ABC’s Bob Woodruff Offers Experience, Hope To Giffords In Recovering From Brain Injury

ABC News correspondent Bob Woodruff, who suffered a traumatic brain injury on assignment in Iraq five years ago, is offering his unique perspective to the family of Gabrielle Giffords. “There is hope,” Woodruff writes in a “Reporter’s Notebook” piece on the ABC News website.

Woodruff, who’d just been named a co-anchor of ABC’s World News, was severely injured by the explosion of an IED.

In telling his story online and on Good Morning America, Woodruff notes just how many similarities exist between his injury and Rep. Giffords’, both suffering trauma on the left side of their brain, and both being fortunate enough to get treatment within 40 minutes:

Like the doctors who saved me almost five years ago, her surgeons knew exactly what to do. Her brain was swelling just like mine. They removed part of her skull on the left side of her head almost exactly like mine, and she is now in a drug-induced coma so that her brain can recover. For me it was 36 days before I woke up.

Woodruff describes in detail his long recovery, and the key role played by family and friends who offered days and days of support at his bedside–exactly as the family and friends of Gabrielle Giffords are doing in Arizona:

Ms. Giffords will be surrounded as well. At the Bethesda Naval Hospital when I was unconscious my friends read books and talked to me, hoping for a reaction — but nothing.

Then one day my oldest daughter, Cathryn, whispered in my ear, telling me that she loved me. At that moment a tear ran down my cheek. The first sign of my return.

Watch the story here, from ABC News: