"I'm up on crutches and can even manage with a cane," Dozier, who grew up in the Baltimore area, said in a statement issued by CBS News yesterday. "It's not pretty, but I'm walking on my own."Dozier, 40, suffered wounds to her head, legs and lower body when a roadside bomb exploded while she and her crew were embedded with the 4th Infantry Division in Baghdad. The blast killed her camera crew - Paul Douglas and James Brolan, both of Britain.
"The last I saw Paul and James, they were rushing from their Humvee to `get the shot' of a young U.S. Army Captain, James Funkhouser Jr., greeting Iraqi locals at a streetside tea stand," Dozier said.
The blast killed the three men and an Iraqi translator, and seriously wounded Dozier.
After she was stabilized by an Army medic, she was taken to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany. On June 7, she was transported to the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, where she underwent intensive physical therapy. She was moved to Kernan Hospital, a rehabilitation facility just west of Baltimore, on July 17 and remained there until her release Wednesday.
Dozier will continue her rehabilitation on an outpatient basis.
Since the blast, she has undergone at least a dozen surgical procedures, including one operation that lasted about 11 hours.
As a child, she attended the Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore and graduated in 1984 from St. Timothy's School, a girls' boarding school in Stevenson, northwest of Baltimore.
At St. Timothy's, where Dozier played lacrosse, acted in a production of You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown and won a prize for spoken English, students followed the progress of her healing and wrote get-well notes to her.
While a student at St. Timothy's, Dozier also sang opera, helped build theater sets and spent a semester abroad in Britain.