RICHLAND — As Stephanie Petersen lay in the road, a tourniquet stanching blood loss from her mangled leg, she focused on the familiar faces above her.

“You look up and the people surrounding you have known you since you were a baby,” she said. “People you just know will take care of you.”

Her brother-in-law, Travis Wolfkiel, cradled her head as they waited for the ambulance.

“He put his hand on my face and said ‘you’re going to be all right,’ ” Petersen said.

It was a typical summer day for Petersen, 38, who lives in Richland with her son Tucker, 12. She works at Pine Eagle Charter School in Halfway, where she teaches high school Spanish, home economics in high school and middle school, and is also a licensed school counselor.

“As a teacher and with my energy, I need something to do,” she said.

That “something” was mowing the lawn for an older neighbor at 7 a.m. on Aug. 7.

Like so many times before, she started to turn the riding lawn mower for another pass at the grass.

The accident

But something went wrong.

“The back wheel caught the edge of a steep, 20-foot embankment,” she said.

The mower rolled, taking her with it, tumbling down the hill. The machine is an older model, without an automatic safety shutoff, so the blades kept turning.

“When I landed on the road, the blades of the mower essentially ate up the back of my leg,” she said. “I went to stand up and my foot just buckled. I knew something was wrong.”

She could see something white sticking out, and so much blood. She yanked off her tank top and tied a tourniquet around her leg and hoisted it in the air.

Then started screaming for help.

“And praying my heart out,” she said.

Petersen was accompanied by her two dogs — Pablo, a border collie that is a trained therapy dog, and Charlie, a corgi.

“The therapy dog would not leave my side,” she said. “The corgi ran up to the house and started barking like crazy.”

That got the attention of her neighbor, who called 911. Then Petersen called her sister and brother-in-law, Amanda and Travis Wolfkiel.

Treating the injuries

The Eagle Valley ambulance crew transported her to the former elementary school where a LifeFlight helicopter landed in a field.

“At that point, I didn’t know the extent of it,” she said of her injury.

In Boise, Petersen waited for five hours in the emergency department.

“The blessing of the wait was I got Dr. Hirose,” she said.

Dr. Christopher Hirose is a foot and ankle orthopaedic surgeon at the Saint Alphonsus Coughlin Clinic in Boise. The first surgery took three hours to clean the wound of dirt, rocks, twigs and weeds. The second surgery was to repair her lower leg.

The mower blade severed her Achilles tendon, tore the peroneal tendons down the side of her ankle, sliced the lateral ankle ligaments, damaged nerves, shaved off a piece of the fibula, and destroyed a chunk of her calf muscle.

Five days after surgery in Boise, which included reattaching the Achilles, Petersen was taken by ambulance on Aug. 13 to Huntsman Cancer Institute at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. There, the medical team removed a chunk of muscle and tissue from her lat muscle, located on the upper back, to graft onto her ankle area. During this 8-hour surgery, Dr. Neeraj Agarwal used microscopic surgery to attach arteries, veins and capillaries.

“So the blood flow will go through the muscle tissue,” she said.

The power of faith

As she recounts her story, Petersen talks much about her faith. And it was in that operating room in Salt Lake City where she said she woke up and saw a bright light and a figure, and heard these words:

“My peace, not yours. My narrative, not yours. These are my angels — they’re here to take care of you.”

She said she felt peace, and that helped carry her through the darker moments when pain and the road to recovery overwhelmed her.

“It is an almighty healing to have not one hiccup with this extreme injury,” Petersen said.

Although her foot and lower leg were mangled by the blade, she was relieved to discover that the tattoo along the top of her foot remained intact.

It is her son Tucker’s footprints with a phrase from the poem “Footprints in the Sand.” It reads: “When you see only one set of footprints, it was then that I carried you.”

“There are all of these God moments — you can’t help but be positive,” she said. “Be a light — you never know who needs to hear that.”

Petersen said her life went from “100 miles per hour to 5 miles per hour.”

“It’s been very life changing — medically, spiritually, mentally,” she said.

After Utah, she got a spot in the swing bed program at Saint Alphonsus Medical Center in Baker City on Aug. 23, and was delighted to see the Wallowa Mountains outside her window — a skyline she has tattooed on her left forearm.

“You’re just home,” she said.

She arrived in Richland on Aug. 31.

Looking ahead

Petersen is expected to make a full recovery.

It will be several months before she returns to work, though, and her days are filled with doctor visits in Boise and tele-health appointments with the medical staff in Salt Lake City. Next spring she will return to Utah for another plastic surgery on the grafted area so it looks like a typical ankle.

Her days are also filled with visitors who drop by to say hello and give her a hug, and her family is always nearby, especially her sister and parents, John and Nina Petersen. Her older sister, Melinda Wolfe and her husband Travis, live in the Boise area, and her brother and sister-in-law, John and Cassie Petersen, live in Union.

As for her hometown community, her eyes well up with tears when she talks about the support she’s received — the students who took care of her dogs and house, the meal train organized by Jessica Hunt, an account set up at US Bank, and when The Sweet Pick owner Jamie Kaesemeyer donated all ice cream sales for four days to Petersen’s medical expenses.

She said the EMTs put a donation jar out at the Baker County Fair in Halfway over Labor Day, where she is always the MC (except this year), and the Eagle Valley Grange collected donations at the steak feed on Sept. 2.

“It is so humbling, it would bring me to tears,” she said. “You get a little sad that you can’t thank everybody.”

She’s been sharing her journey on Facebook — the ups and downs, and how she faces every day.

“I go one day at a time,” she said. “There is good in every day.”

And, she said, she appreciates prayers.

“When people say ‘I’m praying for you,’ that’s the sweetest gift you can give.”

“When I landed on the road, the blades of the mower essentially ate up the back of my leg. I went to stand up and my foot just buckled. I knew something was wrong.”

— Stephanie Petersen, who was severely injured when her riding lawnmower overturned on Aug. 7 at her home in Richland