just an important milestone as well. you heard pia, her chief of staff, talk about that. and also that she s completely aware that her husband mark kelly is going into space in april. now, that awareness to understand, and his ability to express yourself. such an important milestone. why is it so difficult after a brain injury to speak. and how is it possible then to be able to relearn the ability to do it? it s a good question. let me just show you on this brain model if i can for a second. you know, one of the things that s important is that different parts of the brain do different things. so what we know the injury in the congresswoman s case, this is the left side of the brain, kurd around here somewhere. this area, for example, controls motor strength on the opposite side of the body. so the right side of the body. speech is in this area down here typically. it s a big area. it s redundant. meaning it has lots of different circuits that can sort of fill in if something is dam
examined her for a half hour and won t say it is an attempt to speak. her husband said she is trying. do you have a guess? if you look at this brain model, everything in the brain is location. speech production would be more far forward. speech understanding would be in this area. we know from the fact that she can follow commands that speech understanding seems to be fine. because she has a breathing tube in her neck, that doesn t allow speaking we don t know if speech production is intact. one of the next moves will be transitioning that trak yoft me to what we call a talking trak. we will get a sense. i don t think that s known. it s been extremely helpful and thank you for spending some of friday night with us. thank you, keith. thinking about voting to repair a repeal health care
require as much oxygen in the cases where we re having a hard time giving the brain oxygen and that is a specific type of coma. what we re doing here is not that. i know i asked you if you could bring a diagram or a brain to show us a little bit of what s going on and i take it you have something you can show us? what i have here is a brain model and i don t want to get into the specifics of her case but what i can show you on this model is where the bullet didn t go and why she s doing so well we think. if you look down into the geometric center of this brain model right down in here, this is a critical relay center where all of the information coming up from the spinal cord and the body has to pass through anden parcelled out to the brain and like wiles anything the brain wants to tell the rest of the world or commands it wants to carry out has to pass through that area. if a bullet goes through there it s a very different story. if the bullette goals through the fluid spaces and
understood what i was asking. after the operation, john, they say she s still able to follow commands. hear something, process it and execute a function based on what she s hearing. they have what they are calling a medically induced coma giving lots of medications to keep her brain at rest, obviously trying to sedate her, diminish her pain. but they wake her up periodically, almost every hour usually to make sure the neurological exam we just described hasn t changed. sanjay, a lot of what we are getting from viewers and seeing in the social networks is people saying, wow, how could she have survived a shot to the head from close hand. how rare is it? it is rare. it happens and variables can determine that. the type of munition that s used. the type of trajectory in the brain. let me show you on this brain
to the brain. those things help. she was talking when she got to the hospital, details that we re hearing, candy. she was able to communicate when she got to the hospital, very good sign there and then certainly what dr. rhee said immediately after the operation that she was able to follow commands very important as well. so it is possible. it varies from patient to patient, injury to injury, but it happens, especially in a civilian setting as opposed to a war zone setting. and tell me the second doctor talked about the long road ahead. what do you watch for this is a critical time, it would seem to me, when a lot can go wrong and then maybe later you think okay, there s survivability and what s ahead so what is ahead. it s a very good point, candy. you re short of talking about the binary, is a patient going to be able to survive or not but in the longer run, it is more about sort of function. i just want to show you quickly if i can, candy, on our brain model here. first of all