh I don't know, she was the victim of a heinous crime at the hands of a madman. It's too soon to say Giffords can't serve again:

Gabrielle Giffords will never be the same. But this fact and the difficulty of her life today does not mean she cannot return to Congress.

All it means for certain is that Giffords' life will be different from how it was – and different from how she expected it to be. She will live with some level of disability, and this is where we must expand our thinking beyond the all-or-nothing yardstick. A person living with disabilities can be as productive, purposeful and integral as anyone else.

The undercurrent to some of the talk about Giffords' recovery, and her future in politics, is, essentially, that if she's not able to speak as she did before, if she can't write as she did before, if she can't walk as she did before, then she's unfit for her job. These are all false assumptions.

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She has a long way to go. And it's far too soon to know where she will be tomorrow or in a week or a month or six months. She may communicate differently from the way she did, she may no longer have abilities she possessed before the shooting, or at least not at the same functional level.

Yet, even if that turns out to be true, it doesn't mean she cannot serve in Congress. It's too soon to know.

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Calls for Giffords to resign are premature. We need to remember, too, that disability does not mean inability.

Gabrielle Giffords with a disability is more capable than any of these Yahoos currently serving in the Congress. Slide Show: The 10 Worst Members of Congress You've Never Heard Of | The Nation.