Still Lisa: Strep infection turned childbirth into battle to survive

At least twice a day, Steve made the trek across the tunnel leading to Primary Children's Medical Center, where Lily was being treated for respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). And the vigil continued in Lisa's room, where Steve would sprinkle her pillow with eucalyptus oil, hoping the fragrance would remind her of an afternoon in Australia when the air was hot and dry and everything was fine.

She slipped in and out of consciousness, full of medications that chemically paralyzed her and sedatives to keep her from panicking because she couldn't move. When she slept she had horrifying dreams. When she wasn't asleep, they gave her the news in small bits, deciding each day how much she could handle. Steve and Dee told the story in short chapters that had to be repeated over and over, the immensity too much to take in. Trying to make sense of it, Lisa groggily figured she must have been in a car crash, but she couldn't remember a thing about it.

She had been off the medications five days before she grasped most of what had happened. On Easter Sunday, near the end of March, her lips dry and a trach tube still in place, she told her mom, "I'm back."

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There's an old parlor game where people compare potential losses. "Which would you rather lose?" the question goes, "your sight or your hearing? Your arms or your legs?"

Here's how Lisa answers the question. "I could live without an arm," she says now. "I could modify my career and adjust." But her legs were another story. "My legs were where I lived and where my heart was."

Stuck in bed in those first weeks of April, everything seemed too hard. How would she be a mother if she couldn't skip down the beach with her daughters, take them hiking, roughhouse on the floor?

But there were milestones that buoyed her. Her kidneys started working again, a few drops of urine that made everyone cheer and put an end to dialysis. Steve brought Hannah and Lily to see her for the first time, and Hannah asked only "Where'd Mommy's hair go?"

On a sunny day near the end of April, Steve and Dee wheeled Lisa through the front door of the hospital for a breath of fresh air. There were tulips and daffodils growing in the island in the middle of the driveway, and a wisp of breeze. Suddenly she was crying, happy to be outside and in motion, even on such a small journey.

There were months of in-patient rehab still to come, first at the University of Utah and then in Chicago. Steve gave her pep talks. Her one arm was a gift, he told her.