Arkansas City ? If Tracy Gaskill could, she would spend her day eating – strawberry swirled ice cream and juicy watermelons and vanilla milkshakes from Sonic.

But most of all, Tracy would eat pizza. Supreme.

Her words delight her grandparents, Don and Stella Gaskill. Since a September 2002 traffic accident left their granddaughter, now 30, in what her doctor calls a vegetative state, Tracy has been nourished through a feeding tube into her stomach.

For nearly three years, her daily diet through that tube has consisted of five cans of a liquid, high-calorie mixture called Jevity.

But during the past few months, the brain-injured woman gradually began using her long-dormant throat muscles again. She laughed. She hummed. She sipped water.

Now Tracy can talk – mostly in one-word answers that began a month ago and brought tears to her grandparents’ eyes.

And she can eat.

Before the accident, Tracy was a student at Cowley County Community College who dreamed of becoming an art teacher, Don Gaskill said. She also worked as an aide caring for disabled children at Creative Community Living, the company that took over their housing and care after the state hospital closed in Arkansas City.

But all that seems like a lifetime ago – before the evening of Sept. 3, 2002, when Tracy rolled her pickup truck on the road between Arkansas City and Winfield. The cause of the accident is unknown.

Tracy was taken by helicopter from the scene to a Wichita hospital, where her grandparents were told the critically wounded woman would likely not survive past noon the following day.

Today, a poster from the children Tracy once cared for hangs on the wall beside her hospital bed at Medicalodge North in Arkansas City. On it are pasted photos of her former young charges with a hand-scrawled message: “Hi Tracy. Thinking about you. We miss you. Everyone wishes you the best.”

That same poster has followed Tracy from hospital room to hospital room. It was up at the surgical intensive care unit where she spent a month. It was taken to the select specialty hospital where the then semi-comatose woman had the ventilator removed. And it remains at the long-term care facility in Arkansas City where she now lives.

Her doctor, David Schmeidler, has made no significant changes to her medication. He credits Tracy’s awakening to her constant care and to occupational and speech therapy. But, most of all, her doctor credits prayer.

While he doubts that Tracy will ever fully recover, he believes that with intensive therapy Tracy will continue to get better.

“The brain is an amazing thing,” Schmeidler said. “People come out of vegetative states and we don’t know why.”