Amy Purdy

I went to Salt Lake City to become a massage therapist because my thought was I could travel the world and snowboard and have this job that would travel with me.

I could live in resort towns and on cruise ships and just see the world with this job.

But also snowboard.

And –

So I ended up going back to Vegas after massage school because I got a job out there.

I was saving money to be able to travel and kind of do all that fun stuff.

And that's when really my plans changed.

completely went on a detour uh when i got sick with something called meningococcal meningitis and we have no idea how i got it um all we know is that they say 25 of the population carries it wow um and it's just a form of meningitis so there's spinal meningitis then there's bacterial meningitis spinal's not as deadly or bad as bacterial bacterial bacterial okay and

bacterial is really deadly.

We have, we really don't know how I got it.

It's airborne.

So I could have been in an elevator at work and somebody sneezed on me and my body just didn't fight it off because they say it lives on your nose and your mouth.

And it's something we're in contact with all the time, but our immune systems know to fight off.

And so, you know, otherwise everybody would be sick from it.

And I just happened to be one of those people that for whatever reason, my immune system didn't fight it off.

And within 24 hours of my first

flu-like symptom and was just, you know, I just didn't feel good, had a slight fever, just thinking I had the flu.

Within 24 hours of that, I was in the hospital on life support, given less than a 2% chance of living.

So fought for my life for, you know,

weeks to months after that.