'My body was gone': Flesh-eating disease survivor shares inspiring story

She is known as the 24-year-old Georgia woman who survived a flesh-eating disease five years ago, when her fall from a friend’s homemade zip line into a brackish river gashed her left leg and let a deadly bacteria invade her body.

Aimee Copeland lost her entire left leg, her right foot and both hands in 2012, but she won the battle for her life, she told her audience Wednesday at Columbus State University, thanks to prayers and blood donations from family, friends and strangers. Some of the adjectives doctors used to describe her recovery, she said, were “astonishing, mind-boggling, incredible and unbelievable.”

Since then, she has become a traveling inspirational speaker in addition to working as a psychotherapist in Atlanta. She also is starting a foundation to help more disabled people realize what they are able to do.

Wednesday, she was the keynote speaker at the Muscogee County School District’s seventh annual Transition Fair, designed to help disabled students become productive citizens with meaningful lives.

The research shows, said MCSD transition program manager Paula Dukes, disabled people are more successful when they are affiliated with more agencies and have more support. For every three people who are employed in America, one has a disability, she said, citing U.S. Department of Labor statistics.

“In Columbus, we’ve come a long way,” Dukes said. “Seven years ago when we started, we did not have as many options as we have today.”

Accompanied by her service dog, Belle, and in a motorized wheelchair, Copeland helped her audience see more options as she shared her story of surviving and thriving.

In the spring of 2012, she was studying eco-psychology at the University of West Georgia, examining how nature and the human psyche are intrinsically connected. She also was a server at a restaurant called the Sunnyside Café, where a coworker invited her to hang out by the river in her backyard.

They took rides on the handmade zip line across the river. It was fun enough for Copeland to try it a second time. That’s when she heard “two of the most horrifying sounds in my life.”

The first sound was the zip line snapping; the second sound was her body hitting the sharp rocks in the river.

Her left leg was cut so severely, she said, “I saw way more of my inner anatomy than I ever cared to see.”

Three days later, doctors discovered her leg was rotting from a deadly bacteria, necrotizing fasciitis, better known as flesh-eating disease. Doctors told her parents she had a 99 percent chance of not surviving.

“Prayers work,” she said.

Other lessons from overcoming obstacles Copeland told her audience at CSU:

Compassion

“It’s really easy to feel sorry for yourself when you’re isolated,” she said.

But when you start helping other people, she said, you realize they have problems, too, and you start to feel not so alone.

Community

While she went through rehabilitation at the Shepherd Center in Atlanta, she saw patients in worse shape and was reminded, “We all have different strengths, and that’s what it means to be a community. … We can’t be good at everything, but together we can help each other so that we can live better lives.”

Stubbornness

“Perseverance and determination are euphemisms for stubbornness,” Copeland said.

For example, after her hands were amputated, she finally put her hair in a ponytail on her 101st attempt, despite being told she couldn’t do it.

“If you want something bad enough,” she said, “you can figure it out. … No matter what your goals are, you can achieve them if you really want it. If you’re willing to fail 100 times, then I think you can do whatever you want.”

Another example: While wearing her prosthetic legs, she now walks half a mile on a treadmill each day without holding onto anything -- except her positive attitude.

Motivation

“I kind of feel blessed that I’ve had people in my life tell me that I can’t do something,” she said, “because, without their motivation, I might have never tried. … Use people who tell you that you can’t as an opportunity to prove them wrong.”

So she kayaks, rides a tricycle, drives a car and, yes, she even has zip-lined again.

Beauty

In a society that tells women though words and images that they must be “perfect and starving” to be beautiful, Copeland said, she woke up one day and saw “my body was gone. That was a challenge to look in the mirror.”

Reminding herself that all external beauty fades, Copeland wondered, “Am I just my physical appearance? What is the self? Is it this bag of skin? Or is it something much more?”

Now, she has realized, “I’m not a human being having a spiritual experience; I’m a spiritual being having a human experience. And this body is just my vehicle for this time on Earth, and what I am is much greater and much more beautiful and much more pure.”

This story was originally published March 29, 2017 at 8:46 PM with the headline " 'My body was gone': Flesh-eating disease survivor shares inspiring story."