Shooting victim home from hospital, but healing has only begun

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This article was published 13/11/2015 (3629 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Calli Vanderra is finally home.

It’s been three weeks since the 16-year-old Winnipeg girl was shot and critically wounded with a stolen RCMP-issue handgun, and today she was released from hospital.

But the healing is far from over.

“Three days ago, they were telling me she may have to go back in for surgery,” her father, Corey, said Friday morning, just before he left for the Health Sciences Centre to bring his daughter home to the apartment they share.

“She still has infection,” he explained, referring to a chest wound from the bullet that narrowly missed her heart and spine but still damaged her spleen and colon before it exited her lower back.

“But she hasn’t had a fever in three days,” Corey said.

And doctors feel she’s stable enough to be at home.

“She’s not out of the woods,” Corey added, “but they think she will heal quicker and better at home. They feel she would feel mentally better at home.”

Corey said he isn’t sure of the prognosis, partly because the daughter he has raised alone for most of her life has another wound that is just as deep, but not as visible. Calli has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of the random shooting.

The shooting took place outside a Windsor Park convenience store where she and a girlfriend had gone to buy drink just after midnight.

Winnipeg police quickly arrested two suspects in the case. Matthew Wilfred McKay, 22, and Matthew Andrew Miles, 25 have been charged with theft and weapons offences related to a break-in to a marked RCMP vehicle that had been parked outside an officer’s that night. McKay was also charged with two counts of attempted murder.

Calli will still need follow-up medical and emotional care after her expected release later today.

Corey said he will be receiving instructions Friday on how to do her dressing changes and other home care.

Originally he thought she would receive home care, but he later learned that he’ll have to drive her to a clinic twice a day.

Calli will also be receiving follow-up emotional care.

Corey said she’s far from ready to return to classes at River East Collegiate, where she’s in Grade 11.

“She says she is,” he said.

But Corey and the doctors know she’s not.

In the meantime, she will be able to catch up on her school work with a new Dell laptop that was presented to her last weekend by the company’s Winnipeg-based sales manager for Western Canada.

Greg Griffiths had read in the Free Press about Calli needing a laptop. The family has needed more help from others since the shooting. After Corey left his job as a truck driver to care for his daughter, a friend started a crowd-sourcing fundraiser to help with living expenses.

Meanwhile, the stress and worry of what happened to Calli has taken both a physical and emotional toll on the dad.

Last Saturday, while he was holding Calli’s hand as she screamed in pain from a dressing change, Corey passed out and struck his head on her hospital room floor.

Which, in part, explains what he said Friday on his way to pick up Calli. “I just want her home.”

Gordon.sinclair@freeprss.mb.ca