She shot through two barbwire fences that shredded her legs. Her left leg was broken. Both arms, too. The brachial artery was ripped out of her right arm, leaving no blood flow to it at all.

In the hours, weeks and months after the accident, Rebecka Meyers, then a pre-med student at Stanford University, learned firsthand that a body can be repaired, rebuilt, reborn.

Doctors replaced the artery in her arm, but it took eight months for Meyers to regain control and her sense of touch. She learned to write again with a pen taped to her hand. Plastic surgery restored her torn legs, but it was a year before she walked normally.

And many more before she could apply it all to her work. "I can sit there and look at somebody and say, 'Don't give up,' " she says.

Can sit there and watch someone learn to walk again and know "just how it feels like it is never, ever going to come back and you just keep at it."

Can sit there and know, really know, the human body is an amazing thing, which is helpful in ways the pediatric surgeon whose team separated Utah's conjoined Herrin twins couldn't have imagined three decades ago.

Change of plans: She wanted to be a ballet dancer. Not just the way some little girls do, but later, in her teens, when she started making real choices about what's possible.

She graduated early from high school and earned a spot in the world-class San Francisco Ballet.

Today, Meyers speaks of that dashed dream - ended when she was dropped during a rehearsal - wistfully but also matter-of-factly.

"There is no way to be a professional dancer if you've broken your foot. That's just not going to happen," she says.

So Meyers picked a new future, one that put to use the stamina she acquired as a ballerina. She became a pediatric surgeon, focusing in a new way on the wondrous workings of the human body, on how medical science, nature and a mysterious power can sometimes perform a pas de trois.

By switching to medicine, Meyers, who was born in Utah but did not grow up here, was following her father's footsteps. He was an Air Force flight surgeon whose job kept the family - she has two brothers, one an engineer in Sacramento, Calif., and the other an orthopedist in Elko, Nev. - on the move.

"It made me really close to my brothers and my mom and my dad. My brothers are my best friends," she says. "And it gave me a bond to Utah because it was the constant, it was where my grandparents lived."

Meyers received her bachelor's degree at Stanford in 1980 and then her medical degree in 1985 at Oregon Health Sciences University in Portland, graduating summa cum laude.

It took a while to find her niche in medicine. She quickly ruled out her first inclination, obstetrics. But in her first trips to the operating room, Meyers recognized her calling.

"It was quite clear that is what I wanted to do because it was just so cool to go in there and take apart somebody's head and put it back together in a new shape. It was cool," she says, that sense of awe still evident.

She settled on plastic surgery - specifically, cranial-facial reconstruction - after a rotation with a professor who had devised a new procedure.

"I was enamored with that, thought it was amazing," she says - until her second year of residency, when she spent time in cosmetic surgery.

"And just hated it. Just hated it," Meyers says.

"I can remember so clearly sitting down as a junior-level surgery resident and talking to this lady about her liposuction scars and she was all unhappy," Meyers says. "And I was thinking, 'Geez, lady, go for a run. I cannot spend my life worrying about your liposuction scars.' "

Next came pediatric surgery, then pediatric heart surgery. Meyers spent two years at the Cardiovascular Research Institute at the University of California, San Francisco, followed by senior residency there in congenital heart disease. But so many of those patients die that it became too much, so Meyers again shifted focus, this time to pediatric general surgery, and found a fit.

Pediatric surgery is a relatively new speciality, approved by the American Board of Surgery in 1972, and requires a minimum of seven years training. Most pediatric surgeons - Meyers among them - spend an additional two years in research, which extends their post-medical school training to nine years.

There are 743 board-certified pediatric surgeons in the United States. Just 106 of them are women.

'Absolutely first class': Meyers was a fellow at St. Christopher's Hospital for Children in Philadelphia when Dale G. Johnson, chief of pediatric surgery at Primary Children's, came calling.

"I was lucky to get her," Johnson says. "It is very hard to recruit a competent pediatric surgeon because there aren't very many trained."

Johnson says Meyers, who succeeded him as chief, is "both humble and also aggressive in the sense she can take charge."

And, he adds, Meyers has a remarkable technical dexterity despite those long-ago injuries.

"She is way, way above the average surgeon," Johnson says. "I have been scrubbing with surgical residents since 1956 and I have had a lot of people assist me and I've assisted them and all I'm saying is Rebecka is absolutely first class."

Meyers and her husband, Michael R. Howard, a Montana native and retired corporate banking attorney, arrived in Utah 12 years ago, a move that was both an opportunity and a homecoming.

