(This is a piece I had to write from my creative non-fiction class. I had to make it creative and entertaining while still keeping to the facts. I've included my sources as I do NOT own anything in this piece.)
Isabelle Weall is not like other
sixteen-year olds. She was born on the 29th of June 2003.
She is exceptional
because she is a quadruple amputee. Izzy lost both her arms and legs when she
was seven years old after contracting meningitis septicemia. She suffered a
heart attack and organ failure and her parents were told that she had less than
one per cent chance of survival. Despite all odds, she made it.
Her selfies online look like any other teenager’s
nowadays,
smiling, makeup and hair done and full of joy,
however,
it was not always like this. Look at her arms or legs
and
you’ll most definitely notice the difference.
At the time of
these events, there were no vaccines against meningitis.
On the day it
happened, Izzy doesn’t recall feeling ill in the morning.
It was a normal
day in Izzy’s life. She got up early and got ready for school. She was in year
three and she was feeling just fine. She didn’t know that was the day when her
life would change forever.
Nobody ever knows. In the morning,
your life can be one thing but by the end
of the day, it could be completely different.
That’s what happened with Izzy.
Everything started happening around noon. Her
mother got a phone call from the school at eleven in the morning to let her
know that Izzy was feeling ill. She got her daughter home and Isabelle spent
the rest of the day watching TV. Her parents noticed that something was wrong
with their child because Izzy, who was an energetic kid, was feeling
uncharacteristically sleepy.
Isabelle can’t remember the details of the
rest of the day since it all happened a long time ago. She remembers having a
bath in the evening and showing the signs of sickness and diarrhoea. She
remembers being cold and feverish, her whole body trembling. She just wanted to
sleep. These are some of the symptoms for meningitis. Other symptoms,
especially in babies can be fast breathing, high-pitched or moaning cry,
irritability, blotchy, pale or blue skin, headaches, nausea and joint pain to
name a few.
Her parents saw a
strange bruise on her neck and while they thought it was odd, they still did not
know that what Izzy had was not a normal cold. The bruise in question was in a
strange place, where a person can’t usually hit themselves and nobody knew how
it had got there.
That night her parents called an ambulance
while the young Izzy still didn’t know what was happening.
The confusion and fear for their child
must have been unimaginable.
It took one look
at her for the medic from the ambulance to diagnose Izzy with meningitis. She
had to have an injection in her bum and Izzy recalls that it was ‘the most
painful thing ever’ as she says in her video “The day I almost died, my
amputation story”. The injection’s purpose was to slow down the process of her
meningitis in order for them to transfer her safely to the hospital. On their
way there, she suffered a heart attack and her heart stopped for a while. That
is when her parents were told that she was going to die because she had less
than one per cent chance of survival.
Can you imagine being told that
there was close to no chance for
your child to survive? They must
have been so scared and full of grief.
It’s good that their daughter is a fighter.
Izzy doesn’t
remember much from the time after getting to the hospital in Derby. She
remembers lying on a hospital bed and seeing her parents, still not realising
what was going on. After that she was put into an induced coma and everything else
she knows is what she was told after getting out of it.
She was
transferred to Nottingham to the High dependency unit for children where she
remained in a coma for a little over a week. She knows from the pictures her
parents showed her that she had a lot of tubes on her and remained in the high
dependency unit for about two weeks.
She had tubes for
pretty much everything, to help her breathe, for her heart and to prevent her
veins from leaking to name a few. She remembers the tubes after waking up. She
was still confused but she already knew that there was something serious going
on. At that point her arms and legs were going black because of the spreading
on the disease and her parents had to make the hard decision to get daughter’s
limbs amputated. It ended up saving her life.
Can you imagine holding somebody’s
fate in your hands like that?
Izzy had
meningitis septicemia. This is the swelling of the lining of the brain and
spinal cord, caused mainly by germs entering the body and septicemia is blood
poisoning that is caused by the same germs. Combined, they are deadly and can
kill within hours. Children are one of the most susceptible to the disease. The
way this disease works is that the bacteria enter the blood stream and
multiply, causing a lot of damage of the blood vessels and bleeding into the
skin and organs. Because of the damage the illness causes, the doctors weren’t
sure if she would be able to talk or even think properly.
Her next operation
was six hours long. It was her amputating operation when she lost both her arms
and legs. They had to amputate her limbs in order to preserve her vital organs
because the spreading of the disease starts from the toes and fingers and goes
up the length of the arms and legs. This ended up saving her life. Several
years later, in one of her videos she explains that because she doesn’t have
fingers or toes, she is constantly warm.
Izzy is now almost
sixteen years old and she has been adapting to the changes in her body since.
In the beginning, she spent seven weeks in the hospital and eight months in a
wheel chair while waiting for her prosthetics to be done. Her parents and little
brothers would help her by bringing her the things she needed.
After getting her
prosthetics, she had to learn how to walk all over again. In the beginning, her
mother thought that she would always have to stay at home and take care of Izzy
and do everything for her. Her parents even thought they would have to remodel
the whole house in order to make it more convenient for Izzy. In her video with
her mother where they answer some questions from Isabelle’s YouTube
subscribers, her mother says that they thought of moving her room downstairs
and putting a shower in so they could make everything easier for her. However,
due to being the stubborn and strong-willed person Izzy is, they didn’t, and
everything worked out for the best.
Isabelle has
always been a very independent child and after getting used to her new
prosthetics and learning how to walk again, she started learning how to do
everything she used to do before in her new condition.
