@kreed23
Wow, what a horrible experience for your daughter. Something like that would have a negative effect on any student and tragic events are what has led to Gateway offers in the past, at least those who have posted on CC. I don’t know anyone with an actual Gateway offer.
I sure hope that TAMU admissions takes her experience into consideration. As to whether how explaining the event in her essay versus explaining it in the “extra question” will affect their decision, I don’t really know. Hopefully, just having the info will help. I have heard that several people review each application, hopefully her entire application will touch someone’s heart and they will pull for her. I have my fingers and toes crossed for her! 
Be aware that the Gateway program can be expensive because of taking required Summer classes, dorm costs, missing planned family vacations, etc. Search CC, I think someone mentioned the cost to their family.
I am eternally grateful for the person who read my daughters application and offered her Blinn-TEAM for Fall 2017. My daughter was a Duke TIPS student in the 7th grade, with a perfect math score on the test to qualify her for TIPs, but she suffered a Level 2 concussion at school in November of her 8th grade. She had to be dropped out of Algebra 1 and missed 2 months of school, she had to work to recover from whiplash symptoms, regain her ability to balance and to retrain her eyes to focus on the same line in order to read a line of print. She finished the year with special accomodations. Through a lot hard work and a lot of PT, she recovered enough to score in the “normal” range so she didn’t have acccomodations in HS.
But her first few years of HS were ROUGH as she still had trouble focusing/some memory issues/didn’t regain her ease with Math, only went up to Pre-Cal/had a very deep sleep need/difficulty balancing, etc. all of which affected her grades ( one C in each semester of a couple of years, otherwise As and Bs) and eventually her Senior class placement. She was in the 53% of her HS class, had a gpa of 3.5 unweighted/4.7 weighted, SAT 1250 (670 English 580 Math), ACT 27, 4 years in the same EC plus she was on a competative team 45 minutes away outside of school in her Senior year (I drove her, we were there all day on Saturday & Sunday plus at least 6 hours on Monday and Tuesdays after school, LOL, I don’t know how we kept up that schedule), NO volunteering hours because she had no extra time and no leadership roles. But she did learn a lot of great time management skills and she talked about that in an essay. She just wrote a few words about the concussion/recovery/effect on her HS grades in the “extra question”, and only at my demand. She didn’t want to be “different” but I insisted that she explain why she got off to a slow start in HS and to explain why she was in the 3Q of her class.
Blinn-TEAM turned out to be the perfect place for her. She has finished that program, is now a Junior at TAMU and just finished her first “full TAMU” semester of 16 hours and earned a 4.0! She only had one B in her TAMU classes during her Blinn-TEAM years. She is planning on grad school!
Good luck to your daughter, keep us posted.
And nervous!