Brush With Death Turns Teen’s Life Around : Handicaps: An aimless young woman paid for survival with her legs, a hand and several fingers. Now, she says, ‘I’m able to do anything I want.’

Terri Harding was nearing her 19th birthday, just home after finishing her first year of college, when she suddenly felt sick.

She threw up violently throughout that May night. She screamed for her sister, Tina, a nurse. Her temperature shot to 104.

The deadly bacteria meningococcus, lurking in her system, had escalated into spinal meningitis. It clogged her blood vessels, cutting off the circulation to her legs and one hand and turning them gangrenous.

Doctors had to amputate the limbs to save her life. She lost both legs below the knees, her left arm below the elbow, her right thumb and parts of all the fingers on that hand.

But Terri Harding, now 21, refuses to make any concessions in her life, or to recognize any limitations.

She dances--yes, dances--and even won a talent award in the local Miss Rain Day pageant. She models. She dates. She hikes. She drives a car.

“Everybody has something they have to deal with that’s going to be hard in their life,” she said. “I just wanted to show people that no matter how bad life may seem to get at some point, you’re always going to come back from it if you keep trying. I don’t believe this is a handicap. I’m able to do anything I want.”

The skin grafts and pink-and-white splotches that crisscross what is left of her arms and legs are reminders of how closely death embraced Terri Harding.

“I remember the nurse coming into my room saying they had taken my hand off and I went, ‘What’s she talking about?’ because my arm was all bended up and it just felt my hand was in there in a fist, because of bandages and tissues. The doctor came in and undid the bandages and, oh, I just lost it right there--’I don’t have a hand!’

“My feet were so black that I kept saying, ‘Take off my shoes.’ And they said, ‘Terri, you don’t have shoes on.’ They said, ‘Terri, do you want your feet off?’ And I said, ‘Yeah,’ without any hesitation. I don’t know if they explained to me it was life-threatening or if I was just in that much pain from them. I remember saying, ‘Yeah, I want them off. They’re bugging me.’ ”

Before May 11, 1989, there was the Old Terri. Now, there is the New Terri. The New Terri went to Waynesburg College in the fall of 1990. She carried 16 hours, got straight A’s and made the dean’s list.

The Old Terri had no goals, no ambition, no shot at the dean’s list. The new one is finishing her sophomore year, majoring in visual communications and marketing and hoping to go into advertising.

“I was getting to where I didn’t care about my future,” she says now. “I was just like whatever happens happens. I wasn’t that ambitious.”

Her brush with death turned her life around.

“As severe as I had it, I shouldn’t have lived,” Terri says of her bout with the bacterial infection. “It’s just like my life has done a 180-degree turn.”

Terri has filed a malpractice suit contending that doctors at Greene County Memorial Hospital in Waynesburg waited too long to treat her, allowing gangrene to set in. An attorney for the hospital said that doctors there are not at fault.

The lowest point in her whole ordeal, Terri said, came during the three months she was at the Harmarville, Pa., Rehabilitation Center.

“I had to withdraw from morphine, which was the worst experience out of any of this,” she says. “You have that feeling of loneliness that no matter what happens would not leave you at the time. It was worse at night because I couldn’t sleep for about a week straight. My jaw would go from side to side and I couldn’t control it.”

Less than a year after she learned to walk again at the center, in July, 1990, she entered the Miss Rain Day Pageant.

Dressed as Charlie Chaplin, Terri danced a hat-and-cane routine. As sure as she was of herself, she was unsure of the tricky choreography. She kept her head down. She was off the beat and a couple of steps behind. She twirled the cane with her right hand.

Her performance brought tears to the eyes of one judge, Joyce Ellis, who runs dance and modeling studios in nearby Washington, Pa. “I just said this is incredible,” Ellis recalled.

So moved was the audience that it thundered with applause, more than for any of the other 19 contestants. Terri finished eighth overall.

“I wanted to show people nothing about myself--not ‘Hey, look at me. Here I am. This is how far I’ve come.’ It was more for people to know about themselves,” she said.

Terri began taking dance lessons from Ellis shortly after the pageant and has been with her since, often performing publicly.

During one class, Ellis abruptly stopped the music because the dancers were performing sloppily, throwing their arms all over the place.

“You’re taking things for granted, such as your legs and your arms,” she reminded them. “I want you to watch Terri do this dance.”

To compensate for her disadvantage, Terri works harder than others. “That’s why she outdances quite a few of my normal dancers,” Ellis said.

On the Labor Day a year after her recovery, Terri was determined once again to climb the hills and trails around Lake Erie where she had spent earlier summers camping.

So she pushed off on her artificial legs and did it. Just like that.

“Wearing my prostheses is rather easy,” she says. “All you do is put them on and I’m gone. . . . It’s not hard. It’s all how you look at it and what you accept, and you go from there.”

She also tested the waters to see how men reacted after the amputations. She didn’t want pity.

“They’re still the same with me, no matter what,” she said. “They’ll ask me out. It’s how you present yourself. I got this call at 11 o’clock at night from this guy that goes to the college. He told me I had a nice walk.”

Some days are hard, of course. But on a day early in her recovery when Terri was upset, she climbed into her car and turned on the radio to hear Michael Bolton singing “When I’m Back On My Feet Again”:

And I’m not gonna crawl again.

I will learn to stand tall again.

No, I’m not gonna fall again.

Cause I’ll learn to be strong.

“I thought, ‘That is kind of my life,’ ” Terri said. “That’s how I thought at the time. I’m going to be back on my feet again, eventually going to get there. I think I’ve come to that point.”