What if a minor procedure left you permanently altered? - [Rebroadcast #135]
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This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services. Today we continue our annual summer rebroadcast series, returning with new episodes starting August 9th. Today's episode, What If a Minor Procedure Left You Permanently Altered, was originally released as number 135 on August 13th, 2019.

I had no idea what was happening. I was the most lost, confused person. My personhood had been shattered into a thousand pieces that I and my family were left to pick up one at a time. From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein. You are listening to This Is Actually Happening. Episode 135. What if a minor procedure left you permanently altered?

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My father, you know, was an aspiring preacher for years. He reads the Bible and what he interprets the message as is follow the rules to the letter and reject all people that don't. He's also like a big conspiracy theorist and he doesn't have any trust in anything but himself and God.

He thinks he has a first class ticket to heaven, but he, in my opinion, is a narcissist and he refuses to acknowledge that he had a hand in abusing me or my siblings. I don't know how he could read the Bible so many times and so in depth and come away with a message of hatred, but he has. I grew up in metro Atlanta, the suburbs.

The religion was the center of our family. It was the core. We went to church twice a week. We had Bible studies every day. We weren't allowed to play Pokemon or go trick-or-treating because it was of the devil. They sent all of us kids, me, my brother, and my sister, we went to private Christian school.

As a kid, I worshipped my dad, even though I, as an adult, realized that he was the source of a lot of negative emotions, but I idolized him. I was a very carefree, loving, caring, gentle, vulnerable child. And starting at under age 10, I just began hardening up inside.

When I was growing up, my dad was abusive, especially emotionally, occasionally physically abusive. And growing up around all that anger and violence, I internalized anger and violence. But, I mean, I grew up in a privileged household to parents that made pretty good money and spoiled us and encouraged us to chase our dreams.

but they had a set path that they expected us to follow.

My family dynamic shifted after my parents were divorced and my mother remarried my stepdad, Peter, because he's the dad that I always wanted. And he stepped right up into that role. I was 10 when my parents were divorced. So my stepdad has been in my life since I was like 12. And he's been a surrogate father figure, definitely, and so supportive and loving.

I rebelled against religion in my teenage years, and I told my mother that I rejected Christianity and really any form of religion. And that's due in a large part to just experiencing religious abuse

and being raised around bigoted white Christians my whole life. And I was such a hateful person when I still considered myself to be Christian, and I was surrounded by hateful people. And that really sticks out in my memory as my experience of religion. It wasn't an ideology based around love, it was based around judgment.

I just took all that hatred and violence and I internalized it and then I projected it outwards. And then that was really what consumed me. And so I was always in trouble at school. I never felt like I fit in with the happy Christian kids that surrounded me. And I was severely ADHD as a kid. And you know, the ADHD kids in class are always bouncing and talking and being distracting.

And that's a perfect summation of who I was throughout school until I got to college. I was just, I was a mess. I was angry. I had no self-control. At 10 years old, I had been so violent towards my brother that my mother put me in the car and drove me to a mental health institution. So even from just 10 years old, it was...

had permeated my being and so every strong emotion translated into violence, physical violence and fury. When I was 16, I was diagnosed as bipolar 2, which has since been re-diagnosed as bipolar 1. And bipolar 1 is the more extreme version. I had a psychiatrist that gave me 80 milligrams of Adderall in middle school.

And just to make me a zombie so that the behavioral problems would disappear because I had no other emotions. I really had no emotions at all being on such a high dosage at such a young age. So when I got my diagnosis, it was a huge relief because I was finally medicated properly and I could get the therapy and help that I needed.

Mental illness also runs very heavily in my family. My dad's uncle was a serious schizophrenic, and my dad was raised in a very abusive household as a result of that. His schizophrenic uncle, if you sneezed in front of him, he took that as a personal assault on him. So if my dad had to sneeze, he would run to his room and slam the door, and his uncle would be pounding on the door to get in there to hurt him.

for sneezing. And my dad just came from a very dysfunctional family. And as a result, took his dysfunction out on his family. Anger really permeates my life. There's kind of an anger that's just brooding and living inside me and it jumps out at any opportunity. Unfortunately, to deal with the anger,

I self-medicated. When I was a kid, to deal with my anger and frustration and negative emotions, I would self-medicate with candy. And I would steal candy from stores. I would steal money from my parents to get that. And as I became a teenager, I medicated with sex. And I used that for a couple of years. And then when I turned 20, I began medicating with weed.

