A Pain That Just Won’t Go Away : Accidents: After a caged lion mauled Jesse Ontiveros’ arm, a series of unsuccessful operations have prolonged the 6-year-old’s trauma.

From the middle of his big hospital bed, 6-year-old Jesse Ontiveros takes command.

“This is Jesse,” he says confidently when he answers the phone.

Yet, let a white-coated doctor enter, and the thin boy with the big brown eyes begins to cry.

It’s understandable.

After losing his arm to a caged African lion in Mexico, after 12 hours of surgery and three additional unsuccessful operations there to reattach it and after a plane ride to Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles for more surgery, Jesse knows that a glimpse of a doctor usually means pain.

“It’s OK, mijo , it’s OK,” Felix Ontiveros, 41, of Azusa, says over and over again, using a Spanish endearment as he tries to calm his son.

For the next two to three weeks, this is the life Jesse faces as he struggles to recover from the freak accident that claimed his left arm from above the elbow.

Severed arm accidents involving children are rare, said Dr. Susan Downey, a plastic surgeon. Such accidents occur most frequently to men in their 30s who work in carpentry or construction, she said.

But, Downey added, once Jesse undergoes surgery to close up his mangled arm and an artificial arm and hand are attached, he will be able to resume the normal, active life of any growing child.

Still, the hurt and trauma remain too fresh, too vivid for Jesse and his family to cope with at the moment.

“He’s always been a happy little boy, running, climbing trees, riding his bike,” said his mother, Sara, weeping in the hospital corridor. “It’s going to be hard for him, starting all over again.”

Jesse lost his arm June 27 on the first day of a fishing vacation at El Faro Beach, a trailer park near Ensenada, Mexico. The boy and his father, along with Jesse’s 18-year-old brother, Steve, had planned to stay in a friend’s trailer in return for making repairs to the structure, Felix Ontiveros said.

Once they arrived, the group set out for sodas at the trailer park store. Jesse spotted a caged lion, kept as an attraction about 20 feet from the door. The boy asked the store owner if the cat was tame.

“‘Oh, yeah, he’s tame. He’s real good,”’ Felix Ontiveros said the owner told the boy.

But when Jesse walked up and stuck his thin arm through the cage wires, it was violently snatched by the big cat’s jaws.

“It happened that quick,” said Felix Ontiveros, slapping his hands together.

By the time the father ran to his son, the boy’s arm was a bloody stump. Jesse’s hand and forearm lay in the dirt inside the cage, his father said.

The boy and his severed arm were rushed to a nearby regional military hospital for emergency surgery. But Jesse’s arm began to turn blue three days later from lack of circulation and doctors performed three more surgeries, during the next seven days, said Col. Francisco Javier Carvalho Soto, head of Del Cipres Region Military Hospital. The doctors took veins from Jesse’s legs to implant them in the arm and save it, but the efforts were in vain, Carvalho said.

Ten days after the accident, the boy was transferred to Children’s Hospital.

Felix Ontiveros blames the Mexican hospital for what he considers poor care. He said he wanted his son to go to the United States for surgery, but doctors insisted the boy remain in Mexico. Ontiveros believes the hospital experimented on his son, performing the first ever reimplant surgery at the facility.

Carvalho said doctors had no choice but to operate immediately to try to save the arm. Although a reimplant had never been done at the military hospital, the surgeons had performed the procedure elsewhere in Mexico. Surgery began within a half hour of the boy’s arrival, officials said.

“The problem was one of urgency,” Carvalho said. “In Mexico, we don’t have the transportation (system) to take him to another, larger hospital.”

The surgeon said the hospital lacks emergency air transportation and a trip by ambulance to the nearest U.S. hospital, in San Diego, would have taken up to three hours.

Downey agreed that time is of the essence if reimplants are to be successful. Most surgeons recommend performing them within three hours of the trauma, before the severed tissue dies, she said.

Further, arm reimplants are successful in only about 60% to 70% of surgeries, such as when the arm has been severed cleanly by a saw, machine or other tool, Downey said. In crush injuries, such as Jesse’s, the rate of success plummets, she said.

Felix Ontiveros said he is considering taking legal action against Romolo Molina Michel, the owner of the lion, which remains undisturbed in his cage. Michel could not be reached for comment. Meanwhile, Ontiveros said, the animal drew crowds during the July 4 weekend after Mexican television stations broadcast stories of Jesse’s plight.

Ontiveros now weeps when he thinks of his son’s future. The boy is to start first grade at Gladstone Street School in the fall.

“He’s going to need things that I can’t afford to give him,” said Ontiveros, a father of five other children and a recovering alcoholic who is unemployed and disabled by a heart condition.

The medical expenses in Mexico were paid by Michel, the lion’s owner. Expenses here are being paid by Medi-Cal, Ontiveros said.

But Downey said that once Jesse adapts to the prosthetic devices, his life should be relatively normal.

“I would expect him to play sports and do everything he wants to do,” the surgeon said. “Children adapt much better than adults.”