The Roanoke Times

Printed Dec. 25, 2000

Page Webb was shot in the head.

Bones splintered into her brain. The bullet shot out her mouth and into her right lung, puncturing it. Another bullet lodged into her right thigh.

Doctors told her family that she wouldn’t live more than 48 hours.

Of the six people who survived the Backstreet Cafe shooting, Webb was the most gravely injured.

“It was the most trauma I’ve ever endured in my life,” she said.

For the first time on Friday night, she returned to the bar where her life was forever changed.

Webb, 42, was one of the Backstreet survivors who went to the bar three months after the shooting to show the world that the gunman who ended one life didn’t stop theirs. The night before the gathering, Webb spoke to a reporter for the first time about the shooting and her life afterward.

She was suffering even before the shooting. She is on disability and suffers from fibromyalgia, a disease that will eventually cripple her. She’s had back surgeries that have left her bedridden for long stretches of time.

A few years back when she went through a spate of bad health, she said she found her God.

So when she felt the bullet enter her left temple and began choking on her own blood, she immediately prayed. If this is my time, take me, she prayed while a woman held her head and tried to stop the bleeding.

She can remember the bumpy ride to the hospital, the driver going so fast the medics were thrown back and forth. Then she went into surgery, where she lost five pints of blood.

Days later, when she was watching television in the hospital and heard that someone was still in critical condition, she prayed for that person. She didn’t know they were talking about her.

Eleven days after she was admitted to the hospital, she went home to cope with recovery.

All she could eat was pudding and other soft foods. She visits a pain therapist to learn how to deal with the simple things. It hurts her to lie on her right side, where a 9 mm bullet still lies. Touching her lip is painful. Regaining feeling in the right side of her face remains an uncertainty.

Still, she’s optimistic and wonders how the others from the shooting are doing. She hadn’t been able to get back to Roanoke from her Bland County home to see her friends until Friday night, partly because she was embarrassed about not having any teeth.

Doctors say she can’t open her mouth wide enough to get fitted with dentures. She recently learned her jaw was broken.

It’s been a hard road, but she has dealt with it well.

“As long as I don’t let myself get depressed, I’ll get through it,” she said.

When she feels down, she picks a few chords on her guitar. She hopes to put together a few songs for the CD that Roanoke7.com, an organization that raises money for the shooting victims, plans to put out next year.

Webb receives Medicaid, but there are still plenty of bills to pay. She said without the money that Roanoke7.com and the Hate Free Roanoke Task Force raised, she wouldn’t have been able to pay for her groceries.

She figures her health is at about 70 percent and is looking forward to getting better in the next year.

“I’ve got to get my health back and get some teeth, then I have to start to do more,” she said. She said she wants to help the other survivors and work toward healing the mental wounds that were gouged in the bar.

The ordeal changed many things in her life, but has only made her more thankful for what she does have.

“I used to say my prayers before eating,” she said. “Now I say them all the time.”

Zeke Barlow can be reached at 981-3349 or zekeb@roanoke.com

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