thumb's up...

From this morning's C-J, an inspirational story of modern medicine, good old-fashioned rehab, and a lot of painful work and recovery...

Catcher Koyie Hill might have been the happiest call-up of all yesterday when the Chicago Cubs expanded their roster for September.

To be in any baseball uniform seemed unlikely a little more than 10 months ago, when Hill severed three fingers and the thumb on his right hand in a table saw accident.

A specialist was able to reattach all four, and Hill made a miraculous comeback after hours of therapy and a long relearning process that included sessions with Triple-A hitting coach Von Joshua.

"I had to learn how to give high-fives all over again. Everything is different," said Hill, who even considered having his badly damaged pinkie amputated so he could grip the ball better when he threw.

He got off to a slow start at Triple-A Iowa in the spring when he "felt like I had frozen carrots for fingers." But as the weather warmed, so did Hill. He wound up batting .275 with 17 home runs and 64 RBIs in 113 games for Iowa to earn a trip back to Chicago, where he played 36 games in 2007....

His dad is a carpenter, and Hill had designs on being an architect. He'd used the table saw many times before last Oct. 16, when he was working on a window frame for his house. The saw grabbed, and Hill's hand was in the way.

"It cut my thumb off first, went through all the muscle in my thumb and it went back and turned and cut all four tendons and all four fingers and all four ligaments," he said. "They sewed them all back on."

Hill, 29, said rehabilitation "was a long deal. We did three or four hours of therapy every day, and you battle a lot of nightmares and ups and downs emotionally as far as your career.

Wow!