Woman shot in head leaving hospital
PHOENIX — Three months after she was shot in the head in the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history and put on life support, an Arizona woman is smiling and talking, demonstrating a recovery that doctors at a Phoenix hospital are calling miraculous.
Jovanna Calzadillas will leave Barrow Neurological Institute Thursday and go home with her husband and two children.
Arriving at a news conference Wednesday in a wheelchair with her right side immobile, she smiled and said hello to reporters as she was lifted onto a seat in front of news cameras.
Declining to take questions, she instead slowly read from her own short, prepared statements.
“On Oct. 1, a part of me changed that night,” she said. “Even though I will not be the same Jovanna, I will come back strong.”
That night is when the 30-year-old mother and her husband, Frank, a police officer with the Salt River Police in metro Phoenix, were at the outdoor Route 91 Harvest Festival in Las Vegas.
They were cheering for country singer Jason Aldean when gunman Stephen Paddock opened fire on the crowd. He killed 58 people and wounded 851 others before killing himself.
A critically wounded Calzadillas was taken to University Medical Center in Las Vegas. Three doctors told her husband there was nothing they could do and she had a “nonsurvivable injury.”
While considering whether to take her off life support, Frank Calzadillas dreamed that his wife came to him.
“She hugged me and kissed me and she said everything’s going to be OK. She just walked away,” he said.
So Calzadillas’ family instead made plans to fly her back to Phoenix for medical care closer to home. She arrived at Barrow on Oct. 19.
By the beginning of November, she no longer needed a ventilator. Two weeks later, she could drink from a cup on her own and eat ice cream. She has since been going for short walks with the help of a device called an exoskeleton, a wearable robot designed to help patients with brain injuries walk.
Frank Calzadillas said he doesn’t blame any of the Las Vegas doctors for their initial prognosis.
“Medical science is what it is,” he said.