So at 17, I sought out being validated and consoled through sex and fake intimacy. And I had really no sense of value of myself at that age. I thought I was ugly and worthless. And then when I was 20, I found weed and

Weed really just made me numb. It made me happy. It made me laugh. It took away my troubles, or so I thought. So I started smoking around 20 years old, and I smoked basically every day. And it turned from bud to dabs to a ton of dabs. Like, I had a dab pen, so I'd wake up, dab, dab, dab, do 30 or 40 dabs during a day.

Dabs are an oil form of marijuana. It looks like a resin and it hits you with this super high concentration of THC and gets you really, really fucked up. I self-medicated to quiet the anger and frustration and fury that was always brewing inside of me. I was just looking for numbness and just short bouts of pleasure.

I moved to Colorado from Georgia at 21 years old. And since weed was legal, I could just go to a dispensary and get an ounce for $100 and smoke an ounce in two weeks. Then I had health problems kind of show up on the radar. It was just nausea that was so bad, it would put me in the hospital.

I was just throwing up just constantly and it ended up being from the super high concentration of dabs in my system. It's a condition called hyperemesis.

The doctors kept saying it could be from using marijuana. And so I just rejected any notion that it could stem from marijuana because I knew there was something else going on. And there was. But marijuana was also a factor of that that I declined to accept because I loved weed so much and I knew I wouldn't give it up.

And soon the sickness got so bad that I couldn't continue my job. I also contracted hepatitis A during that time and it contributed to the nausea and it really screwed with my digestive system so much that I couldn't maintain my job.

And I lost a ton of weight from not being able to hold down food. So I turned to stripping because if I couldn't pay my bills, I would have to move back home.

So I could be a drug addict. I could work whatever days I felt like, whatever hours I felt like. And I could be around other beautiful women and just make decent money and only have to work a few nights a month and pay my bills. And then I could deal with my sickness the rest of the time. So when I was feeling all right, I would go to the club. Stripping was a transformative experience. I came into it meek, subservient,

I accepted men's abuse. I didn't fight for myself. I didn't know how to fight for myself. So when I began dancing, I learned very quickly that if you don't enforce boundaries, men will just step all over them. So if I didn't fight hard, I would have just been decimated. So it gave me a backbone that I had never learned or been given or been educated to have.

To subsidize stripping, I began camming and I was really just doing it to look for sugar daddies. I mean, digital sugar daddies like from across the country that I could just send nude pictures to and then they would send me money for groceries or clothes or whatever I wanted.

So I had definitely gotten in this state where I sexualized everything about myself in order to figure out where I could make profits from just using my body. And that's what sex work does. It frees women. But people hate it because people hate the idea of a woman monetizing sex.

society does to her every day. Society objectifies a woman every day as she walks through life and we feel unsafe. And the second we turn that coin or we turn that idea on its head and start profiting off of what society wants to do to us for free and take from us, it really makes people angry. I met my

Longest term boyfriend. Six months after I moved to Colorado, he was a native and we met on Tinder, of course. And I was in a manic phase, so I was just looking for numbers of people to sleep with just to soothe my anxiety and anger. And on our first date, he was steady and handsome and kind and

and loving, and I could just sense what an amazing person he was. So I pursued a relationship with him. And three months after we began dating, we moved in together. And he was just the most loving, supportive partner. If I needed anything, he was there for me. My career continued. My relationship continued.

Things were business as usual. And in 2016, I was 21 years old. My sister Jacqueline had a bachelorette party in Key West and I had a pimple on top of my lip. So I picked at it and it just blew up. It swelled up to like the size of a marble. My whole mouth was swollen. I looked crazy.

The swelling went down after a few days, but the cyst had begun. So it started out small, the size of a pea maybe. Over the course of a year, it remained there. I couldn't pop it. I couldn't get to it. It bugged me. It felt like I had something under my skin that I just was dying to get out. So I would be just picking at it and would make it worse. The cyst would get bigger until it was the size of a small marble.

And the cyst wasn't painful. It just bothered me. It was like picking at this thing that you can't get to and it's just living under your skin and driving me just absolutely crazy. And you could see it when I talked and smiled. I mean, it was like a smaller bump under my lip and it was just distracting. And so I finally...

