The bionic woman

WESTERN BUREAU:

Three hundred and twenty-eight days in hospital, 33 operations, 22 months in a wheelchair, and before Stephenie Rodriguez could walk, she had to hand over her lifeless feet in exchange for a semi-robotic existence.

Australia’s bionic woman and rights activist, whose life changed dramatically in 2019 after contracting the debilitating disease, cerebral malaria, in Nigeria, is walking on sunshine, and although it took her an hour and a half to cross the Sydney’s Harbour Bridge in solidarity with abused women in Africa and New York last month, it took minutes for her message to make the world stage.

Rodriguez, who spent a short time in Jamaica in Montego Bay, while creating her ‘Wander Safe’ App in 2017, on her return to work from a two-year hiatus in recovery, is one of the faces of the United Nation’s campaign aimed at highlighting sexual and violent assault against women.

Some 10,000 women and girls are assaulted daily in Nigeria, and Rodriguez is not about to keep quiet about the atrocities.

“The launch on November 25, aligned with UN’s day for the Eradication of Violence Against Women, was really to symbolise that we all can be of assistance to each other,” Rodriguez told The Sunday Gleaner from her home in Australia, 16 days after completing her activism.

The American-born philanthropist, who will grace the TEDx stage in March 2022, and who wants a Nobel Peace Prize for her work, is being hailed as one of the strongest women in the world. Having gone through two years of uncertainty, with doctors at Harvard teaching hospital, Massachusetts General, giving up on her, not once, but three times.

Brought in on a stretcher suffering from septic shock, after collapsing in the airport in Boston in 2019, it took doctors 20 hours to figure out that Rodriguez was being killed by cerebral malaria. In fact, the parasite, borne from mosquito bites, is known for killing its prey.

But Rodriguez found herself in a hospital where the doctors knew they could help her with one drug, while acknowledging the effects would kill other parts of her body.

“The parasite was in eight per cent of my blood, and when they held up their little slide to put it under the microscope, you could see it moving in the blood sample. It gave me chills,” reminisced the woman who has become a poster child throughout Australia.

DEFYING FATE

Cerebral malaria attacks the brain to the spinal cord, but Rodriguez experienced sepsis, which affected her hands and feet. Forty days in the Boston hospital, the majority of the time in a coma, Rodriguez said three times her family left the hospital and were called back and told, “Come now, she doesn’t have 10 minutes. She is going now.”

Each time she defied what her body said was the inevitable, and doctors would sit at the foot of her bed, wanting her to walk them through her near-death journey. “They would be like, ‘tell us what you saw. Tell us what you went through’. And I am like, I was in a coma,” she shared.

But the single mother, whose son encouraged her to get her new fashionable bionic feet (the fusion of robotic parts with human body parts like the Terminator), now admits that she did hear things while in the coma.

The first woman in Australia with bilateral Osseo integration, the scientific term for bone ingrowth into a metal plant, Rodriguez’s surgery was done on September 3 this year.

“We originally had to have all my toes amputated and the heel caps taken off because they were dead,” she shared.

At first it was difficult for the woman who has always been around fashion, and was a serious shoe collector. “My typical souvenir when I go on a trip would be to buy a pair of shoes. Instead of getting coffee mugs or shot glasses, my choice was always a pair of shoes,” she revealed.

Her first set of prosthetics did not allow her to wear heels. They were like a single L-shape rod and foot carbon fibre with no dorsiflexion, which is the backward bending and contracting of the hand or foot, she said.

It was difficult for Rodriguez accepting being an amputee. It was not common within her circle of friends, so she admits it took time getting used to her fate in life.

Looking now at the bright side, Rodriguez quips that she still gets pedicures, “I can walk on glass. I won’t get cold feet and will never get a blister.”

A SORE SIGHT FOR SOME

There are still some people who can’t look at her and she is a spectacle for children who point at her while she is out.

Last week when T he Sunday Gleaner spoke with Rodriguez, she said she was sitting with an elderly woman who told her if she looked at her she would faint. “And I was like, ‘but I am not bleeding. It’s not a wound. It’s like a metal pole’,” she said.

Kids are the funniest, she laughed. She can always hear them telling their parents, “Wow, she is a robot”.

Rodriguez lives in an apartment building with an elevator, and said there were many days when she would be in her wheelchair and her neighbours would refuse to get in with her. “I would always have to remind them, you know what, you can’t catch wheelchair,” she said.

She knows it is her determination and goal to walk again why she is walking today.

“I grew as a person inside, while experiencing excruciating pain in hospital. I became so much more resilient. I know I have made a paradigm shift and now it is really about empowering myself,” she stated.

There were days Rodriguez would cry, and there are days she still becomes frustrated, but knowing her situation is irreversible, and having her head wrapped around it, the strong woman said there is one thing for sure: now she doesn’t have to worry about shoe sizes.

“I am now a perfect size 10,” she declared.

janet.silvera@gleanerjm.com