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One bone, three nerves, one artery, three veins and three muscle groups had to be reattached if Jessie was to recover with some semblance of normal use of his arm. While De Campos prepared the stump, Rogers marked the corresponding veins, arteries and nerves with sutures on the severed arm. First, De Campos shortened the arm even more, taking away about an inch of bone so that the stump would hold a plate to keep the limb in place. She clamped the bones together--two screws in the stump, two at the overlap and two more in the arm.
That done, Rogers connected the muscle tissue. Wearing magnifying goggles, he began reattaching major nerve endings, which are just slightly thicker than an eyelash. Next, veins and arteries were reconnected. Rogers had to take some veins from Jessie's leg to replace damaged vessels in the arm. Finally, Rogers released the clamps and blood began to flow back into the arm, which he describes as "absolutely white" and very cold. Arteries and veins starved for blood for so long went into spasms as new liquid began to flow. Antispasmodics were administered, and team members massaged the arm.
Five minutes, 10, 15. No response in the arm. "We were nursing this for about 30 minutes," Rogers says. "Then, all of a sudden, all the little cuts in his forearm started to bleed, and we could hear pulses in the arteries." The trickiest part, the doctors say, was stitching the skin back. "It was like putting a jigsaw puzzle together," says De Campos. After 12 hours in surgery, they wheeled him into the recovery room. They could only wait and see if he would survive.
Dave and Claire Arbogast found out about the attack when Vance called them from the rangers' station. It's the second time an Arbogast child has knocked on death's door. In 1994 Dustin spent more than a week in a coma after a car wreck. Now 17 and recovered, he is the family's living hope for Jessie's recovery. Friends who know Jessie talk about a tough kid, one who can hold his own in debates with grownups about the sun and stars, but who is happy to shoot squirt guns and swing from oak trees. When he got a finger stuck in a hole in the school bus two years ago, he remained calm as firefighters cut away the bus to free him.
Last Thursday, 13 days after the attack, Jessie's parents put him in a wheelchair and rolled him around the intensive-care unit, IVs dangling behind them. Jessie responds to pain stimuli, and his eyes are open. But his parents are not sure he can see them. At his bedside, they talk to him about Digimon cartoons and other things he enjoys. The parents were there when De Campos moved Jessie's reattached arm to make him more comfortable, and the boy moved it back. They were there when he wiggled his hand. "They continue to view every small step as a very positive sign of hope," says Sister Jean Rhoads of Sacred Heart Children's Hospital, where the boy has been transferred. Rogers, Jessie's surgeon, says the boy will probably not regain full use of his arm. And his right thigh lost half of its mass during the attack, so he will probably require a brace to walk--if he can walk. Or if he ever wakes up to tell his part of a tale of a boy and a shark on the wrong side of each other.
--With reporting by Alice Jackson Baughn/Ocean Springs and Michael Peltier/Pensacola