The Best Gift : Health: Maria Caudillo, whose legs were severely damaged in a car crash, goes home to Lancaster after more than two years in hospitals.

When they headed home to Lancaster on Christmas Eve, the Caudillo family didn’t much mind that there were no wrapped gifts nestled under a tree or a feast on the table. Despite a very long wait, everyone happily agreed, the family had gotten its own Christmas miracle.

After more than two years confined in hospitals because of a car crash that severely damaged her legs, and despite fears she might lose them or even die, 33-year-old Maria Caudillo came home Thursday to her two children, parents and family with hopes of walking again.

“All I’ve got to say is ‘thank you’ to the doctors for letting me go home. They’re my angels,” said Caudillo, squinting in the long-missed sunlight outside USC University Hospital in Los Angeles where she underwent two delicate operations that finally put her on the road home after 13 earlier surgeries.

“I thought she wasn’t going to make it,” confided Caudillo’s mother, Panfila Sahagun, one of about a dozen family members at the hospital Thursday morning for her departure. The family hadn’t made any Christmas plans, Sahagun said, doubting to the last that Caudillo was really coming home.

For the past two Christmases--as well as Thanksgivings, birthdays and other family occasions--the family had gathered at Caudillo’s rooms first at one and then another San Fernando Valley hospital, where she lay suffering in traction with shattered and infected thighs that would not heal.

Caudillo, who was planning to become a manicurist before the car crash, said she spent some of the hospital time learning crafts such as making jewelry and makeup boxes. But on surviving the two-year hospital ordeal, she said, “It’s been very hard. I’ve learned a lot of patience. I don’t know how I did it.”

Family members said the trouble began Nov. 5, 1988, in Pacoima where she was a passenger in a car, driven by a male friend who had been drinking, that crashed into a wall. He recovered from his injuries (and later disappeared) but her fractured thighs did not.

Caudillo said she was taken first to Northridge Hospital Medical Center for emergency treatment and then transferred to Pacifica Hospital of the Valley in Sun Valley for care. Weeks later, with metal plates screwed into her leg bones, Caudillo was released to her home, then in Arleta.

But by August, 1990, Caudillo said, she was readmitted to Pacifica Hospital with infections in her damaged legs. And she remained there for two years until October when she was transferred to Holy Cross Medical Center in Mission Hills, and then referred Dec. 9 to USC University Hospital, a private teaching hospital for USC that is owned by National Medical Enterprises Inc.

Dr. Michael Patzakis, one of Caudillo’s surgeons there, said her diabetes increased the chances of infection in her legs. And the infection put her injuries beyond the scope of routine surgery, he said.

Patzakis, director of a center at the hospital that specializes in bone infections, predicted Caudillo ought to be able to walk within about six months. She underwent an eight-hour operation Dec. 10 on her right leg and then another nearly five-hour session Dec. 14 on her left leg, he said.

In both cases, doctors inserted titanium alloy rods into her femur bones to hold the broken pieces together, and then grafted bone from her pelvis to her legs to aid in the healing process.

About noon, Caudillo left the hospital on a gurney. An ambulance was to take her to her parents’ house in Lancaster--a house she had never seen because they moved into it while she was hospitalized. The family planned a dinner of homemade tamales.

And as for gifts, one family member said of Caudillo, “She’s our gift.”