She lost her limbs but not her spirit

Feb 28, 2010 — The Boston Globe

Doug Most

Feb. 28, 2010 (The Boston Globe delivered by Newstex) --

She greets you smiling at the door in a maroon cardigan, white T-shirt, black sweat pants, and white socks, her auburn hair parted neatly in the middle. Then she moves in to hug you, turns, and walks back into her family's small apartment, strolling through the kitchen and into the living room. Only when she sits on the couch and folds her right knee over her left, just enough so the leg of her pants rides up a few inches, are you reminded how far she has come since she was lying on a hospital bed with no heartbeat.

Monica Sprague Jorge has no legs below her knees, no arms below her elbows. She lost all four of her limbs, and came within minutes of losing her life, 2½ years ago, after a deadly infection ripped through her body in the hours after she gave birth to her second child. As much as that day was a blur of helicopters, speeding cars, and surgery (the first of many) to squash the bug that was eating away at her insides, the weeks and months since have been a slow-motion climb back to the life she once had.

I had last seen Monica in January 2008 at her home in the sleepy town of Ayer, northwest of Boston, just prior to our two-part series in the Globe Magazine. She had finally returned home after six months of surgeries and learning to walk again. Her scars were brutal. Every step was exhausting. Bending over was impossible, because all the muscles in her abdominal wall had been scraped away. Her prosthetic legs were painful to slip on. And her new daughter was still an infant.

If you ask her today, Monica, now 37, says she can see the mountaintop off in the distance, and it's getting closer every day. But what's hard for her to accept is that she'll never actually get there, never live completely independently. And so she is learning to accept this new life, one where she can cut the potatoes but needs help picking up the knife. One where she can put her shirt on but not her pants. One where she can hug and squeeze her husband and two girls but not run outside and play with them.

It would be easy for her to look at August 9, 2007, as the darkest day in her life. And it was. But it was also the brightest.

``I was very fortunate.''

The words hang there. You look at her stumps for arms, the pink prosthetics on her legs, and it's hard to fathom how she could say that. But then you remember. The day she almost died of a rare infection called necrotizing fasciitis was just days after she'd given birth to a healthy girl, Sofia. And the days she spent recuperating were the days she learned what love and loyalty

really mean, by the way her husband, Tony, now 43, stood with her through her every surgery, every amputation, every painful step. ``It's my family,'' Tony says now, sitting on a leather chair across from his wife, whom he married while she was in recovery at Massachusetts General Hospital. Monica chimes in: ``Not always peaches and cream.''

After returning home on December 15, 2007, Monica spent most of her time in a wheelchair while learning to walk on her prosthetics. She had a colostomy bag because her organs had been so devastated by the infection. The Globe Magazine series made her personal story public and even landed her on Oprah's couch.

Today, she walks without a limp on her prosthetic legs. With her shortened arms she turns on the stove and pulls open the refrigerator. She also has a prosthetic hand she can maneuver with muscle twitches; with it she can cut up vegetables. The colostomy bag is gone. She went swimming last summer and even drove in an empty parking lot with Tony, giving her hope that one day she'll be able to get herself to the store and back.

Besides the support of her family, Monica cites the ``phenomenal'' Central Massachusetts Limb Loss Support Group, where she feels ``comfortable, accepted, not different.''

She has occasional phantom pains. ``I feel like I can still count all my fingers,'' she says, ``or like I have to crack my ankle. Then Tony will say, `You don't have an ankle.' ''

As she's talking, she reaches up with her arms, removes her eyeglasses, and uses the right temple of her glasses to scratch an itch beneath her eye. Then she gently places the glasses back on her nose. It's one of many little things she's learned to do. She cleans with help from a handle Tony attached to their vacuum. She can roast a chicken or bake muffins using a special mixing bowl that's not hard to fill and grab.

Nothing will be easy for the couple. A lawsuit Monica filed against the doctors and staff of Emerson Hospital, where she delivered Sofia, is still only in the discovery phase and may take years to resolve. And Tony got laid off last year from his job as a maintenance mechanic.

Still, he's smiling, because not only does he have Sofia (``She's my dream come true''), he's also finally able to adopt Monica's older daughter, Madalyn, 12, from her first marriage.

Monica puts her new life in perspective when she describes the recent day that a curious and wandering 2-year-old Sofia managed to squeeze out and ingest a few squirts of the hand sanitizer Germ-X. Monica reacted quickly and was able to do what any mother would do - she called Poison Control, without needing help from anyone. With a proud smile, she says, ``I dialed the numbers.''

Doug Most is the deputy managing editor for features at the Globe and former editor of the Globe Magazine. E-mail him at dmost@globe.com.

Newstex ID: BGL-1035-42425327