PALM HARBOR, Fla. (AP) - After the accident, Nicole Nugent knew her mission.
“You’re beautiful,” she would tell her blue-eyed, curly haired daughter. “You’re perfect. You’re not different.”
Two-year-old Ireland had lost both legs below the knee to an April 2013 lawn mower accident. The Tampa Bay area mourned with the family. But afterward, Nicole was determined to show her daughter a normal life.
Ireland, now 7, has made it look easy, quickly mastering prosthetic legs. Outgoing and confident, she dances, surfs and is a cheerleader for the Palm Harbor Panthers.
“There is nothing you cannot do,” Nicole told her.
The future seemed to be manageable. But a little over eight months ago, tragedy visited again. This time, it was Nicole who would need the words of encouragement.
Swim at your own risk, a sign on the beach warned that day.
Nicole was in La Jolla, California, treating Ireland to a day of surfing in October 2016 after visiting a program for physically challenged athletes that offered opportunities to mingle with the competitors.
“It was to show Ireland that she can do anything,” said Nicole, a mother of six.
Seals and sea lions often gathered at the spot, tainting the water with waste and bacteria.
Nicole doesn’t remember how she got the small cut on her right heel. She was concerned only about Ireland, bundling her in a rash guard and wet suit and ushering her to the shallow waves.
“I never thought to protect myself,” Nicole said.
Within days, she was back home and in agony. Her foot and ankle swelled. Doctors diagnosed osteomyelitis, a bone infection likely contracted in the water.
Ten surgeries to clean the infection followed but she remained in terrible pain.
Then in September 2017, Nicole learned the infection was spreading up her leg. If it entered her bloodstream, she could die.
Her right leg had to be amputated below the knee.
“I wasn’t worried at all,” Nicole said. “I thought, ’I got this. I can do this. I know amputation. My whole family knows this.’
“In reality, I had no idea.”
She knew everything from the caregiver’s side.
Nicole had been in the pool with the kids one evening in April of 2013 while her husband, Jerry, was out in the yard, cutting the grass.
She was ushering children indoors for baths when she heard the screen door click.
Ireland had slipped out and was running to the front yard.
Nicole followed, waving to her husband to signal that Ireland was behind him. He thought his wife was warning him about something in his path, so he put the riding mower in reverse. That should have triggered a safety mechanism to stop the blades, but the mower had come from Craigslist. A prior owner had disabled the device.
“Who would think to check that?” Nicole said.
It was an oversight the Nugents would never be allowed to forget, one they now share freely with other parents as a warning.
Neighbors heard the screams.
The buzzing sound of yard equipment still traumatizes Nicole. They had an attorney get rid of the mower. Getting rid of the regret was more difficult.
“I always thought this would get easier, her accident, in my mind,” she said. “I always thought over time it would diminish. It is still just as raw for me as it was five years ago.”
She wears a tattoo on her left forearm, a lifelong apology to Ireland.
I am sorry I couldn’t get to you.
It was Nicole who held her family together in those months immediately following the accident, when Jerry was riddled with guilt.
Over time, their roles reversed.
Her Navy veteran husband relied on military discipline to find the strength to lead the family. When Nicole’s sore foot turned into a devastating disability, there was Jerry, taking on more responsibility.
A mechanic at the Pinellas County Courthouse, he worked an overnight shift for a few months so he could tend to Nicole during the day. He would come home, nap and then get the kids ready for school.
“You don’t have any control over things like this,” said Jerry, 53, “but we can control how we deal.”
Nicole had dark days, but she knew she would use her experience in the water to educate others, just as she had done with Ireland’s accident.
“You think lightning won’t strike,” she said. “It struck my family twice.
“But if any family can overcome this, it’s us.”
Ireland received her prosthetics just two months after losing her legs.
Nicole would have to wait much longer, as her leg healed.
The house could already accommodate her wheelchair. Following Ireland’s accident, the doorways had been widened and ramps installed.
The Nugents had already tapped into an online support group for families of lawn mower accident victims. It wasn’t hard for Nicole to find advice. But getting by on one leg wore on her.
While Ireland could scurry up a bunk bed ladder on her knees, Nicole initially struggled to complete simple chores.
“I hate relying on people,” she said. “I am used to doing my own thing and being in charge and running the house.”
Friends and family drove her places. Her husband helped with bathing. He also stepped into her role as “super mom” by taking on the bulk of the cooking, cleaning and taxiing the kids to activities.
Alone with her thoughts, she could not escape the reality that her leg was gone for good.
“This is never going to end,” she would remind herself.
She put on a smile and tried to say the right things.
But she hid the stub with clothing. Her oldest daughter, 16-year-old Italia, noticed and told her she would need to accept her situation, and Nicole knew it was true. She was an adult. Ireland had accepted this at 2.
If Nicole let on to Ireland that she felt ashamed, what kind of message would that send?
Nicole, 37, recalled the inspiring things she told Ireland over the years. When she said them, she believed them. Yet she struggled to find the same amount of hope for herself.
“I was surprised with the amount of depression I felt,” she said. “I didn’t see a light at the end of the tunnel.”
Over time, Nicole has become adept at getting out of the tub on one leg. She’s back to cooking and washing dishes.
Still, she said, there are times she feels like a burden.
“I feel like I am another person, a problem to deal with.”
Cheerleading takes a special type of confidence. There is no hiding, no blending in. Cheerleaders stand in front of a crowd and through their routines scream out, “Look at me.”
Ireland does it with joy on her face. In addition to dancing with the others, while wearing prosthetics, she serves as a backspot with outstretched hands to lend support to the stunt performers above her.
When it comes to surfing, she can kneel on the board but expects one day to stand.
“She has taken life by the horns and just goes,” Nicole said. “She doesn’t feel like anything can stop her.”
For weeks, Ireland has been excited about the prospect of teaching her mother to walk.
The girl’s plan was to have Nicole lean up from the wheelchair on her good leg and do laps around the dining room table on her prosthetic, with the table to keep her steady.
In her innocence, Ireland views the loss of her mom’s leg as the gaining of a prosthetic partner.
“Once she gets the hang of it,” Ireland said, sounding chipper, “she’ll graduate.”
Nicole had never understood the tantrums that Ireland threw each time the growing girl had to be fitted for updated prosthetics.
“Everything hurts,” Ireland would say.
“Everything cannot hurt,” Nicole would respond.
Nicole’s prosthetic debuted in mid-May and settled the debate. Everything hurt, at least in the beginning.
There were three days of adjustments at Prosthetic & Orthotic Associates in Orlando, as Nicole tried to pinpoint the spots where the prosthetic bothered her stub. Once the prosthetic was adjusted, the pain would pop up somewhere else.
“I started crying,” she said, “thinking it was never going to happen for me.”
But she came home with the prosthetic on May 18.
Ireland lived up to her promise. As her mother practiced walking around the dining room table, Ireland coached.
“She keeps telling me to bend my knees more,” Nicole said.
One day earlier in the spring, the two were at a swimming pool, when Ireland had an idea.
“She wanted to jump in together,” Nicole said.
Nicole had not been swimming since her amputation. Ireland was recovering from surgery for bone spurs. Both were in wheelchairs.
But the woman who taught her daughter that all things are possible could not argue.
They wheeled to the edge of the pool and held hands, then leaned forward and plunged in.
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Information from: Tampa Bay Times (St. Petersburg, Fla.), http://www.tampabay.com.
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