After all, her loss, like all losses, was relative. If the surgeon had cut a little higher on her right arm, she might not be able to use a prosthetic one. If she had lost a few more inches of her legs, she might not be able to sit up. She could have lost her tongue.

In Chicago, where Lisa went for intensive inpatient therapy at the Rehabilitation Institute in the summer of 2005, she met two women who had lost all four of their limbs. She also met a man who had lost both arms in an electrical accident. He had both legs and could walk, but he had a 2-year-old and a baby on the way and he was sick at the thought that he couldn't cuddle them. Lisa could stroke Lily's cheek and give Hannah a one-armed hug. She still had five fingers, even if they were hypersensitive and sometimes painful.

"My one arm beats them all to hell," she decided.

She also talked to a woman who had lost part of one leg to an infection similar to hers. The woman was bitter, even a year later, and Lisa decided she didn't want to be that woman.

Lisa had lost three limbs, but they hadn't amputated her sense of humor. Even back in the burn unit, not long after she finally grasped what had happened to her, she called her co-workers in the ER at LDS Hospital. "Hi, this is Lisa," she said. "Do you know anybody who needs some shoes?"

· · · · ·

Just before Thanksgiving, she came home to Utah. Before she'd gotten sick, they lived in a cozy cottage near East High. But when it became clear that the house, with its stairs and small nooks, wouldn't work for a wheelchair, Steve had tried to think of a way to hold onto their home — the one constant in their lives. One afternoon in early June he showed up at a Utah audition for the TV reality show "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition." He mailed in an application and never heard back. Lisa's story apparently wasn't TV-worthy.

So that fall, as he was trying to figure out how to pay the premium on Lisa's health insurance — she had been unemployed for six months now and the benefit was running out — Steve scrambled to sell the house and find an acceptable replacement. He moved the girls to Bountiful, into a house that had been retrofitted years ago with wider doorways and an elevator.

Returning home from therapy in Chicago, Lisa opened the door to find all her old things — the furniture, the masks they collected on their travels, her pots and pans — had taken up residence in a house she had never seen before in a suburb she didn't know.