If your life were a book and you were the author, how would you want your story
to go? That's the question that changed my life forever. Growing up in the hot
Last Vegas desert, all I wanted was to be free. I would daydream about traveling
the world, living in a place where it snowed, and I would picture all of the stories
that I would go on to tell.
At the age of 19, the day after I graduated high school, I moved to a place
where it snowed and I became a massage therapist. With this job all I needed
were my hands and my massage table by my side and I could go anywhere.
For the first time in my life, I felt free, independent and completely in control
of my life. That is, until my life tool a detour. I went home from work early one
day with what I thought was the flu, and less than 24 hours later I was in the hospital
on life support with less than a two percent chance of living. It wasn't until days
later as I lay in a coma that the doctors diagnosed me with bacterial meningitis,
a vaccine-preventable blood infection. Over the course of two and a half months
I lost my spleen, my kidneys, the hearing in my left ear and both of my legs
below the knee.
When my parents wheeled me out of the hospital I felt like I had been pieced
back together like a patchwork doll. i thought the worst was over until weeks
later when I saw my new legs for the first time. The calves were bulky blocks
of metal with pipes bolted together for the ankles and a yellow rubber foot
with a raised rubber line from the toe to the ankle to look like a vein. I didn't
know what to expect, but I wasn't expecting that.
With my mom by my side and tears streaming down our faces, I strapped
on these chunky legs and I stood up. They were so painful and so confining
that all I could think was, how am I ever going to travel the world in these things?
How was I ever going to live the life full of adventure and stories, as I always
wanted? And how was I going to snowboard again?
That day, I went home, I crawled into bed and this is what my life looked like
for the next few months: me passed out, escaping from reality, with my legs
resting by my side. I was absolutely physically and emotionally broken.
But I knew that in order to move forward, I had to let go of the old
Amy and learn to embrace the new Amy. And that is when it dawned on me
that I didn't have to be five-foot-five anymore. I could be as tall as I wanted!
Or as short as I wanted, depending on who I was dating. And if I snowboarded
again, my feet aren't going to get cold. And best of all, I thought, I can make
my feet the size of all the shoes that are on the sales rack. And I did! So there
were benefits here.