An Arizona mom shot in the head during the Las Vegas massacre will leave the hospital Thursday, less than four months after the attack left her on life support with what doctors called “non-survivable injury.”
Jovanna Calzadillas, 30, beat the long odds, and is being discharged from Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Ariz., to finally return home with her two kids and her husband.
Doctors called the recovery a miracle, but her right side is immobile.
Sitting in a wheelchair Wednesday, she slowly read a statement to the press.
“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.”
The mother was enjoying the Route 91 Harvest Festival that night with her husband, Frank, a Phoenix police officer who had just returned from Afghanistan, where he’d been deployed by the Air Force.
Amid cheers from the crowd for country star Jason Aldean’s performance, Stephen Paddock sprayed the crowd with a hail of bullets from the 32nd-floor window of his Mandalay Bay resort room. He murdered 58 people and injured another 851 before turning a gun on himself.
After Calzadillas was hit, she was rushed to University Medical Center, where Frank considered removing her from life support.
It was then that she came to Frank in a dream — and “said everything’s going to be OK,” he said.
Calzadillas was then brought to Phoenix for additional care, while another doctor called the prognosis “pretty grim.”
By November, she began eating and drinking on her own, walking and speaking.
And she’s refusing to give up on the therapy she’ll need on her long road back to health.
“My kids and my family — I will not quit on them and I will not quit on myself.”