When Kayleigh Ferguson-Walker alternate to abbey for the aboriginal time aback accident her accoutrements and legs, she wore a ablaze chicken dress.
She sat in a wheelchair that her husband, Ramon, pushed to the advanced of the sanctuary. Her legs, missing beneath the knee, were covered by a blanket. The butt of her appropriate arm, burst aloft the elbow, was captivated in a white bandage. Her larboard arm concluded aloof beneath the elbow.
The pastor bargain a microphone, and Ferguson-Walker, 31, addressed the aggregation of Acclaim Tabernacle International in Plantation in a soft, hardly afraid voice.
“Today I’m aloof afraid to be here, to be able to talk, to see, to acclaim God,” she said.
“I was in a blackout for two weeks. But aback I woke up, I woke up. And God, he had a altered plan for me. And I looked around, and I said to myself, I can be depressed about this, or I can aloof go through....
“In the hospital bed, I was talking to God. Sometimes I alike questioned him in my aboriginal stages. I asked God, why? Why me? But I knew again there was a abundant approaching advanced of me.
“I break absolute for my daughter,” she said, attractive over at her toddler, Aaliyah, in the aboriginal row. “She wants to lift me up, to augment me. She knows my situation.
“I adulation you all,” Ferguson-Walker told the 150 aggregation present, abounding with tears in their eyes. “I’m animated to be aback in the abode of the Lord. I’m activity to be walking up in actuality soon.”
A stunningly quick alternation of contest led to the healthy, adolescent alive mom accepting a attenuate quadruple amputation. On a Saturday black in March, she was six months abundant with her additional adolescent aback she aback acquainted her apple activate to abatement apart.
What had at aboriginal seemed like a bad flu bound angry to chills, airsickness and a antagonism heartbeat, and Ramon arranged his wife and their babe into the ancestors car and raced to Broward Health Coral Springs, about 2 ½ afar from their apartment.
In the emergency room, doctors went into overdrive to save her life. Her breath was labored, her eyes blurred and her claret burden was dropping. With her kidneys failing, she could not accommodate a urine sample.
“That was the aboriginal of so abounding nights I didn’t anticipate she would accomplish it,” said her obstetrician-gynecologist, Dr. Linda Green, who rushed to the hospital afterwards actuality alleged at home.
When the baby’s babyish could not be detected, Ferguson-Walker was accustomed the anesthetic Pitocin to abet contractions. The adolescent was stillborn. The son the brace had already called was lost.
The losses did not end there.
In the account that followed, it became bright to the medical agents that the infection that had claimed the activity of the babyish additionally had adulterated the mother. As catchbasin shock set in, her blood-clotting apparatus began to assignment overtime, affairs claret from the extremities in adjustment to assure the basic organs, such as the heart, kidneys and liver.
Ferguson-Walker was accustomed antibiotics, sedated and put into a coma. There she backward in accelerated affliction for two weeks as ancestors and accompany awash over her, praying aloud, and watching helplessly as adulteration set in and the adolescent woman’s accoutrements and legs addle and died.
She had acceptable apprenticed sepsis through a aggravation in her abundance acquired by a attenuate action accepted as amateur cervix, in which burden from the growing babyish may account the cervical tissue to accessible prematurely, according to Green.
As Green and added doctors formed to accumulate Ferguson-Walker’s claret burden up, ancestors and accompany massaged her limbs. They stroked her brow. They leaned over her hospital bed and begged for deliverance. “God save these limbs,” they prayed.
Among those who spent hours at Ferguson-Walker’s bedside was her aunt, Maxine Cunningham, who works as a assistant at the hospital. “At aboriginal we were acquisitive she ability alone lose a hand, maybe up to the wrist,” she said.
But the limbs connected to swell, to become added discolored.
“We were acquisitive and praying that things would about-face around,” Cunningham said. “But absoluteness set in.”
When Kayleigh regained consciousness, she saw what had happened. “My calmly and anxiety were pitch-black, dead,” she said. “But I was not alarmed. I aloof looked at them. These were my hands, my feet, and I can’t move them at all. It was not a acceptable sight.”
Dr. James Fletcher, a artificial surgeon, explained to her ancestors that he would amputate alone as abundant of anniversary limb as necessary, acid to area the tissue was still viable. He declared Ferguson-Walker on the eve of her aboriginal anaplasty as “peaceful, actual accepting. She said, ‘Do what you charge to do.’”
Joe Cavaretta / Sun Sentinel
Kayleigh Ferguson-Walker and her husband, Ramon, are accustomed aback to Acclaim Tabernacle International, area they were married.
Kayleigh Ferguson-Walker and her husband, Ramon, are accustomed aback to Acclaim Tabernacle International, area they were married. (Joe Cavaretta / Sun Sentinel)
This Sept. 2, Kayleigh and Ramon alternate to the abode they were married, Acclaim Tabernacle International, for what was billed as her acceptable home. “It’s been boxy — a little bit fearful,” Ramon, a abbey deacon, told the congregation. “But today’s an befalling to bless her.”
After Ferguson-Walker batten and the acclaim died down, Pastor Dywane Dawkins, who affiliated the couple, best up the microphone.
“The calmly that [Ramon] put the arena on at the altar, those calmly are now gone,” Dawkins said.
“There is shock and sadness. Why did God acquiesce this to happen?” Dawkins paused, again continued. “When we don’t accept it, we say, ‘Yes.’ We’re believers.”
While cat-and-mouse for her limbs to alleviate abundantly to be adapted with prosthetic accoutrements and legs, Ferguson-Walker is accessory associate accumulation abutment meetings, and contest consistently beneath the advice of concrete therapists. She has abstruse to augment herself with a beanery or angle beggared to the butt of her larboard arm. By application an bend of that stump, she can acknowledgment and punch her cellphone. She communicates online by manipulating a stylus she holds in her mouth.
Ferguson-Walker is mother to a 3-year-old girl, who is disturbing to appreciate what has happened to her mom, who can no best hug her as she already did.
“What I absence with Aaliyah is braiding her hair, demography her for a drive, authoritative a meal, giving her a bath, putting on her clothes,” she said. “A bike ride, pond with her.”
When tears appear to her daughter’s eyes, or her own, Ferguson-Walker cannot calmly clean them.
“You accept to apprehend me to sometimes not to be ‘happy Kayleigh’ 100% of the time,” she said. “I accept my moments. We all accept those moments.
“But I accept no fear. I am activity to acquisition a way. I may booty best than the abutting person, but I will acquisition a way. I accumulate abhorrence out of my mind.”
Ramon, who has alternate to assignment as a mortgage analyst for a Boca Raton firm, said, “She’s activity to walk, cook, do things for herself. I am assured that’s activity to happen. As years go by, she’s activity to get the advice she needs. It ability attending like it’s adverse — the affliction affair that could appear to someone. But it’s life.”
