freeamfva: fashion’s “Girl with the Golden Legs”, is making history

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I feel like I have a job to do. I want to see women being protected, and I want what happened to me to never happen to another soul again,” says Lauren Wasser from her home in Los Angeles. Ten years ago to this day, the model came down with toxic shock syndrome, which eventually caused her to undergo a double leg amputation – today she is in Paris preparing to walk at the Fashion Week shows. “I could have been in the ground for 10 years now. But here I am, and I feel like I’m on top of the world.”To get more news about 亚洲欧美在线一区中文字幕, you can visit our official website.

In 2012, Wasser was an athletic 24-year-old living in Santa Monica, California, the statuesque daughter of two former models who had turned down a full basketball scholarship to a top university for sporting talent to focus on her own rising career in fashion. But life took an unpredictable turn in early October, when she started to feel unwell, as though she were coming down with the flu. She attended a friend’s birthday party but left early; soon after, a concerned friend found her unconscious on her bedroom floor.
She was rushed to the hospital with a high temperature; her internal organs had begun to shut down and she had suffered a heart attack. By the time she was diagnosed with toxic shock syndrome (TSS), she had only a one percent chance of survival. The infection caused her legs to become gangrenous, and she was put into a medically induced coma.

When she woke up, disorientated, the ordeal was far from over. “There was a moment when I was by myself in hospital and everyone who had come to visit me had left my room – my mum, my godfather, everyone,” she remembers, “and I heard the nurse speaking on the phone behind the curtain, saying, ‘I have a 24-year-old girl here who’s going to need a right leg below-the-knee amputation.’ That was the first time I ever heard the word ‘amputation’ in reference to myself. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t want to believe it. I cried and screamed for my mum to not allow it to happen.” At the time, her doctors had recommended amputating both legs, but there was a 50 per cent chance her left leg could be saved, so she took the risk.

After she was released from hospital, she spent eight months in a wheelchair. “I couldn’t just get up and go to the bathroom, I couldn’t go outside and play basketball, I couldn’t do anything for myself. My whole identity, the person I knew, was completely gone,” she recalls, adding that her belief in God and her loved ones were essential supports throughout. “I’ve come all this way through my faith and through the strength of my family and my friends. My family stood by me when things got rough and really lifted me up. My little brother, who was 13 at the time, is a big reason why I didn’t take my own life. I couldn’t have him find me when he was coming home from school, then live with that burden for the rest of his life. I wanted to show him that no matter what happens, you just have to make the best out of things.”
Gradually, Wasser was able to walk again using a prosthetic leg, but her sense of self was shattered – so friends and family took countless pictures of her to help her come to terms with her new body. “When I saw images or videos that my mum or my friends had taken of me, it was eye-opening because I realised that I do look beautiful, I do look strong. I had been in my own head and standing in my own way, creating this idea of myself that didn’t exist. I thought I couldn’t walk properly, but it was a mindfuck because it wasn’t true.”

While doctors had initially salvaged her left leg, it caused her so much pain in the six years that followed that she had no choice but to have it amputated too, just before she turned 30. “I didn’t have any toes and my heel was so severely damaged, I had to go to the clinic every Monday. I just wasn’t living,” she says. “I’m an athlete, I want to be a mum, and I just wanted to be able to be free and be able to sit down and not have excruciating pain. I made that decision for the rest of my life, to be able to live the life that I know I deserve.”