Watching Lily Dunham solder electrical wires recently at a maker fair, someone passing by likely would not have noticed the two fingers missing from the 29-year-old student’s left hand. “She makes it look easy,” says Harrison Orr, Chair of Electrical Systems, Electrical Engineering, Transportation and Technology. “You would never know she has a disability from the work that she’s done. She is delicate and precise and there is no slowing her down.”
Dunham is graduating now with multiple Associate of Applied Sciences (AAS) degrees with high honors, including Computer Engineering Technology AAS, Electrical System Technology AAS, Electronics Engineering Technology AAS, and a diploma in Electrical Systems Technology. She recently shared the story of the accident that changed the course of her life and brought her to A-B Tech. As a child, she says, her favorite spot was beside her father in the basement, watching him tinker with the office machines he rebuilt for a living. From the age of ten, she volunteered with her church to help build houses for those in need and realized she loved working with her hands. After graduating high school in Morganton, she went on to do three months of boot camp but had to drop out because of severe asthma. She began a construction degree at Piedmont Community College in 2020 and was working as a hardwood floor installer when she had her accident.
At the time she was on a deck, working on a chop saw doing cuts she’d done hundreds of times when suddenly one of the saw’s brackets broke, her hand got pulled under and the board she’d been cutting went flying onto the grass. For a moment Dunham felt nothing. Then, the heat started. “It was like white hot magma had struck,” she says. “I didn’t feel pain, just intense heat up my arm and into my shoulder…”Then, Dunham did what she’d been taught in boot camp; she averted her eyes from the injury; dropped onto her knees in the grass, put her hands above her head, and called out to her coworkers for help.
Somehow through it all, she maintained a sense of calm. She even was able to call her parents and tell them to meet her at the hospital.
“I didn’t want to bleed on the porch,” she says. “I kept asking, did I bleed on the porch?”
It wasn’t until she was at the hospital faced with a needle the size of her arm that the fear set in. “The numbing medicine burned like lava all over again,” She says. “And all of a sudden I knew I was missing a finger. I asked the doctor, “Did the paramedic give it to you? He said yes.”
Dunham had the choice of keeping her fingers, but was told they'd be nonfunctional so chose to go without. During the reconstructive surgery, she was alert enough to crack a joke to her father standing nearby. “They were using an instrument that was buzzing and I looked over at my dad and went Bzzzzz,” she laughs wryly.
After her accident, Dunham persisted in finishing her last semester at college and even attempted her final construction project, but when it came time to use the chop saw she faltered. “I froze and my mind went black,” she says. “I relived that moment of the accident and felt hot pain shooting up my arm.”
Her teacher made accommodations for her and she passed the exam, but Dunham knew she would have to find another line of work. Running through her construction skillsets, she settled on electrical work and enrolled at A-B Tech. Later she decided to triple major in electrical engineering, electronics, and computer engineering because “they all go together in weird ways.”
In the last two years, she’s thrived in the programs, though she occasionally has to ask for help stripping tiny wires. In the meantime, she’s discovered something she enjoys perhaps even more than working with her hands. After being a work-study in the program for the past three years, Dunham discovered she has a knack for teaching high school students during open houses.
“She’s a really good storyteller,” Orr says. “I know if I put her in front of a group for demonstrations or community outreach and she can say what needs to be said professionally.” Now Dunham hopes to land a teaching job at A- B Tech among the instructors who have become like a second family.
In reflecting back on how her life has changed since her accident, Dunham’s face grows uncharacteristically serious. “It’s made me think more deeply about things and life as a whole,” she says. “I’m not looking at life moment to moment anymore. I’m taking steps toward a future end goal.”