Photo by Jad Limcaco on Unsplash

Have you ever met someone who can say that they have learned to walk three times in their life?

My first set of first steps, obviously, I do not remember. I was just a small child. I assume I did pretty well though, walking for over 18 years.

December 28, 1999 was just a regular day. My two best friends, Larry and David, came over to my house to pick me up. We were on our way to play some pool. On the way out to the car, we argued, as we always did, about whose turn it was to drive. Although it was technically Larry’s car, we all treated it like our own; taking turns driving, gassing it up, etc. I was adamant that it was my turn, but the boys disagreed. Finally, Larry pulled the “It’s my car, so I’m driving” card. Fine. I got in the backseat behind him, pouting.

About three blocks from my house, there is a little rise in the road. Not a hill, by any means, but to a tiny little car like the Toyota Tercel that we were in, it was a mountain. We thrived on pointless discussions, we had thousands of them over the years. This day, we were having a discussion about whether a vehicle can climb an incline better in first gear or overdrive. At the stop sign just before the rise, Larry put the car in first gear and proceeded.

This is where my memories become fuzzy, going in and out, jumping around. One very vivid memory I do have is sitting on the side of the road, basically in a ditch, watching police and firemen trying to extract me from the vehicle. I was having what I have since learned is an out of body experience. It was a surreal feeling, not understanding what was going on. Another memory is back in the car. I was looking at Larry; I knew he was screaming at me, but I could not hear a thing. I later learned that the deafening sound of the airbags deploying caused my ears to ring so badly that the ringing was all I could hear. I knew right away that I had a broken arm because of the funny (to me now) thought that ran through my head. I remember thinking that if I didn’t take my Goofy watch off, the rapidly swelling wrist was going to break it.
The rest of what I know about that day, I learned secondhand.

A giant recycling truck belonging to the local trash collection company had made an improper turn into the path of the car we were in. As you may have guessed, the tiny car we were in stood no chance against a huge recycling truck. The police photographs showed what looked like a twisted hunk of metal with a trunk.

Larry’s hip was broken and David had a broken jaw. For a while, the only thing we really knew was that I was cut up pretty badly. Doctors and nurses were literally holding me down as a plastic surgeon tried to sew my forehead back together. Eventually, one of them had to do something drastic to ensure that I stayed still. He climbed up on the gurney, straddled me, looked directly into my eyes and said the scariest sentence I had heard up to that point in my life. “You have to be still. Your scan results just arrived and your back is broken!” I have never frozen so quickly in my life. A broken back? Was I paralyzed? Was I going to walk again? Was I going to die? The answers: Yes. Yes. Yes. No.

I could not feel anything below my waist for almost 7 months. Then one day, I felt the swab the nurse used just before a blood-thinning shot in the abdomen. I simply said “Oh, that’s cold.” My mother shot up out of her chair and demanded that I repeat myself. It then dawned on me what was happening. The nurse just chuckled. “Well, if you felt that, you are really going to feel this.” she said. And feel it I did! It was the best painful feeling I had ever felt. I knew that pain meant that I was going to walk again. It took a lot of hard work and retraining my brain. I suddenly went from lying paralyzed in a hospital bed all day long to going through hours and hours of physical and occupational therapy. My legs went from being completely numb and listless, to feeling like they each weighed 80 pounds. I had to concentrate on telling my brain to tell my legs to move. At night, I wore ankle weights, lifting my legs off of the bed repeatedly to try and strengthen them. Amazingly, my fondest memory in this time period of my life is one of anger. One afternoon the nurses were trying to stand me beside my bed. I had not put any weight on my legs up to this point. I had moved them, but not moved on them yet. I am not proud to admit that I was being quite the baby; crying and yelling at those trying to help me, telling them that I just could not do it. I was begging them to leave me alone and to just let me lie back down. Suddenly, I heard my mother scoff. I looked over as she was getting up from the chair she spent her days in. She looked me straight in the eyes. “If you want to give up that’s fine,” she almost sneered at me, “but I am leaving this room now, and I do not know when I’ll be back!” With those words, my mother grabbed her purse and the book she was reading and flounced out of the room. Now, my mother had been there at the hospital with me from day one of this nightmare. She was never discouraged by the news that her youngest daughter would not walk again. She left the hospital every three days or so, going home to shower and grab more clothes, and returning almost immediately. She slept in the chair beside me every single night. I panicked when she left the room that day. In my mind, she was already halfway home and was not coming back to listen to me whine. All because I believed that I would not walk. What was the use in putting myself through the pain only to fail in the end? As I listened to my mom’s receding footsteps down the hall, I mustered every single ounce of strength I had in my soul and forced my left foot to straighten up on the floor, and then my right. I took the hands that were outreached towards me, and though it was one of the most painful moments of my life, I stood! I stood on my own two feet; on my own two legs. I did not stop there. I took a step. And then another. And another. I told myself that I was going to find my mom. The nurses placed a walker in front of me. I grabbed it and held on for dear life. I was terrified, but I did not stop. I was so angry at my mom for leaving me that I was going to find her, even if I had to walk all over that hospital to do it. I made it to the door of my hospital room and turned towards the nurses station. The nurses station that my mom was casually leaned up against; pride welling in her eyes as she watched me walk. Because my mother knew how stubborn I am, because she knew just how to make me want it badly enough, just shy of 8 months after the devastating accident, I took my second set of first steps.

