The Way I Am

It was May 6, 2018, more than a month after my heart attack, and I was still in the hospital in Atlanta, barely able to sit up in bed.

- By DR. CHANTRISE HOLLIMAN Pooler, Georgia

At 45, I felt as helpless as a baby. The medicines used to revive me had sent my immune system, already compromised by lupus and Raynaud's syndrome, into a frenzy, leaving me partially paralyzed from the waist down. Now an infection was spreading through my legs.

My husband, CJ, and my parents had kept vigil over me this entire time. But all their prayers and my own had gotten me no closer to going home.

The doctor came into my room and got right to the point. “The infection isn’t responding to antibiotics. The only way to stop it is to amputate your legs below the knee.”

I started to cry. CJ slumped in the chair next to my bed. My father, overwhelmed, had to leave the room. My mother spoke up. “Everyone needs to stop crying. If it’s going to save her life, then it has to be done,” she said. “Chantrise, you are more than your legs.”

But when I woke up after surgery to a body I no longer recognized, I felt as if I no longer recognized myself. The runner who’d got up at 5 A.M. every day to hit the pavement in her sneakers and pound out five miles. The educator who’d earned her doctorate and moved from teaching ninth graders to teaching teachers as a director of professional development for charter schools. The speaker who’d confidently stood in front of audiences at educational conferences. The traveler who’d hopped on a plane every chance she got. The pastor’s wife who’d always shown up for her husband and their blended family.

I needed to get my life back. To feel whole again. And that meant getting prosthetics and learning to stand up and walk again. In my thirties, I’d been diagnosed with lupus, which caused my immune system to attack my body, as well as Raynaud’s, which decreased blood flow to my extremities, but I hadn’t let those diseases stop me. I would do whatever it took now to make myself strong and capable again.