Arkansas City ? A Winfield woman who couldn’t talk or feed herself after a 2002 traffic accident in which she suffered head trauma has spoken her first words in over two years.

Tracy Gaskill suffered internal injuries and head trauma when her pickup truck rolled over on U.S. Highway 77 in Winfield on Sept. 3, 2002. Gaskill was in surgical intensive care at a Wesley Medical Center in Wichita before being moved to Medicalodge North, a long-term nursing facility in Arkansas City where she has been since.

But about three weeks ago, Gaskill, 30, began speaking and swallowing, according to family members and medical personnel. Nurse Lynda Marshall said Gaskill was still using a feeding tube until Tuesday.

“It’s amazing, isn’t it?” Dr. David Schmeidler said Wednesday. “I have never seen this happen in my career. I’ve read about it happening, the severely brain damaged recovering suddenly, but never seen it, until now.”

Schmeidler said that when he visited Tracy Gaskill a few weeks ago, she greeted him by saying, “Hi, Dr. Schmeidler.”

“She is actually able to speak and to speak coherently,” he said.

Marshall called Gaskill’s recovery “amazing.”

“After they’ve been without speech and the ability to eat that long, it’s very rare they’re able to come back,” Marshall said.

Tracy Gaskill smiles in her room Wednesday at Medicalodge North, a long-term nursing facility in Arkansas City during a visit with her grandfather, Don Gaskill. Tracy, 30, who suffered critical injuries in a 2002 accident, recently spoke for the first time since the accident.

She noted that Gaskill must undergo speech therapy and work on her cognitive functions and ability to eat on her own.

No one knows what caused the crash that put Gaskill in the hospital, but her family believes the care she received at Medicalodge North and their daily visits and prayers helped her recovery.

“In the last year and a half, she’s indicated that she knows us; she has been watching TV and smiling,” said her grandfather Don Gaskill, of Winfield. “More recently, she started nodding her head when we asked her questions. Then a few months ago, she’d laugh out loud.”

He said that in recent months, nurses at the hospital worked with her to get her to hum, then she started to speak.

Another Kansas woman, Sarah Scantlin, made headlines earlier this year when she uttered her first words since being left bedridden and unable to communicate after a drunken driver struck her in 1984. The Hutchinson woman continues to recover from her brain injury.