CAPITAN, N.M. -- Amber Luna drags her right leg as she walks across her living room to put her 2-year-old son Jacob down for a nap.
Her voice is hoarse as she warns her older boy to move away from the wood stove.She's weak, thin and walks with the help of a cane.
But ask her how she's doing. She beams.
"I'm great," she says. "I'm alive."
Luna, 23, spent a good deal of November in intensive care at University Hospital in Albuquerque -- much of it in a coma -- battling hantavirusantavirus pulmonary syndrome. She left the hospital Nov. 21 as a member of an elite club: Only 229 people have been confirmed as having hantavirus, a deadly viral infection discovered in New Mexico that is carried by rodents such as deer mice and spread through their urine or feces. More than 4 of every 10 people who contract the virus die, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. Fourteen people were treated for hantavirus at University Hospital in 1999; Luna and seven others survived.
The Lunas, like just about every family in rural New Mexico, knew their way around a mousetrap. But mice had seldom come into their one-story stuccoed house across the street from the football field at the high school in Capitan, a mountain village in Lincoln County.
"We'd see maybe one or two and we'd set out a trap and that was it," Luna said.
When the state bulldozed a storage garage and pulled out a tree on the lot next door to prepare a building site, mice flocked to the Lunas' yard.
"There was just a ton of mice," said Mike Luna, Amber's 29-year-old husband and an employee of the state Highway Department. "It was just incredible. We bought traps and we started trapping."
Mike and Amber's brother, Andrew, chose the unseasonably warm and dry September to clean out several storage buildings on their property and found plenty of evidence of mice.
Amber discovered traps with dead mice in the house, threw the traps into plastic garbage bags and took them to the trash. "I didn't have a second thought about it," she said. "It's a house. You get a mouse in it, you trap it and throw it out."
Mike and Amber knew all about hantavirus from reading news reports about the initial outbreak in the Four Corners in 1993 and from watching television specials about it since. But it never occurred to either of them to be careful around the mice they were seeing around their house.
After the 1993 outbreak, researchers went back and tested tissue samples saved from patients who had died mysteriously.
They found one case of hantavirus in Dona Ana County and another in Otero County. But from 1993 to this year, all but one of the new cases in New Mexico had been diagnosed in the northern third of the state.
"I thought it was just up north," Mike Luna said. "I didn't think we could have it around here."
Amber Luna began feeling ill the Wednesday before Halloween. She woke up with a headache and a fever and thought, "Oh, no. Here comes the flu."
By that afternoon, her eyes burned, she had vomited and her fever had climbed close to 105.
Then her back began aching.
"My back felt so intensely bad. It felt like somebody hit me in the back with a sledgehammer," she recalled.
She attributed the pain to lying on the couch sick for two days and to effects of the fever.
At 11 a.m. Oct. 29, her friend Nema Spear came to visit and found her teeth-chatteringly cold under three comforters with the thermostat at turned up to 90 degrees. When Luna begged her husband to light a fire, Spear convinced her she had more than the flu.
The Lunas drove to Lincoln County Medical Center in Ruidoso where doctors and nurses began medical tests that eliminated possible suspects
Stephen Frey quickly saw all the symptoms of hantavirus, except for the characteristic cough.
When Mike Luna left his wife in the hospital and drove home to Capitan to be with his kids that evening, Frey told him, "As soon as she starts coughing, we're flying her to Albuquerque."
Amber Luna's cough started at 1 a.m. Her husband raced to the hospital to see her off, and within an hour she was bound for University Hospital, the center for hantavirus care and research in the United States.
The day before Halloween, Luna remembers being poked and injected and receiving spinal taps and a CT scan as her breathing worsened.
Hantavirus attacks the heart and lungs, filling them with fluid until a patient can no longer breathe.
Doctors and nurses fitted Luna with a small respirator and, when her panting got worse, a larger mask. That mask being placed over her face is the last thing Luna remembers before slipping into a drug-induced coma so she would remain motionless while doctors and nurses tried to save her.
Back in Capitan, a team from the state Department of Health showed up to find out where she had contracted the virus.
While she lay in the intensive care unit in Albuquerque, machines doing the work of her heart and lungs and adding oxygen to her blood, workers in protective suits and respirators set traps inside the Luna house, in the yard and around town.
Led by Paul Ettestad, Health Department veterinarian, they set a couple hundred traps and caught about 40 rats and mice. Ten or 11 or those, several from inside the Lunas' house, tested positive for the virus.
Ettestad told about a meeting of about 200 townspeople that deer mice are everywhere in New Mexico and so is hantavirus. He explained precautions: Make it hard for rodents to get in, and when you find them or their droppings, disinfect before you clean.
In Capitan, the hardware and grocery stores sold out of mouse traps and mouse poison.
"Everybody was just scared to death," Spear said.
Amber Luna lingered in a coma for more than a week while machines helped her lungs get back to normal. Then doctors took her off the life support and waited for her to come out of the coma.
She remained comatose for another week.
"Then," she says, "I woke up on Nov. 16."
She had come out of the coma Nov. 12, but was delirious and doesn't remember clearly until four days later, when she looked at her husband and said, "Hi."
He said, "Well, it's about time."
She was released from the hospital Nov. 21 and stayed with her mother-in-law in Willard until she could regain some strength and mobility.
Mike Luna went home.
While Amber recovered in Willard and spent time with her boys, Mike put on a face mask, mixed up gallons of bleach and water solution and sprayed down his house -- "inside and outside, floor to ceiling."
The carpets and upholstered furniture were steam-cleaned, and Mike Luna dumped everything the family did not use frequently -- suitcases, old clothes, a mattress -- in the back yard to be burned.
"Everybody hordes things," he said. "You don't want to get rid of anything. No more. Now, I want to see all corners."
Amber Luna returned home the week after Thanksgiving.
A lot of things have changed. She has lost 22 pounds and quit smoking. Skiing this winter will be replaced by three-times-a-week physical therapy sessions to strengthen her right leg, where nerves were damaged by tubes inserted into her femoral artery.
Mike Luna has learned to cook.
The Lunas in town have become big fans of mouse poison.
And they've put dibs on two of Nema Spear's kittens.
"I guess," Amber Luna said, "that we'll learn to love cats."