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CANDACE RONDEAUXAn enemy rocket nearly took off Paula Wikle's arm in October. Her life since has been a series of steps back. She's nearly there.
TARPON SPRINGS - At first, the nightmares wouldn't go away.
The flashbacks sneaked past the painkillers that had become Paula Wikle's guardian. They slipped in under her nausea, slid past her wall of pain.
It didn't take much to trigger her memory of that day - a smell, a remark. Then she was back in Baghdad, alone in her room at the Rashid Hotel, the first day of Ramadan just dawning on that dusty October day.
Allahu akbar, came a voice from overhead. The alarm on the bed stand flashed 6:10 a.m.
Allahu akbar, the Muslim call to prayer came again. "God is great."
Still sleepy, she lay for a while. The first rocket blast rocked her bed. The second shot chunks of concrete over her head. The third shook the building and lifted her out of bed. She dove for cover.
She couldn't feel her right arm and didn't even look at it. She was sure it had been blown away. She didn't panic. She put pressure on her wounded arm to stop the bleeding. She walked out of the room and got help.
Weeks later at Tampa General Hospital, her flashbacks began to subside and Wikle, 34, knew she was okay.
"I'm a lucky girl," she said.
Four hospitals, 10 surgeries and a whole lot of love. That's what it took to put her arm together again. Flying debris shattered part of her humerus, the bone from the shoulder to the elbow, causing nerve damage and gaping wounds.
Not to mention the number it did on her head. A State Department employee who had been in Iraq just six days before the Rashid Hotel attack, Wikle was a mental wreck afterward. She hated to be alone. Panic attacks bore down on her with the force of a sledgehammer.
"She was really spooked," said Wikle's Tampa General surgeon Mark Mighell.
Now, roughly four months after the attack, Wikle says it was her friends, family, doctors and nurses who kept her sane. Five women who work for Helen Ellis Memorial Hospital's home health care program in Tarpon Springs cared for her virtually around the clock for months.
Wikle's longtime friend Peggy Paino, 51, is a registered nurse at Helen Ellis Memorial. She and others made sure Wikle got her intravenous antibiotics three times a day after she moved home to Tarpon Springs, where she stayed with a friend late last year.
"She was a mess when she came home," Paino said. "She was distraught, and she was in a lot of pain."
Thursday, sitting at a table at a Tarpon Springs restaurant alongside her friends from Helen Ellis Memorial, Wikle chuckled as she said that luckily, she's left-handed. She can't do much with her right arm yet, though doctors expect her to regain some use. The nightmares have not entirely gone away yet, either.
But there's progress. Last week was the first time in months Wikle could take a shower by herself. She does an hour of physical therapy three times a week at the Florida Orthopaedic Institute in Tampa. She figures it won't be long before she's her old self and can go sail fishing again.
"I'm not 100 percent yet, but I'm getting there," Wikle said.
Wikle was one of 47 State Department workers stationed in Iraq when anti-American guerrillas fired nearly two dozen rockets at the Rashid Hotel on Oct. 26. Formerly a member of the department's support staff at the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala City, Wikle volunteered to fill in for two months as an office manager in Iraq.
A former Air Force senior airman who grew up in Tarpon Springs, Wikle was familiar with the chaotic scene that greeted her at Baghdad International Airport in October. She threw on a standard-issue Kevlar helmet and flak jacket, grabbed her bags from the heap of luggage on the tarmac and got on the bus to town.
Security in Baghdad was especially tight during Wikle's first five days in Iraq. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz was staying at the Rashid Hotel that week.
Wikle's assignment was to provide administrative support to American efforts to rebuild Iraq's fractured government. There wasn't much time for sleep. Each morning she would wake up, make a list of about 10 things to do and end up doing 40. Yet she loved it. "It's not that often that you get to help rebuild a country from ground up," Wikle said.
On Oct. 26, Wikle had planned to call a few cell phone companies about their operations. With the monthlong Muslim holiday just beginning, she looked forward to a relatively quiet Sunday.
It was anything but.
The rockets that hit the 14-story hotel wounded 15 people and killed Army Lt. Col. Charles H. Buehring, 40.
Wikle survived, but her right arm was shredded. It looked like a shark had chewed a couple of softball-sized holes in her flesh. Army medics took her to a military hospital where doctors immediately operated on her arm before sending her to Germany. Meanwhile, a friend helped Wikle get in touch with her family.
Still reeling from painkillers, Wikle underwent two more surgeries at the American military hospital in Germany. Four days later, she was flown back to the United States, where she underwent two more surgeries at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington D.C.
Not long after that, State Department officials got in touch with Mighell at Tampa General. An orthopedic surgeon who specializes in upper limbs, Mighell spent 10 years in the Navy, is in the inactive reserves and served in Iraq as a medical officer during the Persian Gulf War.
"The first gulf war was nothing like this one where so many people are coming home with arms and legs amputated," said Mighell (pronounced "Mile").
So far, 550 members of the American military have been killed in Iraq, and 2,743 have been wounded, according to a recent Defense Department count. Estimates of reported civilian deaths in Iraq range from 8,400 to a little more than 10,000, according to Iraqbodycount.net, a Web site run by volunteers in Britain. There are no official government estimates on civilian casualties.
Mighell tried to be upbeat when he first met Wikle when she arrived at Tampa General about two weeks after the attacks. She was her usual chatty self, Wikle said, but still a little on edge. She asked him to do everything in his power to save her arm so she could live a normal life again. Mighell worried out loud that an infection in her arm might force him to amputate.
"That's the first question that comes out of everyone's mouth," Mighell said. "Am I going to be normal again?' And the reality is that you're not."
There's nothing normal about going through 10 surgeries in a little more than three weeks. But doctors saved Wikle's arm and she withstood the test. Mighell consulted with the hospital's team of infectious disease specialists and plastic surgeons about Wikle's injury.
Once he was satisfied Wikle's wounds were sufficiently clean after several surgeries, Mighell used a mix of bone taken from a cadaver and synthetic material to reconstruct the bone in her arm. Surgeons also inserted metal plates, Mighell said.
By Nov. 18, Wikle's arm was on the mend. Four days later, she was discharged from Tampa General. But she still faced six weeks on intravenous antibiotics, months of physical therapy and steep psychological challenges.
"She still had some trauma," said Wikle's sister Dee Dee Thorp. "We were just trying to be there for her."
Thorp, 38, is amazed by Wikle's recovery. Her family watched in disbelief when Wikle showed them a DVD of Tampa General surgeons working for seven hours to repair her mangled arm during one of her many procedures. Thorp was even more amazed at how resilient her sister remained through all the surgeries. "She stayed positive the whole time," Thorp said.
Why not? Wikle has plenty to look forward to. Recently back from a trip to Guatemala, she hopes to return to work in Washington D.C. by the first week of April. Her job and adventurous spirit have taken her to almost every continent on the planet, including Antarctica. Sitting around makes her feel like a slacker.
So, of course, she wants to go back to work for the State Department. This time, in Australia.
- Times researcher Kitty Bennett contributed to this report. Candace Rondeaux can be reached at rondeaux@sptimes.com or 727 771-4307.