Facing the Future with a Triumphant Spirit

Narrowly escaping death, and now a quadruple amputee, Jackie Richard isn’t giving up on her dreams.

The story of Jackie Richard’s medical odyssey starts with a nightmare: she went into an Alabama hospital with a bad stomachache, passed out in the emergency room and woke up, two months later, without her hands or her lower legs. A long scar ran down her chest from where desperate doctors had tried, unsuccessfully, to figure out what had caused the massive blood infection that almost took her life.

At first, not quite understanding what had happened to her, Richard fretted about getting back to her jobs as a bartender and restaurant manager. Even when she did grasp that she had become a quadruple amputee, her reaction didn’t change a whole lot.

“In my head, it was always, ‘What am I going to do to get back to where I was before?’” says Richard, 36. “I like to be independent. I wanted to open my own restaurant before this happened, and that’s still what I want to do. I didn’t have a moment where I freaked out. Everyone thought I was going to go into a deep state of depression, but I always was a happy person. That’s who I am.”

Now, one and a half years past her brush with death, Richard has made remarkable progress. Living in her older sister’s home in Norfolk, she has gone from being unable to sit up in bed to walking unaided on prosthetic legs. She also has detachable hands that look real and can move in response to electric signals from muscles in her arms, allowing her to grip objects and again pursue her passion for cooking.

“At first, you are almost taken aback by her situation,” says Dee Judson, team coordinator for the Sentara Day Rehabilitation Program in Norfolk, where Richard finished intensive daily therapy in late July. “Then you see her drive and determination. She wants no pity. She will keep at something she wants to do until she figures out how to do it. One thing we have all learned from her is how much is possible. I don’t want to say there are no limits to what people can do, but we can set the limits further out.”

In January 2009 Richard, then living in Alabama, began suffering stomach pains and what she assumed was constipation. She wrote it off to sushi she’d eaten. But the throbbing in her lower abdomen stretched on for two days, growing so intense that she took the unusual step of calling in sick at work. Concerned, Richard’s roommate drove her to an emergency room on the afternoon of Jan. 14. Richard remembers sitting in the waiting room and talking to two student nurses who asked where the pain was located. Instead of answering, she blacked out. “I went downhill real quickly,” she says.

Richard spent two weeks in a coma. For two months, she was so heavily medicated that she drifted in and out of consciousness. Her family and doctors watched as nearly every organ in her body shut down due to the mysterious infection. But thanks to 14 surgeries—including four skin grafts following several gradual amputations after gangrene invaded her hands and legs—Richard survived.

When she finally woke up, Richard had a tube down her throat to help her breathe, and she couldn’t speak. She had no sense that time had passed or that doctors had removed her hands at the wrists and her legs just below the knees. Still, her spirits were good over the next six months in the hospital, where she spent hours watching televised cooking shows and dreaming of the American-style bar and grill she wants to open. It wasn’t until she landed in a nursing home that she began to despair. “That’s when I thought, ‘Boy, I could just be lying here for the rest of my life,’” she remembers. “After two weeks, I was done with it. And that’s when my sister rescued me.”

Soon after arriving in Norfolk in August 2009, Richard developed blood clots in one leg and was admitted to Sentara Norfolk General Hospital. That led her to the Sentara Day Rehabilitation Unit, an intensive outpatient program that allows patients to work with therapists—and support each other—from morning to afternoon. Feeling less isolated, Richard found prosthetic legs that didn’t make her skin blister, recovered from another surgery to reshape the stump of one leg and gradually relearned skills she had taken for granted for years, such as walking, using the bathroom, writing and putting on eyeliner. She even whipped up homemade pizza and cookies for her fellow patients.

“She’s had down days like everyone, but they are few and far between,” Judson says. “She’s an inspiration because there’s no holding her back.”

Richard doesn’t deny her occasional anger and frustration. She can’t always wear her prosthetics because each weighs about five pounds, a particular burden in the heat of summer. The longest she’s been able to stand at one time is about an hour. She’s had to rig devices with Velcro fasteners to help her eat and shower. She still can’t drive, although that’s her next goal. Because cutting and holding cooking tools can be difficult, making a meal that once took an hour may take four hours.

And outside her home, Richard can’t help but notice other people’s stares. “Of course there is no way you don’t feel like a monster with all these scars and lack of limbs,” she says. “But I am embracing my prosthetics because they are necessary to continue my life as I would like to live it out. There are people who cannot get around if they wanted to. I consider myself lucky.”

Children are the most openly curious. At an airport recently, a young boy asked his mother if Richard was a robot. In response, she showed him how a prosthetic hand works and told him that except for her missing hands and legs, she was just like him. “I am a part of society, so I’m not going to hide away like I’m not human,” she says. “We all want to belong and we all sometimes feel like we don’t fit in, but I think I have a lot to offer and love life too much to let the fear of the unknown ruin my spirit.”

While still self-reliant by nature, Richard, who is single, has learned to lean more on friends and family. They don’t pity her, she knows now; they just think she deserves a good life. She plans to continue some physical therapy, join the YMCA to build muscle strength and play on a Norfolk-based wheelchair soccer team. Eventually she wants to find work at a restaurant, whether in Hampton Roads or back in Alabama.

Her life story so far is different from what she thought it would be, but she’d like to live out some of the chapters she had written in her head. “All of this has made me aware to be grateful every day for what I have,” she says. “I’m the only one who gets to decide where I go from here—and what I’ve decided is to just keep on living.”

Written By Alison Johnson
Photography By Dawn Griffith