Most of us have had routine surgery or know someone who has. It’s called routine for a reason. Something doctors see a dozen times a day. A quick cut and a suture, and you are sent home after one night of bad hospital food. It is inconvenient, occasionally uncomfortable, and almost always unremarkable.
For Lucinda Mullins, a 43-year-old mom from Kentucky, a routine procedure to remove kidney stones in December 2023 became something nobody could have prepared for. What happened next should be enough to break even the coldest of hearts. Lucinda herself disagrees. "This is not a sad story," she said. "This has a happy ending."
A routine surgery is supposed to be a quick overnight thing, something you put behind you faster than you can say 'scalpel'
This mother was taken into surgery for a common kidney stone removal
The kidney stone surgery went as planned. What followed did not. Lucinda developed septic shock, a life-threatening condition in which the body's immune response to an infection spirals so catastrophically out of control that it begins destroying its own tissues and organs. For a week, she lay in hospital not moving, not talking, not responding.
Her husband DJ described it as standing at the edge of a cliff watching someone about to fall. Doctors told him it was about to get worse before it got better. When Lucinda finally regained consciousness and was moved to UK Hospital in Lexington, the medical team sat her down and told her what they had needed to do to keep her alive. Both legs were gone. Both hands and forearms were gone. She had lost all four limbs to save her life.
Her body went into septic shock, and she spent more than a week completely unconscious in hospital
Surgeons were forced to perform a quadruple amputation to save her life
"Surprisingly, I wasn't upset. I didn't question it. I wasn't angry," Lucinda told the Daily Mail. In a moment that most people would struggle to imagine surviving emotionally, she found something she can only describe as peace. "I said, shoot it to me straight. I want to know it all."
When the doctor explained what had been done, she did not break down or rage. She sat with it and found herself okay. "I was alive, and I got to see my family again and my friends. And if that was a sacrifice that I had to make, I was fine with it." She credits her faith for the stillness she felt in that moment. "There was just this presence of God around me that told me this is all going to be okay."
She also credits something arguably just as powerful: the knowledge that her children were waiting. "Just knowing I could see my kids again and that I had the support of my family, I think that gave me peace to be okay with it."
In a powerful turn of events, she decided to see this as her happy ending, being thankful that she was able to wake up to see her children
Her community raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to help build her an accessible smart home
Back home in Waynesburg, DJ and their two sons, Teegan and Easton, had been living through their own version of the nightmare. Easton, the younger of the two, had not left his mother's side since she came home. "He helps feed her, brushes her hair, he's got to sleep right beside her," DJ said. "He's keeping a close eye on her for sure."
The older son Teegan had questions but has handled the situation with a maturity that has clearly come from watching his mother handle it with grace. DJ, for his part, has been extraordinary throughout. He stood in that hospital corridor for a week watching his wife on the edge of a cliff and came out the other side still standing, still present, still there. The Mullins family did not fall apart. They held each other up.
She also helped pass a bill that would help people with private health insurance have access to multiple prosthetics
Lucinda's story did not end in a hospital bed. It did not end in grief or limitation or the slow diminishment that a story like this could so easily become. She set her sights on going back to work as a certified medical assistant, and she did. A GoFundMe raised enough money in just ten days to build a 7,000 square foot accessible smart home for the family, giving them a space designed entirely around Lucinda's needs.
And in June, she announced that Senate Bill 97 had been passed, legislation she had campaigned for that gives people with private insurance the right to access more than one prosthetic device.
A woman who went into hospital for kidney stone surgery and came out without her limbs has since built a home, returned to work and changed the law. "God chose me for this to happen and he was going to use me in a big way," she said. "We're not done with our story yet." She was right.
People in the comments were full of admiration and respect for her incredible spirit
