NEVER SAY NEVER
Lauren Wasser lost both legs to TSS, but not her zest for life.
On Oct. 3, 2012, Lauren Wasser had no idea her life would be forever changed. What started out as a “normal day” for the 1.8m model, who had been working in the industry since appearing in Italian Vogue as an infant, quickly took a turn when she came down with what she thought was the flu at her friend’s birthday party. “As soon as I walked in, everyone was like, ‘Dude, you look horrible,’ ” she says. “I knew something was wrong.” Wasser, now 30, drove herself back to her apartment in Santa Monica, Los Angeles, took off her clothes and went to bed.
Aside from a brief visit by the police after her concerned mother called for a welfare check, the next thing Wasser remembers is waking up in hospital. She had been placed in a medically induced coma at Saint John’s Health Center a week-and-a-half earlier after police checked on her a second time and found her face down on her bedroom floor with a 41.6˚ fever. Doctors couldn’t explain why the organs of a healthy 24-year-old woman were shutting down. “They told my parents and my godfather to prepare my funeral,” she says. Luckily there was an infectious-diseases doctor on call who asked if Wasser had a tampon in. Lab results revealed that she had toxic shock syndrome, a potentially fatal complication from bacterial infections associated with tampon use. Wasser, who had her period at the time and changed her tampon multiple times that day, suffered a heart attack and developed gangrene, which affected her right leg so severely that she needed to have it amputated below the knee, and also caused severe damage to her left foot.
“I was heartbroken,” she says. “My legs were my everything.” Wasser spent the next four months in hospital and eight in a wheelchair, reaching a point so low that she considered suicide. “The identity that I knew was completely stripped of me,” she says. “I hated life.”
It was a surprise message from her now girlfriend Jennifer Rovero, an acquaintance at the time, that pushed Wasser to use her new prosthetic leg. Rovero, a photographer, met Wasser after her surgery and took hundreds of pictures while she recovered as a form of photo therapy to pull her out of her depression. She also made her wear shorts that showed off her prosthetic for the first time. “In that moment she not only helped me feel beautiful again but released me of what I was hiding from,” says Wasser, who returned to modelling in a campaign for Nordstrom in 2015 and appeared on the TV show Loudermilk in 2017. With the support of Rovero, who she calls her “angel,” Wasser decided to have her left leg amputated in January after five years of pain. “Getting rid of my leg was getting rid of the past and getting ready for my journey ahead,” says Wasser, who wants to continue modelling, acting and redefining standards of beauty. Wasser hopes this next chapter includes running a marathon at the end of the year and starting a family. “I want my child to know that their mom kicks ass and can do anything and everything.”