"Dale Johnson, you just couldn't work with a better person, and Primary Children's Medical Center, you couldn't work at a better hospital," she says.

That's because of Utah's high birth rate and the fact that Primary draws patients from four adjoining states, giving the staff the volume and diversity of cases that would be found in a major metropolitan facility.

"So it's a huge hospital, but not a huge state, and for me that's really important," Meyers says.

With Meyers on board, Primary launched a pediatric liver transplant program, eliminating the need for families to travel out of state for such care.

Meyers also was instrumental in persuading the University of Utah Medical School, where she is an associate professor, to include general pediatric residents in a surgery rotation.

"She sees there are important continuities between medical care and surgical care," said Armand H. Mathey Antommaria, an assistant professor in the Department of Pediatrics.

Meyers explains it this way: "The more we understand what each other does, the better we can do our own piece of the care. It's a team."

'110 percent focused': Meyers, 48, still has a dancer's build, tall and lithe. Her blonde hair sweeps past her shoulders. Her face is lightly freckled, hinting at days on the ski slopes or casting flies over remote creeks. Fishing is a passion and the space above her desk at Primary Children's is papered with pictures of brag-worthy fish.

It doesn't take much to get Meyers to share a photo of her own big one: a 28-pound brown trout she landed with a Madame X fly last summer on a tributary of the Missouri River in Montana.

"I'm not a big river, float-in-a-boat-with-a-guide kind of fisherman," she says. "What appeals to me is being out on a creek with just me and my husband and my fly rod. I love that. That's a perfect day."

Meyers draws parallels between the mind-set of a fly fisherman and that of a surgeon.

Surgery is "like fly fishing. If you're not 110 percent focused on what you're doing, you shouldn't be there," she says. "When you're operating, you don't see or hear anything but what you're doing and the person across the table from you and your anesthesiologist. If you don't have the ability to do that, that's not your job."

Meyers drew on that focus - and that ballet-dancer stamina - in the 26-hour operation that separated conjoined twins Kendra and Maliyah Herrin. It was Meyers' third such surgery.

She deflects questions about how she and her team kept going through those long hours, saying, "It's not an issue. It's part of the job."

She dwells more on the attention the case received and the ethical thinking that shaped the decision to proceed.

"We have lots of other patients that are equally complex that don't get the spotlight," Meyers says. "I'm not trying to minimize the importance of this operation, but we do major surgeries for cancer and major surgeries for transplants and major surgeries for reconstruction. That's what Primary Children's is all about. This is what we do. When you need cutting-edge children's care, it is here."

But doing what's possible is not always the same thing as doing what's right, she says, and you go forward only when the two elements align.

They did in the Herrin twins. Their shared single kidney would not have sustained them as they grew older, and Meyers was confident their psyches and bodies would recover, although treatable complications are to be expected.

"These girls will never be girls who didn't undergo a major separation surgery and have special battles and needs," Meyers said in a news conference last week. "They will be able to live very good full lives."

In forecasting the twins' futures, Meyers is mindful of her own past as she says, "That's why, when people look at Kendra and Maliyah and they say, 'Well, are they going to walk?' - well, you know, yeah. I mean, not today and not tomorrow, but if you have the spirit to do something and we can give you a head start, nature can take it from there.

"It's the turtles, you know," she adds.

Since performing the surgery, Meyers has worn two necklaces, each sporting a small silver sea turtle. Bigger turtles, about the size of a 50-cent piece, dangle from her ears.

Talismans, she says, just like wearing the cross. Meyers explains that one day she was listening to NPR's "Fresh Air" and Terry Gross was interviewing the chief of a southeast Pacific Polynesian tribe.

"She was badgering him a little bit, you know, she does that sometimes, and she was saying, 'What is the spiritual focus of your religion?' " Meyers says.

"The chief explained it was the sea turtle, which holds up the world like Atlas holds up the world in Greek and Roman mythology.

"She said, 'Well, what holds up the turtle?' He said, 'A turtle.' 'Well, what holds up that turtle?' He said, 'A turtle.'

"Finally, he got really irritated, which was intriguing to me, and said, 'Look, lady, it's turtles all the way down. That's what it's all about.' "

That struck Meyers, and now those turtles, her symbol for the ineffable force that can hold things together and make all things possible, aren't coming off until the Herrin girls leave the ICU.

brooke@sltrib.com