Went to a doctor to get it addressed when I was 23 and sought out a surgeon to remove the cyst. And we scheduled a date for the surgery. The day before the surgery was my boyfriend's birthday. And I had that small surgery the next morning at a surgery center. His mother drove me to it. I really didn't tell my family about the surgery. I was just getting a cyst taken out of my face.

I went to a surgery center, it wasn't a hospital, and this specialist just put me under anesthesia for a 15-minute procedure. And I woke up 10 days later.

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And the next, something goes wrong. But with ADT's 24/7 professional monitoring, you still feel safe. Because when every second counts, count on ADT. Visit ADT.com today. I had no idea what was happening. I was the most lost, confused person. My first memory was nurses removing my respirator tube and it being extremely painful.

I had no concept that any time had passed. The last thing I remember was celebrating my boyfriend's birthday. My boyfriend wasn't there, and I didn't understand why he was gone. Because I knew that something had happened because I had woken up in a hospital. But I didn't really know what had happened. I was so heavily drugged up to deal with the pain. And when I looked down at my legs, I saw that my right leg looked like a Christmas ham.

But I thought it had just been folded up and bandaged because I was not in a clear headspace and I wasn't processing things rationally. I was just looking down at this giant hunk of gauze wrapped up. Some of my first memories are my mother walking into my hospital room and it's the first time I remembered seeing her.

And my mom sits down and I just light up because I was so confused and I could tell I wasn't right, but I didn't know why. And she sits down by my bed and I said, mom, did they take my leg? And she said, yes, sweetie, they did. They had to. In my crazy state of being so under the influence of

super heavy opiates, the first reaction I had was to my mother, the very conservative Christian wonderful lady. I said, that's hot. That was my first reaction was just to fetishize the amputation.

I just immediately tied my amputation into what I could make of it. And to my poor mother, I was just talking about how that was a sexy thing. And that's how fucked up. So fucked up. People kept trying to tell me that I had had an amputation, but I didn't register it. So it took me just days to realize that my leg had been amputated. So I was just really in this crazy state.

haze of just super heavy drugs. I didn't really process what an amputation meant, what effect it was going to have on my life. I only tied it into the life I had been living without really thinking about the far-reaching consequences of having one leg.

For some reason, the drugs that they have you on when you're in an induced coma, when you come off of them, you have really extreme reactions. And my extreme reaction, of course, my default, was just being short-tempered and angry. So I was being a fucking bitch to everyone. And my mom's best friend came up to me and she said, you almost died. And it was really hard on your parents and your family.

It was the first inkling I had that things had been bad. I had had zero idea. I mean, she said that I almost died and it came out of nowhere and it smacked me. I was like, what? Like, what do you mean? I had no idea how long I had been out. All I knew is that

I was celebrating Ben's birthday and I woke up in the hospital and my right leg was just hugely, ridiculously swollen because of course you cut a limb off and your body just freaks the fuck out. And my body still hasn't come to terms with the amputation. I had understood that my leg had been amputated by that point.

But I hadn't understood anything about the coma. I was just confused. I was so confused. I just wanted my boyfriend, honestly. I was like, where is Ben? And he had been at the hospital through my entire coma, so he had to go back to work.

After I had been in that 10-day coma, I didn't sleep for three days after I woke up. I mean, there was no way I could get to sleep. I was seeing things. I thought I saw Ben outside my window, and I was begging the nurse to give me a phone to call Ben so he could come inside the hospital, even though he was an hour and a half, two hours away. So that really is what punctuated the first few days. Confusion, anxiety, anxiety.

exhaustion, and because of the trauma my heart had undergone, I had zero energy. The hospital wouldn't give me any water.

Uh, they didn't know if I could swallow, uh, because my, I had had a swelling in my brain and it had kind of affected my motor functions. Uh, so they had to do a swallow test and they also didn't know if I would need an emergency surgery. So they couldn't give me water to drink. So the desperation that you feel for water when you can't have it is something I can't describe. Um,

It was worse than pain. It was worse than pain because I was so desperate. Even though I had 20 IVs in me, I had three in my neck, I had IVs in each of my arms, but it didn't sate my thirst. The primal instinct and urge to drink water when you are dehydrated is all you can think about. It's all you can focus on. It's all you want.

