Positivity: Dream defies loss of limbs
From Los Angeles — a two month-old story that should not be missed:
Kellie Lim, a triple amputee at 8, is now ready to graduate from medical school.
May 27, 2007Kellie Lim knows all too well what it is like to be a very sick child.
Struck with a ravaging bacterial infection that destroys limbs, she became a triple amputee at age 8 and soon faced a life of prosthetics, wheelchairs and often-painful rehabilitation.
But from that suffering, Lim forged a life of achievement. On Friday, she will graduate from UCLA’s medical school and then will begin a residency program at the medical center there.
Her chosen specialty? Pediatrics, with a possible concentration later on childhood allergies and infectious diseases.
“Just having that experience of being someone so sick and how devastating that can be — not just for me but for my family too — gives me a perspective that other people don’t necessarily have,” the 26-year-old Michigan native said recently.
And of all the topics she sampled during medical school, only her work with children left her “smiling at the end of the day.”
Lim carried out her medical training with a determination that awed her professors and fellow students and won her the school’s top prize for excellence in pediatrics.
Opting not to use a prosthetic arm, she showed that she can perform most medical procedures with one hand, including taking blood and administering injections. She lives on her own in a Westwood apartment with no special features for the handicapped and drives a car with only one adaptation: a turning knob on the steering wheel. She is learning to swim, is trying horseback riding and even went tandem skydiving recently.
Lim, whose legs were amputated about 6 inches below her knees, gave up her wheelchair years ago and walks so well down the long and crowded hospital hallways — with a slightly bouncy stride — that new classmates and patients often don’t have a clue for weeks that artificial limbs fill her shoes and pant legs.
Go here for the rest of the story.
