Christa Pike update

NBC News -  One month ago, Christa Pike survived what seemed impossible: a lethal injection in which two rounds of the drug had already entered her body. Medics took her from the Tennessee death chamber and she was placed on a hospital ventilator; she regained consciousness days later.

Now, Pike, the sole woman on Tennessee’s death row, says she is healing in a prison medical ward, but that the pain she still feels extends far beyond the physical.

“There hasn’t been a moment since that night when I haven’t been in pain,” Pike, 50, said in her first public statement, which her legal team shared Friday. “My body hurts. My arms hurt. My hands hurt. My throat hurts. I still struggle to speak. And the pain isn’t just physical. There is pain in my mind and in my soul.”

Pike, who has been on death row for three decades for murdering Colleen Slemmer, a 19-year-old classmate, was discharged from the hospital and returned to her Nashville prison 10 days after the attempt to execute her Sept. 30 went awry. Her arms were left swollen and bruised after the execution team tried to insert intravenous lines to deliver two rounds of the lethal drug pentobarbital into her bloodstream, her legal team said. Medical experts have suggested Pike’s injuries could have been the result of incorrect needle insertion or the chemical leaking into her tissue.