'I've never looked back'

Cassi Moore could keep her hands, or what remains of them, tucked into pockets or gloves. She could make a point to always wear long pants or skirts so that fewer people would notice the bionic ankle on her right leg.

But the organically high-spirited Windsor resident and El Molino High alumnae figures that if she hides the effects of the bizarre, fast-moving infection that almost killed her 11 years ago, curious youngsters might no longer ask her what happened to her fingers and her legs.

She figures that if she covers up, grown-ups who struggle with amputations — or who fret for loved ones who do — will have no cause to approach her to ask how she has coped with her multiple amputations.

“I don’t feel a need to hide,” the blonde and bespectacled Moore said.

For more than a decade now, an important aspect of her survival and recovery has been the impromptu conversations with people brave or inquisitive enough to speak with her after they notice that nine of her 10 fingers are mostly gone and she walks on a prosthesis. Those encounters have chipped away at the barriers between the able-bodied and the disabled.

But that’s only one reason that Moore, 42, doesn’t try to cover up the fact that she has stubs for fingers and her right leg is missing below the knee and she wears a brace on her left calf because the front half of her left foot is gone, too.

It’s true also that she finds it’s just more comfortable to go bare-handed and to wear pedal-pushers. And the mother of three believes that what happened to her extremities days after common bacteria entered a tiny cut on a thumb during a Mendocino County camping trip in mid-1998 isn’t extremely important.

What’s important is that she’s alive.

Moore remembers coming around at the UC San Francisco Medical Center after 22 days in a coma. Standing at her bedside were her emotionally wrung-out husband, Dan, a Sonoma County jail employee, and her equally exhausted yet elated parents, Bill and Pat Smith of Santa Rosa.

Moore knew she had been through one horrendous and excruciating ordeal, and she asked her family what caused it. They told her it was a ghastly case of necrotizing fasciitis — flesh-killing bacteria.

Apparently, common Group A strep — streptococcal bacteria — had entered a small cut on her left thumb while she and daughter Charlee, then 10, and sons William, 8, and Danny, 5, were practicing martial arts at a tae kwon do camp on the Navarro River.

Even before they broke camp, Moore, then 31, felt achy and suspected she was coming down with the flu. At home three days later, Moore suffered the worst pain of her life — worse than childbirth, she said.

It came from deep within her left side. Her family was horrified to discover that a bruise on that side had burst open and was seeping blood.

When she arrived by ambulance at what would be the first in a sequence of hospitals, Sebastopol’s Palm Drive, she had no detectable pulse and her kidneys had shut down from toxic shock. She was near death.

Thanks in large part to a nurse who recognized the symptoms, doctors confirmed that a fast-advancing infection of strep bacteria was killing tissue on Moore’s side. The bacteria had entered her bloodstream through the cut on her thumb and had attacked a weakened area — the small bruise on her side where she’d elbowed herself during a tae kwon do drill.

Radical surgery halted the advance of the bacteria by cutting away healthy tissue ahead of it. Moore’s fingers and toes turned black and shriveled, requiring amputation, not because of the infection directly but because of bloodflow constrictors that doctors deemed necessary to direct blood to the massive wound on her side.

She was still in terrible shape when she opened her eyes after three weeks in a coma, but curious. She asked her husband and her parents what had done this to her.

The answer she received then, in the summer of ‘98, was familiar to her. “I’d heard about necrotizing fasciitis on 20/20,” she said.

Her question answered, Moore burst into tears and thanked God that though the unbelievably strange and virulent disease had ravaged her, it did not kill her.

“At that moment, I don’t know how to describe it,” she said. “A peace came over me and I’ve never looked back.”

She has lived on. Recently the staff at Hanger Prosthetics and Orthotics fitted her with a state-of-the-art computerized right ankle that reads the terrain as she walks and raises and lowers the toe of her artificial foot. After years of limping and tripping on less sophisticated prostheses, she now has a nearly natural gait.

Moore drives — the playful license plate on her red Ford reads “ONE THUMB” — and over time she’s figured out how to use her one complete thumb and nine stubs to thread a needle, resume playing her guitar and keyboard, operate a computer, ride a bike, pick up a dime and embrace her three grown-up children and Dan and her other loved ones grateful to get back as much of her as they did.

People sometimes stare at her, yes they do. But she’s not about to hide.