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("Reach up and grab onto your bar...")
("...slowly start to roll back.")
("You're integrating the spring through the bar into your hands, into your belly. Good.")
- An active life is living fully.
An active life is being joyous.
It's a life with accepting, in my case,
life with a prosthetic leg.
An active life is being grateful for
what we've been given and using it.
("How do you feel?" -"Good!" -"Yeah?")
It's a life without limits.
- As part of my communications work for Ottobock, I get to meet remarkable people
and to tell their stories about challenging limitations.
Leslie, a coworker and friend, is one of those people, and by sharing her experiences
with limb loss, she believes she can help others
reframe their limitations as opportunities.
("Thank you, thanks for having me here. So yes, as you said, April is limb loss Awareness Month...")
Today, Leslie works in our legal department.
In the past she did everything from nursing to competitive skiing
and in recent years she's become much more involved in talking about limb loss issues.
- It's not that I've ever hid the fact that I have a prosthetic leg,
I've just never made it my defining characteristic.
I still don't.
And I think I finally realized or accepted
that by sharing my story, I can help people even more so.
-"Hi! How are you?"
-"I'm so good. It's so nice to see you." -"Nice to see you, come on in."
- Leslie's own journey began when she was six years old
-"So there's Leslie looking cute."
"This is first grade."
- She's very close to her mom, and I asked the two of them to come together to talk about that difficult day
that started her own story.
At the time, Leslie's family was living in the rural town of New Ulm
- The day of her accident,
my friends came over, and I was busy with that and Leslie asked if she could go
play with a friend, Marny. And I said 'Well of course you can.' She had a new bicycle, so she took that over.
Again that afternoon I had my
committee sitting around the dining room table and
suddenly Craig came bursting through the door saying
'Mom! Mom!' And I said 'Greg be quiet, I've got people here.'
He says 'No Mom! Mom!'
He says 'Some dump truck ran over Leslie.'
So we live in this small town in New Ulm
We could hear the ambulances trying to find our house
Sounded like forever and ever and ever
Trying to keep her awake on the ground
I said 'sing with me' and we sang 'I'm the Greatest Star'
And then 'Jesus Loves Me' and finally the ambulance came and put her in
and took her to the hospital in New Ulm. The doctor came out, and he says
'Her leg is crushed' and I said something stupid like
'Well will she ever be able to dance again?'
He said 'We're gonna be lucky to save her life.'
He said 'We're going to have to amputate the leg.'
- Leslie was taken to Rochester for surgery and did much of her rehab work there
- You know I look back and I, fortunately, don't remember the pain. I don't remember a lot of the physical pain
I remember being scared. I remember being frustrated.
- Were you on a leg? - I was. I mean it was a very rudimentary prosthesis, but I mean right away I was up and using it.
One of the very clear images that still remains
is standing up from the wheelchair for the very first time
and then looking down at my foot and I remember
looking at it thinking that I had a Barbie doll foot. I mean, this was
a six-year-old girl looking at her prosthetic foot thinking
'My foot looks like Barbie dolls!'
- Her first prosthetist, Steve Amundson, was
a very young man and I think Leslie was his first pediatric patient.
And so he immediately started Leslie's care at the hospital.
("Oh my word!")
("How are you?" -"Good, how are you?" -"Good. Long, long time!")
- Steve still works in prosthetics in the Rochester area.
Leslie and her family returned to see him for the first time in many years.
- Steve was my first prosthetist
and he is the person who taught me to walk and
really held my hand through my initial steps
in this limb-loss journey.
You always taught me to articulate what it was that I didn't like.
And for, you know, a 6, 8, 10-year-old kid that was hard to do.
- Sure. - So from your perspective as the prosthetist,
what do you think is the key component to a successful relationship?
- I think you have to listen to the patient, number one.
The thing I always say to amputees when I see them is
'You are an amputee, but the only thing you have in common with another amputee is that you are.'
Otherwise, everybody is so individual.
- It was amazing to be able to see him again, but I think most amazing was to be able to thank him
and to tell him that it was he who taught me to advocate for yourself
and you know, you don't have to live with pain, you don't have to live with it being uncomfortable.
If it's not right -- if something doesn't feel right -- say it.
- So Carol, what would you tell other parents?
What are some of the takeaways you think are really important for other parents to know?
- You have to know that there's hope.
The days are hard: you go through lots of surgeries, lots of infections depending on the situation.
It's a lot of hard work. And it's hard work for the first couple years, actually
but there definitely is light at the end of the tunnel.
- From my parent's perspective, they said 'We want to get you back into everything that you were doing.'
So as hard as it was for them, you know, I was back in tap dance, I was back in Brownies.
I tried everything that I could. Kickball and all the classic, you know, everything that you do in gym class.
I wasn't always the first one picked, however, for the teams, and you know, I guess it is what it is.
There were sometimes where I was left on the sideline because, you know, nobody wanted me to be on their team.
- Leslie's dad's mother and brother were in wheelchairs because of polio
And my darling mother-in-law, so well-meaning, but she always said of her oldest son:
'Oh poor Rollie, poor Rollie, he's had it so hard, poor Rollie.'
And Gordy and I decided we're never ever ever going to say 'Poor Leslie'.
There's never going to be any pity, it's never gonna be 'poor Leslie'.
- Leslie started working toward an active lifestyle right away.
At eight years old, she started adaptive skiing.
Later, she was able to race competitively without her prosthesis in college
- After that...realizing as I was getting older, too... What else could I do for activities?
Then I started really exploring kettlebell. This was actually something one of my ski coaches used
in our training, was Russian kettlebells for strength training.
And so about three years ago I found a trainer
and started working out with her. And then ever since then I kinda try to
kick it up and try something new once in a while.
I've never made the fact that I wear a prosthetic leg
my defining characteristic. There are many people who don't know
and only because I just don't... - When does it come up? - It really doesn't come up,
it only comes up if maybe I'm walking a little differently
or going up the steps and then someone usually says 'Oh, what did you do to your foot?'
And then it reminds me--oh, there is something different about me.
And so it tells me that I've accepted it and
I feel like I look a certain way to the outside world
but there will always be people who will notice that about me,
and that's just the way it is.
- As in her personal life, Leslie has tried to keep her professional life active.
She's worked in medicine as a nurse, and later changed tracks to the legal profession.
As part of her job, Leslie advocates for improved insurance coverage for prosthetic devices.
She also does lots of voluntary work, providing peer support to recent amputees.
- Now more than ever, I feel compelled to do work for people with limb loss
The reality is that it's not always easy
but if I were to tell somebody who's new to the experience of life with limb loss,
it's that it does get better.
- I learned a lot from Leslie and from hearing her story.
I learned never to quit, to ask for the support you need,
and to not let limits define you and your dreams.
- If I had to live my life over again, would I have the same experience?
Absolutely.
Whatever it is that could somehow slow you down
or make you different or whatever it may be: use that.
Honor it. Accept it as a gift and use that to make your life limitless.