I suffered withdrawal from the dabs that I had been doing. So every morning they would try and feed me breakfast and I would just end up vomiting everything up. I couldn't keep anything down in this withdrawal. And my remaining foot, my left foot had developed...

nerve damage from the lack of blood flow. So I got a condition called neuropathy in my foot, which is your nerves are basically in panic mode. So whenever anyone brushed the bottom of my foot, it felt like somebody took a hairbrush full of needles and slammed it into the bottom of my foot. The pain in my left foot was greater than the pain in my stump at that time.

After I woke up and kind of began to grasp that the amputation had happened and that something bad had happened as well, I hadn't understood that I had had a complete system failure. There was so many parts of my body that weren't functioning. There were so many doctors that had to keep track of each part. There was a liver doctor, there was a heart doctor, there was a kidney doctor, there was a bladder doctor, etc.

And because I was so young and what had happened to me was such an anomaly that at a teaching hospital, I was kind of like a sideshow attraction or like an interesting case study.

And I remember taking my first steps. I was in a wheelchair. They had a walker in front of me. They had me grab onto the walker and I stood up out of the chair and it took monumental effort to go 10 feet. Just, I would like lift the walker of six inches and then like

lift my little, my broken foot just in such a bad state. It was just a few inches. And when I got 10 feet, they'd let me sit down again. And God, it was such a breath of relief. I slept so, I just slept so much. Most of that month I was sleeping because my heart had no longevity left. It had no energy to give me.

After I had gone through two and a half weeks of rehab in hospital, we flew home to Georgia so I could live with my mom while I was recovering. And they had to build wheelchair ramps throughout the house. But I was starting to get the story of what had happened when I was out. ♪

My family wanted to protect me from what I had undergone in my coma. I got pieces of information about my coma, but they told me so little. And I was in the hospital for a month, and when I was checked out of the hospital, I still knew basically nothing about what had happened. But since then, I've quizzed my family members on what they went through, what they heard from the doctors, what they saw.

And what happened to me during those 10 days that I have no recollection of. So I went in for the surgery. The procedure went fine. He put me in the recovery room. He called my mother to say that the surgery had gone well and I was in recovery and I started aspirating blood. So I coughed up blood and then I breathed it in.

And my heart failed like that. And the doctor immediately put me back under anesthesia and sent me to the hospital. My body began swelling. I mean, I had brain swelling that caused my eyeballs to point different directions, even though I was totally out of it. My eyes were open. And my boyfriend had just gotten the call that things had gone wrong and he needed to rush to the hospital. And he called my parents and they...

immediately threw a suitcase together and went to the airport and flew out that night. And my mom and Peter said it was the worst flight of their life. All they could do was just look out the window and see where I was going to be when they landed. They didn't know if I would be alive. My parents got in at midnight the night that this occurred, and the doctors told them that they needed to call the rest of the family to come up.

And my mother said, you only say that if she's dying. Is my 23-year-old daughter going to die from this tiny little surgery? And he just said, call your family. So my small and close-knit family and extended family fly in from all over the country.

They barely saved my other leg, you know, all of my limbs were a toss up that they were going to make it through because as I had gone into shock, all the blood had rushed to preserving my internal organs. As each organ failed, my lungs failed when they were trying to put the respiratory tube in me, they collapsed my left lung.

My kidneys failed. My liver failed. My body was just non-functioning. I was on dialysis. I was on ECMO, which is a heart-lung bypass. The only thing keeping me alive were so many machines that my stepdad described my hospital room as the cockpit of an airplane.

So it took a long time for the doctors to figure out what had happened to my heart because at first it was just a giant mystery. Why would a healthy, athletic 23-year-old's heart fail under anesthesia for 15 minutes? What in God's name could provoke that?

We learned later that what I had suffered was called Takotsubo's disease. It's also called a broken heart disease. And your heart, under the stress of the anesthesia, it misshapes. It turns into the shape of an octopus trap, which is what I believe Takotsubo means. It's most common in women in their 90s. So to happen to a 23-year-old, it was just unbelievable and unheard of.

The disease came from how much I abused dabs. And I was also going to hot yoga five or six days a week, which stressed my heart out extremely much on top of the dabs, which fucked my heart up really badly. That had set off a domino effect in my body that caused system-wide failure.

So it was just a freak reaction that no one could have anticipated and that puzzled doctors for a long time before they came up with the Takotsubo's diagnosis. This is going to sound ridiculous, but I never really mourned my leg. I accepted that this is my life now, and I just pushed on.

