She longs these days to be vertical. At home she will wear 8-inch kneeless "stubbies" that resemble pipes on small platforms. But in rehab she is trying to master the grand prize — with diligence and a certain amount of luck, she may one day walk on "C-legs" with bending knees and flexible ankles and a microprocessor that lets the two joints talk to each other.

First, though, she must show the insurance company she has mastered the practice legs in rehab. They're heavy and burn energy she doesn't have and may not get. Progress comes in tiny spurts and hinges on small things, like whether the sleeves that cover her stumps are precisely aligned to avoid painful pressure points. She has no guarantee that she will ever really walk, on her own, without the harness, but she works at it, hour after hour, heel toe, heel toe. It's exhausting, and as she tires she beckons to a therapist across the room.

"Christine, do you want to hold me?" she asks, then realizes how funny that sounds. "Hold me," she vamps in a husky voice.

She cannot yet drive and relies on a large network of friends to take her everywhere — the rigid schedule of walking therapy and hand therapy and doctors appointments that consumes her time and energy. The friends come, one says, not from a sense of duty but because they long to spend time with her. Even when doctors were removing pieces of her, notes a woman who helped care for her, "Lisa would ask about your kids and knew their names."

Because she lost part of her intestine, she doesn't absorb nutrients well, so eating is one more complication that must be considered and planned. She also lost fat and muscle when skin was taken for grafts. So she picks foods that are high in protein and energy. Once a Doves chocolate girl, she now craves vinegar and salt and green olives, her taste buds altered by the damage to her tongue.

It takes at least an hour to get ready to go anywhere each morning, 20 minutes and someone's help, just to attach her new electric arm. It's a complicated gadget, programmed so that flexing the triceps muscle in her stump opens the hand, relaxing the muscle closes it. To turn the wrist she must swing the upper arm back and forth. The arm is a work in progress: she has to decide if she wants an elbow, because elbows are not necessarily the most practical of nature's inventions. A microchip controls the strength of her grip.