Society usually paints stubbornness
as something bad but in this case,
being stubborn saved her life and
made her the person she is today.
With a lot of
practice and trial and error, Isabelle learned to walk, dress herself and even
do her own make up. The only thing she needs help with is putting her hair in a
pony tail and straightening it, which her mother does for her. She brushes her
hair on her own. Just like other teenagers, she has a smartphone and a MacBook
which she uses with her arms. She says that it’s a lot easier to use her
MacBook’s touch pad because it is more sensitive than other laptops’ mice.
Izzy doesn’t like
her arm prosthetics. In her “Why I don’t wear my prosthetic arms?” video she says
that they were too heavy and the movement they offered was more limited than if
she didn’t wear them at all. She shows her audience how she would use them if
she were to wear them.
Even without hands, she has taught herself to
use her arms to drink and eat, do her makeup, to hold her phone and edit her
own YouTube videos. She can even write by holding her pen between her arms and
she says that her writing is very neat given the circumstances.
She takes everything with her elbows,
using them instead of hands and when she needs to open something, she holds it
between her arms and opens it with her teeth. She has done several YouTube
videos in which she lists multiple things she can still do on her own as a
quadruple amputee.
Izzy doesn’t
follow trends when it comes to fashion. Instead, she wears whatever is the most
suitable style of clothes for her. For example, she would rather wear baggy
trousers than a bodycon dress because her prosthetic legs would cause too much
damage to the fabric and the dress itself would limit her movements. She tries
selecting clothes made of more durable material because her legs damage a lot
of her clothes, but Izzy doesn’t care much about it because after all, they
help her walk.
When it comes to
her prosthetic legs, Izzy doesn’t like them to be normal. She gets them from
NHS and after being casted and trying them on, she usually asks for something
unusual to be put on them. In her “Getting new legs finally” video she explains
that one can ask for one’s legs to look like real ones and even have a tattoo
on them. So, according to Izzy, people have them match their skin colour, but Izzy
likes to have something more different on them. Her current prosthetic legs are
bright pink, but she has had Hello Kitty, The Wanted and One Direction on them
and pretty much any other trend at the time of the making of her legs. ‘You
name it, I’ve had it on my legs,’ she says in her video.
Having bright pink legs certainly
compliments her outstanding personality.
When she was in
secondary school, she started trampolining because it was a popular thing in
her school and everyone else was doing it. It was after the first two times
that she really got into it and now she is a two-times national champion at the
Disabled category for trampolining. She trains twice a week and even had the
opportunity to teach her trampolining routine to the Olympian Nile Wilson.
Besides
trampolining, she wants to learn to drive a car. Because she is disabled, she
can start learning a year earlier than most people in the United Kingdom, at
the age of sixteen. She is very excited. She doesn’t only want to drive a car;
she wants to be a racer.
In one of her
YouTube videos she said that she would show her audience the car and how she
operates it when she gets it. After all, the life of a YouTuber is to keep
everybody constantly updated on their lives and what’s going on.
On top of all
that, Izzy has done a TedTalk where she spoke about her experience and how not
giving up helped her. In her talk she says that she has met people who, after
losing one or more of their limbs, have given up on life and she does not want
to be like them. In one of her videos she says that her disability has given
her a lot more opportunities in life than she would have got as an able-bodied
person.
The doctors even told her that she wouldn’t
have survived if she hadn’t been so stubborn.
Izzy is currently
at one hundred and thirty-two subscribers on YouTube and over four hundred and
fifty followers on her Instagram where she does makeup tutorials for disabled
people.
While she isn’t the only one doing
makeup tutorials for disabled people,
she is certainly the only one not using
her arm prosthetics while doing her make up.
Izzy’s channel is
a lot like other personal channels where she shows what she got for Christmas,
organises her make up and shows how she does her own make up, but the
difference is that she includes a lot more things about how she has adjusted
her daily life to her disability. In her “25 things I can still do as a
quadruple amputee” video she shows her audience video evidence of the things
she has taught herself to do in her condition. In them, you can clearly see her
eating a hot-dog, drinking water and walking. She says she’s able to go to the
toilet on her own and even take showers. Izzy can also swim, dry her hair and
put on fake eye lashes. She lives with her parents, so she doesn’t need to do a
lot of the house work but if she needs to, she can make herself some pasta.
Isabelle goes to a
mainstream school because she says she’d hate going to a special school. She
doesn’t want to be singled out. Since she’s pretty much fully independent and
can do mostly everything other people can, she prefers going to a mainstream
school.
Izzy has received
negative comments about her condition and has been bullied in primary school
for being amputated and even now, she would get the occasional stare from a
stranger. She says that she understands why a child would stare since they
probably have never seen an amputee before, but when it’s an adult who’s
staring, it gets a bit more uncomfortable.
In her “The perks
of my disability” video she talks about all the good things being a quadruple
amputee has given her. This includes skipping queues and getting free tickets
to movies, along with getting free products from brands which mostly come from
her being big on Instagram. She also gets extra time for hr tests and
allegedly, a lot of people have expressed their negative opinions on this
because in their eyes it isn’t fair, but Izzy quickly brushes it off. After
all, it isn’t fair that she lost her limbs.
Isabelle is living
her best life having adjusted to her life as an amputee and she is confident in
herself and her abilities. She is an ambitious young person who is working
towards achieving her dreams and getting the best out of life.
Isabelle Weall is
currently living in Derby, United Kingdom with her parents and two younger
brothers, getting ready for her GCSE.
Sources:
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