Pia Carusone knew the day would come when the questions about her boss, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, would become more indelicate.

After answering some of those questions, Carusone, Giffords' chief of staff, told me: "We want to give people a clear picture (about Giffords). It's not in anyone's interest to have anyone feel misled. But it's hard because we satisfy one person and one set of questions, and tomorrow, we're on to the next. The feeling is like it's never enough."

It won't be. Not from now on. The inquiries will keep coming until the day Giffords decides if she will return to Congress.

Is she ready to do that?

No.

Is she close?

No.

The shooting near Tucson on Jan. 8 was horrific, and the grief over the six people killed and 13 wounded, including Giffords, was profound. So, the media backed off.

After all, the fact that Giffords survived and seemed to improve almost daily was miraculous. We reported on the upbeat assessments made by Giffords' doctors. We passed along the optimistic observations of her staff and her husband. We followed with giddy appreciation the love story of Giffords and her astronaut husband, Mark Kelly, and noted each time a political friend or associate visited the congresswoman and offered a tidbit about her progress.

But Giffords is a public figure, about whom tidbits are not enough. So, I asked Giffords' staff if they could explain, in terms that even a newspaper columnist could understand, exactly where Giffords stands.

For example, how well is she able to communicate with them?

"We do a lot of inferring with her because her communication skills have been impacted the most," Carusone said. "If you think of it as someone who is able to communicate with you clearly, it is easy to test them. You can ask them a series of questions, and you can get clear answers back. Whereas with Gabby, what we've been able to infer and what we believe is that her comprehension is very good. I don't know about percentage-wise or not, but it's close to normal, if not normal."

Does her struggle to communicate mean that she's not using complete sentences?

"Exactly," Carusone said. "She is borrowing upon other ways of communicating. Her words are back more and more now, but she's still using facial expressions as a way to express. Pointing. Gesturing. Add it all together, and she's able to express the basics of what she wants or needs. But, when it comes to a bigger and more complex thought that requires words, that's where she's had the trouble."

Is that frustrating for her?

"Absolutely," Carusone said. "When she is trying to come up with a word or a sentence and she's clearly struggling, putting everything she's got into it, and sometimes she's not successful. When she is, there's a relief that comes across her face that she has found the word. But when she can't come up with that, it is absolute frustration."

Who is making the decisions for the congresswoman? Is it Giffords herself or her husband, family and staff?

"It's a combination," Carusone said. "I've told her that we've been approached by every media outlet in the world, at this point, and that when she is ready, there are plenty of options for how we do it. She does not want to do that right now. And that's understandable. For someone who takes her job seriously and has a good relationship with the press and knows how important that is, to feel anything less than 100 percent is daunting. Let alone to feel what she's feeling: a real struggle and challenge with communication."

Is there a timetable established for deciding if she will remain in office?

"The only firm timetable is the legal timetable, and that is May of 2012, when petitions are due for re-election," Carusone said. "That's a firm timetable. Short of that, we'd love to know today what her life will be, what her quality of life will be, which will determine whether she'll be able to run for office and all sorts of other things involving her life. But we just don't know yet. . . .

"We're about halfway through the process that is the most important time for recovery. Patients recover for the rest of their lives, but it's the first 12 to 14 months that you make the biggest jumps. . . . In the doctors' minds, it's not even close to when you begin to make the final prognosis for the quality of her life."

When will the public get its first good look at her?

"This is a one-step-at-a-time process," Carusone said. "It has been a difficult and busy time with everything. Every week, there is something new. I think that we're getting close to the time when Gabby will feel comfortable releasing a photo. Then, we go from there."

How clearly have doctors been able to determine the damage done by the bullet?

"An MRI is the most complete way to look at someone's brain, but she cannot ever have an MRI," Carusone said. "She has bullet shards inevitably in her head, and because MRI is magnetic, that obviously would be bad. That is a problem that shooting victims have. They have to use a CT scan. If she had suffered a stroke, they could do an MRI and get a much better picture of the damage to her brain. But that will never happen."

Carusone and the rest of Giffords' staff are in uncharted territory. While they continue to battle the emotional burden of having lost a friend and colleague, Gabe Zimmerman, and nearly losing Giffords, they must carry out the responsibilities of a congressional office, work with Giffords' husband and family, satisfy the curiosity of the media and answer the concerns of the public.

Given all that, what is the blunt assessment of Giffords, right now, five months after having been shot in the head?

"She's living. She's alive. But if she were to plateau today, and this was as far as she gets, it would not be nearly the quality of life she had before," Carusone said. "There's no comparison. All that we can hope for is that she won't plateau today and that she'll keep going and that when she does plateau, it will be at a place far away from here."

Doctors remain pleased with Giffords' progress and optimistic that she will make what Carusone calls a "tremendously good recovery." But it will take time. And there are no guarantees. And when you are a politician, like Giffords, the questions will keep coming.

"There's so much that is unknown," Carusone said. "With cancer or a heart issue, doctors can tell you a lot more. With brain injuries, they can't. ... A lot of this is a waiting game. That is a difficult thing to explain when speaking to the public. But she was a perfectly healthy 40-year-old who was injured on the job. I'm hoping that buys her a little more patience. But it's a brutal world out there."