He’s her “rock.”
A weary but devoted Mark Kelly has kept a constant vigil at the bedside of his wife, Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, at the hospital where she was rushed after being shot in the head during a demonic gunman’s rampage.
Kelly, a NASA astronaut, has barely moved from Giffords’ side, where he’s often seen sitting quietly next to her bed, gently holding her hand as she lies in the intensive-care unit at University Medical Center in Tucson.
He takes only short breaks for food, to go to the restroom or to visit Giffords’ staffer Pam Simon, the pol’s community-outreach director, who was also shot in Saturday’s siege.
“He has not left the hospital,” said C.J. Karamargin, Giffords’ communications director.
“Mark has been a rock. He’s making sure his wife gets the best medical care.”
For now, it appears his steady presence is helping.
Giffords, who was in a medically induced coma, opened her eyes for the first time yesterday — including once for 30 seconds — as her overjoyed family and congressional colleagues looked on.
“The doctors couldn’t believe it. They said this is such a good sign,” Giffords’ close friend, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), told the Arizona Republic newspaper.
In an emotional moment, Kelly asked his wife to touch his wedding ring.
“She started doing that. She just started rubbing his arm,” Schultz said. “It was the most incredible experience that I’ve ever had.”
Trauma surgeon Dr. Peter Rhee said the congresswoman “is getting better every day.”
“She was able to actually feel her wounds herself . . . We are very happy,” he said.
“Every day from now until the weekend is the time that if something was going to go bad, it would happen around this time period. Nothing has happened.”
Medical experts agree that Kelly’s loving, unwavering presence could be a reason his wife is progressing so remarkably well.
“It’s absolutely essential,” said Mary Hibbard, a neurorehabilitation psychologist at NYU Langone Medical Center.
“Often when people emerge from coma, they’ll tell you stories of how reassuring it was to hear voices of loved ones.”
When someone is in a coma, they are often confused and completely disoriented in the brief moments they have during consciousness.
“If you come into the moment and see a loved one, hear a familiar voice, it reminds you of where you need to go back to,” said Dr. Stephan Mayer, director of neurocritical care at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center.
“Those little glimpses of the life that you’re away from, I think it makes a world of difference.”
By nearly all accounts, the life that Giffords is away from — and the one that she created with Kelly — is pretty remarkable.
They met in 2003 on a trip to China with the National Committee on US-China Relations.
At the time, Kelly was married with two kids and living in Houston. Giffords, an Arizona native, had a boyfriend.
A friendship was born, and the two kept in touch through e-mail.
When Kelly divorced his wife, Giffords coached him back into the singles scene, even advising him on how to treat women he dated.
For one unusual get-together, Giffords invited Kelly to tour an Arizona state prison. She was working on death-penalty legislation and figured that Kelly, the son of a police officer, would enjoy the trip.
She later joked he was interested only in sitting in the electric chair.
By the time Giffords ran for Congress in 2005, things were starting to heat up.
After surmounting the difficulties of a long-distance relationship, Kelly, now 46, and Giffords, 40, were married in 2007 at an organic-produce farm in her home state of Arizona.
In keeping with the green theme, the bride wore a recycled Vera Wang wedding dress, borrowed from a pal.
Inside her wedding ring, Kelly — a veteran of three space flights — inscribed, “You’re the closest to heaven that I’ve ever been.”
Friends say they are perfect together — accomplished in their own fields and able to enjoy the smaller things in life together.
“Each one is gifted in what they do. It brings them together tremendously,” said a friend of Kelly from Houston, who declined to give his name.
Kelly is scheduled for a flight on the space shuttle Endeavour in April, but because of his wife’s condition it is unclear if he will join the mission.
“It is just too early to speculate,” NASA spokeswoman Nicole Cloutier-Lemasters told Space.com.
Before the shooting, Giffords had spoken of the nervousness she felt seeing her husband launched into space.
“I’m always on pins and needles wondering, will this be the last conversation I am going to have with my husband?” she told The Daily Beast in an interview last year.
But it was Kelly who faced his worst nightmare Saturday — when he first got the news in Texas that his wife had been shot.
He rounded up his kids, took a friend up on a generous offer of a private jet and rushed to get to Giffords’ bedside.
But midway through the gut-wrenching flight, Kelly saw a TV report — false, but devastating — that his wife had died of her wounds, a friend told The Post yesterday.
Although Kelly spoke to his gravely injured but conscious wife by phone immediately after the carnage, for a miserable few minutes he believed she had died.
Kelly grabbed the plane’s satellite phone to call the hospital, where doctors assured him his wife was still alive.
“[They said] I know for a fact it’s not true,” the friend said. “They said ‘Gabby’s in surgery.’ ”
The horrible mistake mortified Kelly, a shuttle commander who flies to Arizona regularly to see his wife, a third-term congresswoman.
But it wasn’t just Kelly blindsided by the erroneous reports.
His twin brother, Scott Kelly — also an astronaut, who is currently on board the International Space Station — also heard news that Giffords died, the friend said.
Scott Kelly made frantic calls to the family from space and learned that the reports were wrong.