GILLETTE - Normal is a stepfather who can beat all the other kids at limbo. He lowers his mechanical wheelchair all the way down, lays it back and rolls under the pole.

Normal is celebrating your eighth and ninth birthdays in a Hawaiian-decked hospital room while your stepfather heals from a single-car drunken driving accident.

For 11-year-old Bailey Huber, normal is knowing that when your stepdad's stuck in bed, it's a good time to make him play games, because, you know, he can't go anywhere.

But before the accident, normal was a lot different.

Bailey's stepdad, Chris Santistevan, was a former Marine who had served in Japan and Italy from 1993 to 1997. He was more than 6 feet tall and worked as a mechanic at E&S Services in Gillette. He and Bailey's mother, Sheryl, had recently bought a house to start a life together.

Chris' old normal was bowling with buddies. It was helping disabled people to bow hunt for antelope each fall as a volunteer with the Physically Challenged Bowhunters Association.

But normal changed on Feb. 12, 2004.

Santistevan tried to drive home after a night of bowling and drinking. His truck hit a guard rail, flipped end over end and pinned his legs beneath the steering wheel. A small fire started in the engine compartment and prevented two men who stopped to offer help from pulling him out. Two deputies freed one leg before the heat forced them away. Somehow, Santistevan yanked his other leg from the wreckage before falling to the ground.

He woke up several months later in a Greeley, Colo., burn unit but doesn't remember much of anything until about September. The only normal thing then was that Sheryl and Bailey were still by his side.

Doctors told Sheryl it was almost certain her husband would die. He had third- and fourth-degree burns over 87 percent of his body, some as deep as the bone. They had to amputate his right leg above the knee. They amputated his right arm above the wrist. They decided to save his left leg and left arm, though both were mangled.

But Chris lived.

Doctors told him he'd find his new normal in about five years.

Four and a half years later, Chris is still just a guy. He wakes up and goes to work at E&S Services where he organizes maintenance orders for the vehicles he used to work on. He comes home, watches TV and goes to bed. Then he does it all over again.

"I've got a good routine now," he says. "I know how things work. I think that's what normal is."

Normal became living with his new body. He decided that doctors should cut off eight more inches of his right arm to ease the pain and stiffness. That was surgery No. 51.

Then, he told doctors to amputate his useless left leg. It hurt constantly. It made it difficult for Sheryl to transfer him to bed at a night and into his chair in the morning. That was surgery No. 52.

Normal became knowing it's easier to lose one more limb than to fight with it the rest of one's life.

For Sheryl, normal is marrying a man in a hospital room attended by nurses just because she knew it was time.

It's coming home to friends who said they'd help, but who never came around.

"I think they were scared to see him like that," she says.

It still hurts every time she touches Chris - feeding him, clothing him, showing her love for him. But he is grateful for every touch.

This is the new normal: Wheelchairs, limbo games, learning to do all the things one used to do, but to do them with one arm. Now, Chris is the participant, not the coach, in the Physically Challenged Bowhunters Association. And today, he is competing in the 28th annual National Veterans Wheelchair Games for the second year in a row.

"Other people in wheelchairs need to see this and know it's not the end of the world and get out and do stuff," says Chris.

Bailey and Sheryl will be there, cheering him on. They will stick out walking among 550 wheelchair athletes.

But that's OK. For this family, sticking out is normal.

Contact features reporter Hannah Wiest at (307) 266-0535 or hannah.wiest@trib.com.