It was harder for my mother. She really mourned the loss of the life I had as a perfectly abled person. And now I was, you know, sort of seriously disabled at 23. And I had almost died. And my family was just reeling from that emotionally. They were just

They were so hurting. I've always said that my family went through a more traumatic experience than I did.

My poor mother had almost lost one of her children and the thought of almost losing one of her babies, it shook her to her core. My brother, my sister, my stepdad, my boyfriend especially, God, that was so hard for him because he would drive down every weekend and sleep on the couch in my bedroom, in my hospital room, on this tiny little cramped couch, this 6'2 man.

He just did everything. He did everything for me. Everyone in my life did everything for me. When I came out of the coma, my family told me that one of the first things I was wanting to do was break up with Ben. And I think that was a reaction almost dying. And I had like a clarity that no relationship with a man was going to work no matter how perfect the man was.

I really had no inclination that I was gay until I was 22 because I was raised in such a homophobic environment that I shoved down that part of myself.

um, so deep that I couldn't reach it. And I slept with so many men looking to find one that fit. And I found one that almost fit. And I tried with everything to make it work. Um, and I realized that I just can't connect with men on an emotional level that I can with women. And also I have so much respect and love for women and what we go through in this world and what, and what our path and, and blazing our own trail means. Um,

At 22, I finally woke up to being gay. So it was a very hard awakening for me to come to that it took me years, years to accept that. I was still with Ben and I still stuck it out for a year because I needed the emotional support that Ben gave me. But I knew deep down that I needed to marry a woman no matter how much I loved him.

When I broke up with Ben, my family understood that it was because I loved women. And after my mom was separated from my dad, she started amending her view of Christianity to be a more loving and accepting view. And I came out to her by asking if

she would, you know, attend my wedding if I married a woman. And she said she would. And ever since then, it's kind of been an unspoken agreement between us that she knows who I am and she won't reject me for it. And my siblings have always kind of known and are the most supportive, you know, and they don't care what my sexuality is. They just, they value me for who I am.

Ben knew that about me. He knew that's why we broke up, and he accepted that about me, and his family did. So I just am in a very supportive place about my sexual identity. I'm really blessed. I mean, I don't take that for granted.

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And then I was on a crutches for a year. It was over a year from my amputation to when I got a functioning computer prosthetic. And then it was three or four months of PT after that until I could finally lose the stupid crutches. I've had long lasting nerve pain, also known as ghost pains. I was treated with methadone for my early ghost pains because they were so extreme. It was excruciating pain.

Ghost pain is so hard to describe. It's like the limb is still there. I can feel the exact dimensions of my limb. My shin will hurt, the bone will hurt, or I'll have an itch on my calf, or my toes will hurt. It'll feel like I jammed a toe, but they're long gone, and it's been 20 months, and I'm still having these ghost pains.

It's like an excruciating crawling pain. Like if you've ever come off of opiates for any reason that your whole body just crawls and, and it's just excruciating and you, you're twisting around trying to, trying to soothe the pain and there's nothing you could do. That is what ghost pain is like. And, uh,

For most people, it gets bad at night, and that's when it affects me is every night when I get tired, the ghost pains start to ramp up. And thankfully, they're manageable now. But I have a feeling I'm going to be suffering with them for a while and maybe forever.

There's so many things you don't notice until you can't do them anymore. So I couldn't go up steps for like eight months. So I would be going to the grocery store or I'd be at someone's house or I'd be in a restaurant and there's just a couple steps to go to the place where you order. And there's just no way I'm getting up those without assistance. Someone needs to hold my hand. And if I don't have a railing, I still can't go up steps even though I'm walking now.

Or when your friends want to go out to a bar or a club and party, I'm going to have to sit at the bar and watch them party because if I even want to go out on the dance floor and try and dance a little bit, as I begin to sweat in my prosthetic...

it's held on by suction and so the suction is lost and the leg begins to slip off because of sweating. So I have to take the leg completely off, mop everything up and put it back on, which is a spectacle in a public environment. When I work out, I have to take it off and put it back on every single time I work out in the middle of the gym in front of people. And so people walk around the corner and there's someone sitting on a bench putting their leg on and there's a leg just sitting next to them and it like freaks people out. They're like, Jesus Christ.

I gradually came to accept that I am now permanently disabled, that I'll never be the athlete that I once was because I always prided myself on my athleticism. I'm trying to learn how to run again because I can walk, but running I look like a baby giraffe learning to walk. I'm just hopping and it's very embarrassing.

