A year ago Tuesday, ABC journalist Bob Woodruff woke up from a coma, 36 days after being severely injured by an improvised explosive device while riding in an Iraqi army tank in Taji, Iraq.
It's a day that Woodruff and his wife Lee figure they'll celebrate every year.
"There's a name for this, actually," Lee Woodruff told Canada AM Tuesday. "It's called your 'wake-up day.' It's the day, like a birthday, I guess, where you celebrate the day you woke up from the coma after a brain injury."
Woodruff had been on the job as the news "ABC World News Tonight" co-anchor for only 28 days when he was badly injured in the explosion while embedded with the 4th Infantry Division.
The hatch on the tank Woodruff was riding in was open and his head and upper body were severely injured by shrapnel in the explosion.
"When I got hit, I got rocks all over the side of my face. My shoulder was smashed completely in the back." Woodruff explained, the scars still visible on his jaw.
The bombing shattered the left side of Woodruff's skull. A rock the size of a loonie had punctured his neck and lodged next to an artery.
"A lot of blood was coming out. One of the guys I was working with in the tank was holding his fingers on my neck to keep the blood from coming out," he explained.
"Obviously, I don't remember much of it. When the IED exploded on us, I don't really remember that."
But there is one moment that remains with him.
"When we got hit, I was out for about a minute and I saw my body below, like a dream, with whiteness around me. And that's about it.
"I woke up and I saw Vinny, my producer and Doug Vogt, my cameraman. And I asked them if we were alive and he said, 'Yes.' And then I was awake for another 10 minutes before I went out for those 36 days."
When Woodruff finally awoke, the first thing he said to his wife, Lee, who was at his bedside, was "Where have you been?"
"Part of me wanted to strangle him because it was like 'Where do you think I've been for the last five weeks?! Rubbing your gross, disgusting Iraqi-soiled feet,'" Lee said with a laugh.
"And of course the other part was just so grateful. I could not believe that this -- what we'd hoped and dreamed and prayed about for so long -- here it was."
Bob's brain injury had left him with aphasia, leaving him unable to properly use the language centre of his brain, a condition that remains.
"In the beginning, when I woke up from the coma, I couldn't recall the names of my brothers, the names of countries. I couldn't even name Canada. So many words were difficult. And over several months, it got better and better. And every week, every day, it gets better."
The Woodruffs have now written a book together about their experience, "To Iraq and Back: A Family's Journey of Love and Healing," describing Bob's surgeries, the pneumonia, the sepsis, and the very difficult recovery.
Woodruff's Canadian-born cameraman, Doug Vogt, also sustained head injuries in the bombing and has now recovered. The 46-year-old, who won three Emmy awards while covering events for the CBC, ABC and BBC, told Canada AM earlier this year that the incident has made him reevaluate his career as a war cameraman. He now plans to get involved in cinema work.
Woodruff, on the other hand, wants to continue reporting. He puts his abilities at about 90 per cent of what they were before the attack and he continues to go to rehabilitation twice a week.
Back at work for ABC News full-time now, he intends to cover a new beat: returning soldiers. As for whether he'll ever return to the anchor chair, now filled by Charles Gibson, Woodruff is unsure, though he has said it's a possibility.
But for now, he's content to just be grateful.
"It's absolutely remarkable I've come as far as I have."
