Battling through the pain

One first responder, Cal Fire Engineer Phil Mateer, said Hill's presence of mind and positive attitude impressed everyone there that night. "For her, being in the condition she was in, I was amazed," he said.

And finally, after many pleas, Hill let Weatherwax call her dad. Calmly, she told him there had been an accident, she was all right, "but my arm's gone."

Until that day, Hill's plan after June 1 graduation was to report to boot camp July 2 in South Carolina to start her training with the U.S. Army. She'd enlisted the previous summer for an eight-year post as an airborne combat medic.

After years of horseback riding, raising animals like emus and goats on her father's acreage off Western Mine Road, and working with the livestock at her school farm, she had contemplated careers in agriculture and veterinary science.

But "I like high stress, high action, think-on-your-feet" environments, she said.

She had no Plan B.

Her battles now involve the thousands of otherwise forgettable actions that make up daily life - from pulling the neoprene compression sock onto her upper arm, to holding down paper so she can more easily write, to dressing, buckling her belt, saddling a horse, sweeping the house and diapering her baby sister, Charlee, 6 months.

Many of these chores she's mastered, creatively using her teeth or her toes, walls and other surfaces to manipulate objects or hold things in place.

"The way she does her hair is incredible," Weatherwax said of Hill's casual updo one day last week, mimicking how she'd twisted it into place and leaned into a wall to hold it while she used her single hand to fasten a clip.

"She can do a lot of things by herself, and I don't know how," said Castellanos, whose own contributions include buttoning Hill's pants when she gets to school. "She can tie one shoe - because she uses her toes."

Hill also has acquired a laptop computer with voice recognition software, thanks to a community fund-raiser, and is grateful to be ambidextrous, so she can still write.

But it's Hill's independence, strength and what her mother calls "amazing coping skills" that seem best to explain the girl's determination to overcome the loss of her dominant arm.

She told her mother that even in the minutes after the accident, on her way to the fire station, she knew her arm was lost and "it was irrevocable," Sue Hill recalled, "and she realized it wouldn't be any use being angry or depressed or upset about it, because it was gone. She couldn't get her arm back."

Except for one moment in the hospital in which she tried to catch a dropped water bottle with a hand that wasn't there any longer, Kya Hill said she's been amazed at the speed with which her body naturally rewired itself and began to compensate. She soon started dreaming of herself with one arm, as well, as her loss "became part of my reality."

She no longer experiences phantom pain and said she mostly has the sensation that the fingers of her right hand are glued together and her arm is bent up.

But Hill is having to completely rethink how she functions with her acquisition of a sophisticated prosthetic arm that's requiring her to strengthen and retrain the muscles in her upper arm and shoulder in both isolated and coordinated function.

The timing of her accident means she's benefitting from vast improvements made in upper limb prostheses over the past five or six years, driven by high numbers of amputees returning from military service in Iraq and Afghanistan, though civilian amputees far outnumber soldiers who have lost arms or legs.

Until recently - and despite extraordinary advances in lower limb prostheses - prosthetic arms were not much improved from a century ago, said Southern California prosthesis designer Randall Alley,

who consulted on Hill's case with Petaluma fabricator Drew Hittenberger.

They were heavy and not especially functional, consisting mainly of a kind of hooked pinching device. Most arm amputees decided to do without.

But Hittenberger said

Hill needed - and deserved - a state-of-the-art limb if she was going to deliver cows and ride horses, hunt and do all the other physical things to which she's accustomed.

"If there's anyone who will use this, it's her," he said.

Assembled from a wrist, an elbow and a multi-articulating, robotic hand run on rechargeable batteries and acquired from different manufacturers around the globe, the arm has a custom-made fitting shaped to Hill's upper arm and worn with a harness. In a few weeks, it will be remade in carbon fiber - with the pink camo covering.

Two electrical contacts triggered by contractions in what's left of her biceps and triceps, and the muscles between her shoulder blades, signal the arm or hand to move.

But opening, closing, bending and turning are one thing, Alley said. Smoothly performing day-to-day tasks is something altogether different and depends in many cases on figuring out how to

position the hand and simple practice over the months ahead.

After the first two days of working with it, Hill's muscles were exhausted.

Not to mention, she said, "I'm guessing it won't look that flattering with a bikini."

But Hill was clearly thrilled when, with concentration and a twisted face, she first isolated and activated the correct muscle fibers to open the fingers.

"That's so cool," she said, her contorted face breaking into a huge smile.

Her dad, who fought for weeks with his HMO to cover enough of the prosthesis that it was made possible, wept as he viewed his daughter for the first time in her new arm.

Tears in his eyes, clearly overcome, he simply observed, "Look how whole she looks."

You can reach Staff Writer Mary Callahan at 521-5249 or mary.callahan@pressdemocrat.com.