California doctors successfully reattach a woman’s arm severed in train accident – The Mercury News

A month after a train severed her right arm, surf instructor Elieah Boyd was discharged from the UCI Medical Center in Orange, where her arm was reattached in a 10-hour surgery.

The 24-year-old Ventura resident was pushing her e-bike across railroad tracks on her way to meet her boyfriend when she saw an Amtrak train about 150 yards away. She thought she could make it, she said, but within seconds the train struck her bike, tearing off her arm.

Still standing, she grabbed her right shoulder — and as tightly as she could — afraid of bleeding out.

A retired firefighter, who was out on a walk and had helped her cross the tracks moments earlier, rushed to her side and later directed police to search for her arm.

Her arm packed with ice beside her, Boyd stayed conscious during the 45-minute helicopter flight to UCI Medical Center, watching the city lights down below through the windows.

“On the helicopter ride, I honestly was just thinking, ‘They’re gonna be able to do it, they’re gonna be able to do it,’” Boyd said. “Just trying to stay as positive as I could and think of the best possible outcome.”

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Elieah Boyd, who lost her arm in a train accident and spent 10 hours in surgery getting it reattached, talks with the media on the day she is being released from UCI Medical Center in Orange, CA, on Friday, Aug. 8, 2025. The Ventura County resident lost her arm over a month ago when she was pushing an e-bike across the train track and looked up and saw a train coming. First responders found her arm and airlifted it and her to UCI Medical Center. (Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register/SCNG)

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Within five minutes of getting the call from the Ventura hospital, UCI Medical Center Trauma Director Dr. Michael Lekawa confirmed he had available surgeons and operating rooms to treat her and accepted the transfer.

With the clock ticking to save her severed arm, Boyd was in the operating room within 30 minutes of arriving in Orange County.

“When she arrived, she was awake and conversive. It was almost surreal that somebody could have that kind of injury and be that way,” Lekawa said. “When it’s life over limb, we choose life.

“In this case, because her life was stable,” he said, “we were able to worry about reimplanting the limb.”

Boyd remembers asking to call her mom and her boyfriend so he wouldn’t wait for her. She worried about who would walk her dog.

Friday was her first time outside in the almost month after her accident.

“I had come to terms that I would only have one arm, and I’ll figure out how to do my day-to-day life with one arm,” she said. “So when they told me I had two, I was absolutely in disbelief. I was like ‘Wow, this is the best thing I’ve heard in my entire life.’”

Doctors can’t give her a timeline of recovery or say how much mobility she’ll regain, but Boyd is determined to adapt, she said.

A close friend brought her kindergarten handwriting books, where she practiced tracing the ABCs with her non-dominant hand. After daily practice, she can now eat, brush her teeth and put her hair up in a side bun with her left hand.

A surf instructor and cafe manager in Ventura before the accident, Boyd said she hopes to get back on a surfboard, even if just to sit on one.

“I can probably teach with one (arm),” she said. “I would love to teach again.”

At first, Boyd said she felt a disconnect with her reattached arm. “This doesn’t feel like my arm,” she remembers thinking.

But slowly, it has started to feel like her own again. Now she has a “tingly feeling” and “pins and needles” in her right arm.

“I’ll take any feeling over nothing,” she said. “It seriously shocks me that it’s even a possibility to have another arm.”

The accident, she says, was a reminder to slow down in life.

“Before this, I was fast in my life, thinking ‘Oh, I need this job, I need all this progression,’” she said. “I was in a rush to get there, I wasn’t enjoying certain elements of my life and my day-to-day.”

Among those who have reached out during her recovery was pro-surfer Bethany Hamilton, who lost her arm in a shark attack. Talking to someone who understood, Boyd said, was a source of comfort.

After her one-month stay at UCI Medical Center in Orange, Boyd said she looked forward to snuggling her Australian cattle dog, Cali, and putting her feet in the ocean.

“I try not to look at it like it’s a tragedy that’s happening to me,” Boyd said. “It’s something that I have to go through, and I’ll be able to get past it eventually. It’ll only make me stronger.”