CHENGDU, China — Far from Beijing and its gathering of Olympic athletes, a small group of people here spend hours each day pushing their own physical limits
Li Chunyang, 16, is one of the children pulled from the rubble of Dongqi Middle School in the town of Hanwang after being trapped for 52 hours. His left leg had been pinned under debris. It was amputated after his rescue.
The other day, he went on his own from Chengdu, the provincial capital of Sichuan, to the city of Deyang to take a national school exam. The trip involved getting on a bus, then walking through city streets. It was his first journey with an artificial leg. It took two hours.
“If there’s an incline, I have a little difficulty walking,” he said. “The hardest part is walking on stairs or going uphill.”
The rehabilitation clinic is called the Sichuan Missing Limbs Restoration Center, and it is considered one of the top five institutions for prosthetic limb fittings in China. On a recent day, there were 75 patients there. Many were young children.
The vast majority of the patients are victims of the 7.9-magnitude quake that left nearly 70,000 people dead and 18,000 missing.
The patients spend one to two months here, first training for a week before getting a new limb, then learning how to use it.
The schedule is strict: three hours of training in the morning and three hours in the afternoon, using a variety of equipment — waist-high parallel bars, exercise balls, weight machines. In one room, a man lay on a bed with acupuncture needles in his back.
The center has been around for more than 50 years. It is supported by the government of Sichuan Province and by donations from charities and individuals. Patients do not pay for medical treatment or for their prostheses. Mr. Li estimated that each limb costs from just under $1,500 to $3,000; materials are imported from around the world, and the limbs are assembled here.
Mr. Li said the center had not had to turn away any patients. Sometimes it seeks out patients who need help, as it did in the case of Chunyang, the Dongqi student. The boy had been flown to Suzhou University Hospital in Jiangsu Province after being rescued, and somehow the center heard about his case. Workers here contacted his parents.
“Some people from the center came to our home to take us here,” said Yue Tianyun, 41, Chunyang’s mother and a farmer from Tumen, in the mountains of northern Sichuan Province.
She watched her son as he stood on both legs in a hallway talking to a friend. He wore a pink shirt and white sneakers on both feet. She stays here in the center with him.
“I’m here to encourage him or look after him,” she said. “I accompany him when he does his exercises. He doesn’t have many psychological problems.”
It was 11 a.m., time for lunch. The hallway began clearing out. Ms. Yue brought out a wheelchair. Chunyang took off his artificial leg and sat down.
A doctor approached and pressed on the stump.
“The stitches have some pus,” said the doctor, Liu Xidong, 40. “You can squeeze it out.”
The first week Chunyang was here, he practiced with a training leg before workers began assembling the real thing.
“My butt hurt at first,” he said. “After a week, there was still a little pain, but not much.”
Chunyang was sitting outside the largest training room in the center, which has three walking platforms with parallel metal bars. There are television screens in front of each platform so the patients can watch themselves walking. On one side of the room there are a few steps with bars for patients to practice walking up and down stairs.
“They do indoor exercises first, then outdoor exercises,” Dr. Liu said. “They’ll use the bars inside the rooms, then they’ll walk without the bars.”
In a room on the floor above, a woman named Cheng Yan sat up in bed eating a lunch of rice porridge and vegetables. She had just gotten a replacement limb for her right leg that morning. After a few hours of training, she had taken it off.
“I’m trying to get used to it,” said Ms. Cheng, 29, who was wearing a necklace with an icon of Guanyin, the Buddhist goddess of compassion. “It’s O.K. so far. It’s not too painful.”
Ms. Cheng, who worked in a clothing factory in the southern boom city of Shenzhen, had been visiting her parents in the nearby city of Dujiangyan when the earthquake hit. She was in a room in the back at the time; everyone but her managed to run from the house.
She said she could have gotten her new leg earlier if she had not injured herself in her first week here. “I forgot that I had had my leg amputated, so in the morning I got out of bed and fell,” she said. “All the people in this situation have the same feeling. You feel you still have your leg there, and it hurts. But after the wound heals more, that kind of feeling will fade.”
Ms. Cheng said she would not go back to the factory and would stay with her family from now on.
In the hallway, Chunyang said he and his mother would go home soon. When they do, they will live in tents.
More than 240 students died in the collapse of Chunyang’s school, and only a few sections of crumbling wall stand by the river in Hanwang. Classes will restart in the fall in a refugee camp.
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