I was suddenly unstoppable. Or so I thought.

Unbeknownst to me, the next battle for my mobility was a short 10 years away.

In June of 2010, I considered myself pretty healthy. Maybe too healthy, as I could have stood to lose some weight. I had no major health concerns, though. One day, I noticed the middle toe on my right foot had a very green tint to it. It was not painful, just green. I decided to make the 40 mile trip to the Emergency Room to make sure that nothing was seriously wrong. I was told that I had a urinary tract infection and was sent home with antibiotics. Now, what a green toe had to do with my urinary tract, I will never know. But, they are the doctors, right? Three days later, I return to the same Emergency Room with a much blackened middle toe and an alarming new symptom: It was extremely painful to put any weight on my right leg. I simply could not bear it. This visit, I was told that this is a side effect of the antibiotics that I would be perfectly fine in a few days, and sent away again. Even with my almost nonexistent medical knowledge, I knew that these doctors were wrong somehow. I was getting extremely scared. Instead of returning home, I drove over an hour away to visit another Emergency Room. The new set of doctors were alarmed at the appearance of my toe and ordered a lot of tests. Results showed blood clots. I needed immediate emergency surgery. However, I was told that the hospital I was at was not equipped to handle my situation and started preparing me to be transported to another facility. Doctors did not know what was causing these terrifying symptoms. I was tested for leukemia, Factor V Leiden, and a plethora of other diseases. After almost 2 years of tests and multiple surgeries, I was diagnosed as having a disease called Antiphospholipid Antibody Syndrome (APS). Doctors do not know what causes APS, but they do know that it is closely related to Lupus, it is an auto-immune disorder that causes my white blood cells and platelets to attack my own body and that there is no cure. My immune system detects an organic part of my body, whether it be an artery or an entire organ, as an enemy, an outsider, a foreign body, and launches an attack of white blood cells. This attack, called a flare, results in multiple clots of white blood cells and platelets occurring all over my system. These clots cause circulation to be cut off from various and sometimes multiple extremities. The very first detected clot, the one that caused my toe to turn green and then black, was actually all the way up in my abdomen. The blood flow to my right leg had been almost completely cut off and not enough blood was reaching my foot to keep it alive. My leg was slowly dying from the inside out. Multiple surgeries and interventions later, we were successful in saving my life and my left leg, but on September 11, 2012, my right leg was amputated below the knee. I was devastated. In 2 short years, I went from being a vibrant, active thirty-something to being confined to either a bed or a wheelchair 24 hours a day. I no longer had the freedom and the independence that I valued above almost everything else. I was suddenly thrust back into the role of a helpless child-like entity. Without delving into detail that I do not want to disclose and I can almost guarantee you do not want to read, I again could not do most personal tasks and was completely dependent on others to care for me. I was in a wheelchair for 11 months, enduring a revision surgery and a wound-vac on a slow healing residual limb. I was convinced, again, that I would never walk. I sank into a deep depression that only got worse when my mother lost her battle with congestive heart failure in May of 2013.

So, there I was motherless, truly alone for the first time in my life and wondering where I was going to go and more importantly, what I was going to do. In the months following my mother’s passing, I was reintroduced to an old friend. I had no inkling how much this person would turn my world upside down and change it, and me, for the better. To this person, I was not some helpless person stuck in a wheelchair. I was not the invalid I saw myself as. To this person, I was the same happy, funny woman that they had known 7 years prior. Astonishing me more than almost anything else was the fact that this person did not see my wheelchair, they did not see my missing leg. They saw me. I found myself being courted, even wooed. Eventually, after many months and walls I had built around my heart demolished, I became a fiancée.

Finally, after waiting for what seemed like an eternity, after finding new love and being shown that life can be amazing whether on wheels or on feet, after almost resigning myself to being in my wheelchair forever, but also being completely okay with it, in early July of 2013 my surgeon approved me for a prosthetic leg. A month and a half later, in late August, with an amazing fiancée by my side and a brand new happy outlook on life, I took my third set of first steps.

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