The New York Times Sports department is revisiting the subjects of some compelling articles from the last year or so. Here is our March report on Morgan Stickney’s first recovery.
Something awful happened to Morgan Stickney on her way to joining the world of Paralympic swimming.
Stickney had been a young distance swimmer with dreams of Olympic glory until a foot ailment forced her to have her left leg amputated below the knee in May 2018, when she was only 20. But with an unyielding determination that has become her trademark, Stickney made the best of her situation: As The New York Times wrote in March, the amputation meant an end to five years of severe foot pain and dependence on opioid painkillers, and it enabled her to get back into the pool.
Within a few months, Stickney set remarkable times in the 100- and 400-meter freestyle and was invited to train at the United States Olympic and Paralympic Training Center in Colorado Springs. A new dream formed for Stickney, as a Paralympian in Tokyo next summer.
But then one day after training, she felt pain in her right foot. X-rays revealed fractures, and doctors said they would heal. Stickney dreaded something much worse, however.
She was right. The pain endured for weeks, and in June she had to leave the training center and move back home to Bedford, N.H., while a team of doctors tried to discover the root cause for her slowly dying right foot.
“I thought swimming was over forever, this time,” she said. “For two or three weeks, I just cried every night.”
For her father, Tony Stickney, the day he went to Colorado Springs to pack up Morgan’s things and take her home was one of the saddest of his life. His daughter had endured so much pain and isolation in her late teenage years, but once she got off opioids and back into the pool, the old, happy Morgan resurfaced. And then all that was gone again.
On the plane ride home, Tony Stickney wept.
“I knew the happiness I felt eight months earlier was over,” Tony Stickney said. “I was bawling my eyes out.”
But it would get much worse.
Morgan’s pain was intense, and she grew dependent on opioids again, sometimes taking as many as 20 pills to get through a day. Her parents feared an overdose.
She saw a series of doctors over several months until it was finally determined that a cardiovascular abnormality was preventing blood from flowing to her lower legs. An angiogram showed blood stalled after reaching her calf. There was no blood circulation in her remaining foot, and the bones were dying.
The diagnosis also explained why a broken bone in her left foot had never healed — necessitating the first amputation.
Reluctantly, all her physicians agreed there was no alternative. At age 22, Stickney would need to have her other leg amputated, again below the knee. Terrified, she summoned all her strength to go through with it, and on Oct. 8, as she was wheeled into surgery, Stickney asked the nurses to pull back the sheet so she could get one last look at her foot.
Immediately after the surgery, Stickney and her family went through three days of unfathomable torment when her epidural did not work. For hours at a time, Stickney endured the excruciating pain of an amputation without a pain blocker while doctors tried to balance her medication and fix the epidural.
“It was brutal,” Tony Stickney said. “At one point I mumbled a prayer to myself, ‘God, where are you?’”
Over the next two days, Morgan fell in and out of consciousness, sweat pouring off her face as her screams echoed down the corridor while she squeezed her father’s hand so tightly, they wondered if she had crushed his bones.
Late one night, Morgan tapped out a short text to an acquaintance: “I can’t do this,” she wrote.
“It was pure torture,” she said in an interview in November. “If I had one leg to get up with, I would have jumped out a window. I’m not exaggerating.”
Finally a nerve blocker, a more targeted form of pain relief, was inserted on Oct. 12, and the pain was brought under control. Her father snapped a photograph of his daughter actually smiling again, and from that moment forward, Stickney began the process that she hopes will get her back in the swimming pool and onto the medal stand.
She spent the next three weeks at a rehabilitation facility in Boston learning the initial stages of life without lower legs, starting with how to sit up in bed. Ten days after the operation, Stickney said, she stopped taking all opioids.
By early November, Stickney returned home to begin what she calls “my new normal.” Until she can be fitted with a prosthesis, she has three wheelchairs — one on each of the two floors of her house and one to get to the car. She scoots up and down stairs sitting down, and her father carries her around piggyback.
Through it all, Stickney has been taking college courses online and still hopes for a career in medicine. But first, there is swimming to do. A crowdfunding page had yielded more than $117,000 in donations by late Christmas week, and Stickney used some of the money to buy a Vasa machine — an out-of-pool apparatus used by swimmers to train their upper bodies.
There is a long way to go, but Stickney still plans to compete for a spot at the 2024 Paralympics, and perhaps even sooner. She has been invited to the Indianapolis Paralympic World Series in April. If she can get ready in time, she could return to Colorado Springs and be chosen for the 2020 United States Paralympic team in Tokyo.
Stickney is reluctant to talk about that possibility. For now, she wants to learn how to walk again.
“I’ve been through hell the last few years, but I’m stronger because of it,” she said. “Hopefully I can show others that, although life isn’t perfect, you can still find happiness.”
