A 41-year-old mother of two is leaning into her faith after a harrowing ordeal that began with a small kidney stone and ended with the news of a quadruple amputation.
“It’s one of the worst-case scenarios that can happen, and it just happened to me,” Lucinda Mullins told TODAY.com, adding that she has “never been so happy to be alive.”
In December 2023, she was rushed to Logan Hospital in Stanford, Kentucky, by her husband, DJ, after he found her lying on the bathroom floor in pain, in and out of consciousness.
Lucinda had recently undergone a routine procedure to clear a kidney stone. However, another kidney stone had become infected, and as a result, Lucinda went into septic shock.
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Lucinda had multiple organ failure, including kidneys, liver, and lungs. She required a ventilator, dialysis, and an ECMO heart-lung machine. She remained sedated for roughly a week.
The efforts to keep her alive came at the expense of circulation to her arms and legs.
“It was basically life over limb,” DJ explained. “That circulation [in her arms and legs] never did come back.”
When Lucinda awoke from sedation, DJ told her that her legs would need to be amputated above the knee. Her response was remarkably calm.
“I just had this peace. I just felt this presence of God with me telling me it was going to be okay,” Lucinda recalled. “I was alive, and if that was the sacrifice that I had to make to be alive, I was okay with that. I wasn’t angry. I wasn’t upset.”
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Lucinda’s hands and forearms will also need to be amputated.
