MARK WAITE / PVT Bob Winn holds a clock with a picture of his daughter Sedona and son Mike, riding an all-terrain vehicle a couple months before the heart surgery that left Sedona paralyzed, while both children look on. Advertisement

Thanksgiving is a holiday when people give thanks for what they have.

For the Winn family, the greatest thanks are for the gift of life and the generosity of the Pahrump community.

Sedona Winn, a typical 15-year-old animal lover who would love to ride a horse for a Christmas present, can only hope she has the chance again.

She goes to some school dances at Pahrump Valley High School, belongs to Leo's Club, the school choir and has a crush on a boy like many girls her age.

From the bed in her home, Winn, a quadriplegic who can still always crack a smile, said, "We have Thanksgiving for everything we're thankful for."

Asked what she was thankful for this Thanksgiving, Sedona, whose chihuahua pup was sitting on her bed next to her, replied, "I'm thankful for my doggy and my cat."

Almost two years ago, Dec. 14, 2006, she suffered a massive bilateral stroke while undergoing heart surgery to replace a pulmonary valve at Sunrise Hospital in Las Vegas. She was left paralyzed from the neck down.

"I try to get up every morning and get dressed and everything like I used to and walk," she said. "It kinda sucks not being able to walk again."

Sedona Winn had undergone a few surgeries after being born with a heart defect. She died the night she was born until doctors repaired her heart and restored her to life.

This operation in December 2006 was to be her last, what was called a maintenance surgery, to replace a teenager's pulmonary valve with that of an adult as her blood flow was getting restricted. But during the operation the supply of oxygen to her brain was cut off completely for a time or at a reduced rate, her father suspects.

"She went into a coma immediately after surgery. She never came out of the anesthesia. She was in a coma for two or three weeks," Bob Winn said.

He has been a single father since his wife left him in December 2001. He stayed at a Ronald McDonald House in Las Vegas with his son Michael, now 9, while Sedona was in a coma.

"About the middle of January she woke up. Every morning was a routine. Michael and I would walk in with the nurse at 7 every morning right on the dot. 'Good morning baby, daddy's here, I love you,' every morning," Bob Winn recalled.

Eventually doctors suggested they pull the tubes and let her die. He was told Sedona could be a vegetable if she survived. Some of the tubes were removed that night, but the two visitors got a real surprise the next day.

"So this morning when I walked in, 'Good morning baby, daddy's here, I love you,' and she replied back, 'I love you too." I looked at the nurse, she looked at me and we're both, 'Did she just say that?' I just dropped to my knees crying. My baby's back."

After she recovered from the coma, Sedona Winn went to a rehabilitation center in Las Vegas, then was transferred to Phoenix.

"It was supposed to be the best pediatric rehab center in the Southwest. She was there six weeks. I went down to see her, nobody could find her, nobody knew who she was, she had bed sores, she was down to 80 pounds and so overmedicated she couldn't even slur her name, let alone say it," Bob Winn said.

So her father took Sedona back home to Pahrump, where he lives on Social Security disability payments and child support from his ex-wife.

Bob Winn is thankful for all the help from the Pahrump community, starting with Karen Jackson at KNYE-FM, who organized fundraisers for a meal that first Christmas.

Channel 30 television and the Pahrump Valley Swap Shop did a fundraiser that enabled him to put in a handicapped ramp and other supplies at his house. The television station helped him get a donated van, a 1999 Plymouth Voyager, with 155,000 miles.

"God bless Pahrump. Pahrump stepped up and helped. I've got nothing else to say," her father said.

The Make-A-Wish Foundation paid for her trip to Disney World in Florida and for tickets to a Hannah Montana concert.

But the government has been a real Scrooge lately.

"Medicaid had to cut back a lot of things. They said for therapy at the hospital, that she was no longer making any forward progress so there was no use in going further with it," Bob Winn said. "She will get atrophied and curl up and get inoperable. She will never get her movement back. She has to have this therapy for the rest of her life."

Then there was a Medicaid decision to cut back her home health care from 23.5 hours per week to 14 hours, leaving only two hours daily to change her diaper, shower, get her groomed, dressed and ready for school.

Bob Winn said he received some optimism the 23.5 hours of home health care could be restored, maybe even a home caregiver some day, during a conversation with a deputy attorney general and two social workers from Medicaid.

"They were in awe of the fact that I didn't have a case manager and all the things that were wrong with my case that should've been covered and fixed when she came home," he said. "Medicaid doesn't come out and tell you, doesn't give you a handbook saying here's what you can get, all you have to do is apply. You have to hear this on your own."

Bob Winn said there's special equipment for his daughter's Christmas wish, to take that horseback ride, and a special saddle, but he doesn't know how to find it.

"God bless her attitude. Her attitude is what pulled me through this. I could never have survived this if she'd had a depression type thing going on. That little girl has a smile for every day. I aspire to be as strong a person as she is, I really do," Bob Winn said.

It's hard for people who work with her not to become attached to the smiling teen, her father said, like her former special education teacher from Rosemary Clarke Middle School, who encouraged him to get Sedona enrolled at Pahrump Valley High School. She is getting A's in school, he said, taking two regular curriculum classes and the rest special education.

"I put the 'wow' in chihuahua," Sedona Winn quipped, with a smile.