And another thing is how people view you when you're disabled. Like, all of a sudden I went from someone desirable to someone unfuckable because they were disabled.

And as soon as I got my prosthetic, I became fuckable again because I may have been disabled, but I didn't look disabled because I had two legs, even though one of them was a robot leg. So people just view you as helpless and sad and pathetic, you know, either consciously or subconsciously. But they are also very helpful. Like, I mean, so many people have reached out to open doors, carry my groceries, just help in any way that they could.

I've mourned that people will no longer view me as physically strong and capable. That part of me is gone now. I'm always going to be asking and needing help in some way or another. You just live in a world that is perfect until you're disabled and you realize that you can't go there. You can't dance. You can't go out with your friends. You can't walk more than a quarter mile. It's limiting.

And I've worked very hard to get to a place where I did a mile and a half hike for the first time since my amputation about a month ago. And that was, I was just so elated when I, when I finally completed it, I was just amazed that it was something I could do again.

And there's also a camaraderie among disabled people that we understand our struggle and able-bodied people, they will only understand if they have a disabled friend or family member that they go around with and they're like, oh my God, you can't get up these stairs without help. So if you're by yourself, you're fucked. You know, there's just no going up those stairs. So yeah, the world is different. I don't know if I would trade this experience for having my leg back.

because it has reshaped the direction of my life in a positive way. I'm grateful in a lot of ways. It's made me a lot more understanding, kind, patient, and patient with myself, which is still a really hard concept for me, because I want to be perfect. I want to be athletic. I want to be independent so badly. And it takes so much more work to get there.

The anger and bipolar were something that I've had to take on, you know, and face every day.

Anger is still a bigger part of my person than I wish it was. It consumes me when I drink and it just unleashes this part of this angry, violent part of me that I thought was gone at this point. But I did, you know, briefly fall back into using drugs, which is amazing because marijuana took my leg from me and I still relapsed.

you know, like, like something can take so much from you and you go running back. Just, it just speaks to how much I was desperate to numb myself from my emotions that I still struggle against. So I've also like gone into, you know, uh, groups that address substance and alcohol abuse. And I attend them regularly. My anger is transformed mostly through DBT therapy, uh,

And also a lot of personal will. I'm a fighter, obviously, and that stems from kind of a core of anger. But I will fight against my own self-sabotage too, so attending as much therapy as I can. I wouldn't consider my amputation to be an especially traumatic event for me.

Like I said, it was so traumatic for my family because they had to live through me almost dying and being told that I was going to die. But me, I woke up and my world was changed, but it wasn't changed in a way that I couldn't swallow.

And I don't know if I'm just cocky or if I'm out of touch with my emotions or what's why I haven't let it get into my mind and ruin my life because it totally is.

It took my leg away from me and I will not let it take my life away from me, you know? And I'm not going to be one of those bitter people who's like, well, I lost my leg when I was 23, so fuck everything, you know? Like, I just got to keep living and I will and I have. When I woke up from my amputation, my personhood had been shattered into a thousand pieces that I and my family were left to pick up one at a time.

The first piece was even being able to sit up in bed for a period of hours. The second piece was being able to get around in a wheelchair around my house. The third piece was going back out in public and being part of the world again instead of being stuck inside looking out at the world. The next piece was getting a prosthetic and learning to walk again.

I've had such moments of complete freedom when I get back something that I thought I had lost. Like when I took my first steps without being on crutches, I couldn't get the smile off my face. I was just beaming from ear to ear. When I took my first very first steps,

very dumb looking, but effectual running steps. I cried and I am just not a crier because I'm getting pieces of myself back that I, I didn't know if they were lost forever.

And it's given me pieces that I didn't even have before. And they've been formed into a mosaic, whereas beforehand they were, you know, a uniform painting. And now they're just glued back together pieces. But I have so much more appreciation for the life that I have made for myself with the support of so many others. People that...

haven't gone through a physical trauma like this, when they hear my story and I speak to them about it, um, they're often surprised that how little I let this ruin my life.

But I don't think I'm special. I think that a lot or anyone in this position, they're going to come back with ferocity. You rise to the occasion. You don't think you could until you're in the position of not having a choice. And I am a fighter, but I think everyone has a fighter inside of them that wants the best for yourself and is willing to give everything to get there.

Today's episode featured Olivia Wilder. You can find out more about Olivia and updates about Olivia's current journey on Instagram at all.in.amputee.

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