:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():focal(749x492:751x494):format(webp)/Christa-Pike-Riverbend-Maximum-Security-100126-tout-0c369c042ed44f6b8885f8bc4faf19d0.jpg)
Christa Pike has not eaten any food in over a week, her lawyers revealed at a press conference Wednesday that was held on the steps of a Tennessee courthouse.
Randy Spivey and Luke Ihnen said that their client was awake and speaking one week after she managed to survive two attempted executions, but is still battling a number of serious medical and physical ailments.
“She has a clot on her arm, she has pneumonia, she is not able to swallow yet —so she has not eaten — and she cannot move either of her arms,” Spivey said outside Davidson County Chancery Court.
The loss of motor skills such as the ability to swallow is often caused by brain injuries suffered during traumatic incidents, but can also be caused by spinal or neck trauma and prolonged intubation.
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():focal(776x436:778x438):format(webp)/Christa-Pike-092826-tout-5a17ca29167645b7bfb002d8ed7f86aa.jpg)
It has been eight days since Pike survived two attempted executions at the Riverbend Maximum Security Insтιтution in Nashville.
This means she has not eaten any food in at least eight days, though that number is likely higher because she elected to donate her final meal to homeless individuals in Nashville.
Her attorneys say that additional funds contributed by her supporters resulted in 85 individuals receiving free meals in the days before Pike’s scheduled execution.
That execution failed to kill Pike but the two lethal doses of pentobarbital did wreak havoc on both her external and internal organs, according to a medical expert hired by her legal team.
Dr. Joel Zivot, an anesthesiologist at Emory University, previously told PEOPLE that he believed Pike’s “intravenouses just blew very quickly, and so only a very small portion of the pentobarbital made it into the central circulation into the brain…the rest of it was deposited into the soft tissue of her arms.”
Despite losing use of both arms, Pike is still required to be handcuffed to her hospital bed with her feet shackled.
But six days after surviving those executions, Pike’s prognosis did not look good, her attorneys were told as they prepared to go home for the evening.
“On Monday night [Oct. 5] it was our understanding that Pike was brain ᴅᴇᴀᴅ and that life support would be removed the next day,” Spivey said at the news conference.
Then, on Tuesday morning, Pike “woke up and began talking.”
A spokesperson for Spivey later told PEOPLE that Pike had also “taken a few steps.”
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():focal(749x0:751x2):format(webp)/Christa-Pikeis-attorney-Luke-Ihnen-hold-a-press-conference-outside-the-Metro-Courthouse-in-Nashville-100826-090761d17b97454aa6f41a4f83f3b610.jpg)
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee has halted all executions for one year in the wake of this incident, and a chancellor who heard arguments in the case ruled that the TDOC must preserve all evidence related to the botched execution.
At that hearing, the ᴀssistant attorney general for the state declined to tell the judge if there were plans to try and execute Pike for a third time.
Pike is still struggling to remember all the details of what happened, said Spivey, but is “very aware that the state tried to execute her.”
She is being cared for in an undisclosed Nashville hospital, and during the court hearing on Wednesday, Ihnen asked that a decision be made on the conditions of Pike’s custody while she is a patient at the hospital.
Ihnen said that corrections officers have insisted on keeping Pike shackled and handcuffed to her hospital bed against the advice of medical staff, and promised to provide a medical affidavit confirming this ahead of the chancellor’s decision.