Christa Pike woke up angry and confused in hospital after surviving a botched execution attempt last week, her lawyer said.
The 50-year-old inmate's first words were to ask "Where am I?" and "Who are you?", Randy Spivey recalled during a news conference.
Pike survived two lethal injections on 30 September in Tennessee.
Experts and her legal team say her apparent recovery is unprecedented. No other US inmate has survived a lethal injection from executioners.
A court ordered the state of Tennessee to preserve all evidence related to the failed execution on Wednesday.
Pike continues to receive critical medical care and is being restrained at her hands and feet in her hospital bed, her lawyers said.
Her legal team believed for days that she was brain dead and expected her to be taken off life support at any moment. However in a shock to everyone she began to talk on Tuesday while recalling only limited details about the execution attempt.
Pike had helped the execution team find a vein in her arm and was kind and polite while she was being injected. Both of her arms are now tremendously swollen. She has a blood clot in one of her arms, pneumonia and is not able to swallow.
The recovery is believed to be the only case where a person has survived an execution attempt by lethal injection.
After it became clear she would not die following two rounds of the drug pentobarbital she was taken to hospital where she remained unconscious for days as medical staff cleared her body of the injected chemical.
Earlier on Wednesday lawyers appeared before a judge for an emergency hearing where her team requested that all evidence from the botched execution be preserved.
That evidence could lay the groundwork for a future lawsuit against the state.
Up until yesterday Pike's client was unconscious and unable to communicate, Luke Ihnen said. She is now speaking limitedly.
Tennessee Assistant Attorney General Will Ayers called the situation unusual prompting agreement from the judge. He argued an emergency motion was unnecessary because the state is already compelled to preserve evidence.
Still Judge Chancellor I'Ashea Myles ordered that anything that was in the actual room needs to be preserved and maintained including IV lines and syringes as well as waste like packaging inserts and labels.
The judge demanded documentation on Pike's psychological condition prior to during and after the 30 September execution attempt.
Tennessee Governor Bill Lee has ordered a pause on all executions in the state for the rest of the year and has said he wants answers about what went wrong. The state's prisons chief said he is resigning after the failed execution.
Pike was 18 when she and her then-boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp beat tortured and killed 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer whom they had met at a job training camp for troubled teens.
Shipp was 17 years old at the time meaning he was spared the death penalty because he was not yet legally an adult at the time. He remains in prison.
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