KANSAS CITY, KAN. ? It has happened slowly, with small bites and short sentences, but progress has been constant for a woman’s miraculous recovery from the brain injury she sustained in an accident 20 years ago.

Sarah Scantlin made headlines last month when she uttered her first words since being left bedridden and unable to communicate after a drunken driver struck her in 1984. Scantlin was 18 when she was hit while walking to her car in Hutchinson.

Now 38, she has come further than anyone imagined. Doctors and therapists at the University of Kansas Hospital find something new that Scantlin can do every day. She can answer questions and read Dr. Seuss books.

Last week she swallowed food on her own for the first time in 20 years, downing spoonfuls of apple juice.

Today, she is scheduled for surgery to straighten her feet. Doctors want to give her a chance to walk again.

“The strength in her legs is great, but her feet are in a position where they’re not functional for walking,” said Linda Ladesich, one of Scantlin’s rehabilitation doctors. “We don’t know if she’ll walk again, but she deserves the chance to try.”

The surgery on the feet comes first, Ladesich said. Surgery on her upper extremities, to move them out of a contracted position, might follow.

Her parents, Betsy and Jim Scantlin, have been nearby to watch her improve and to see a little more of the old Sarah every day. They try not to ask whether she will walk again or feed herself, or be the confident, happy young woman she was in pictures plastered on her hospital room walls.

“How far will she go? I don’t know,” Betsy Scantlin said. “And no one else knows, either. You can’t worry about diagnosis. If you did, it drives you crazy. You would stop living.”