Kentucky ‘warrior’ mother-of-three Lucinda Mullins has taken her first steps on her own since losing all four of her limbs to sepsis following a routine kidney stone surgery.
In a video posted to her TikTok page on Wednesday, Mullins, 41, could be seen walking out of a room at the Cardinal Hill Rehabilitation Hospital in Lexington – showing off her new prosthetic legs.
She took a few brief steps without any support from the nurses nearby, as she was apparently strapped to a walker.
Nurses at the hospital also seemed to get in on the celebration, holding up her former prosthetics as they mouthed a scene from The Princess Diaries in which a stylist says, ‘Paolo take ‘this’ and ‘this’ and give you a princess.’
Mullins would later share the video on her Facebook page, writing ‘I made my first TikTok today’ as she touted the work of her physical therapists.
Mullins, a mother of two boys, has also recently been retrofitted with robotic arms that move when she shrugs her shoulders, WKYT reports.
Photos posted to a GoFundMe raising money for her adaptive equipment show her using the black metallic arm to grab items from a basket.
The movements mark huge milestones for Mullins, a nurse herself, who had to get her limbs amputated after she became septic during a routine operation to get kidney stones removed before Christmas.
She and her husband DJ have previously described to DailyMail.com how she became dizzy and collapsed after she pulled her stent out, and her blood pressure dropped to dangerously low levels.
Mullins was immediately rushed to a local hospital, where doctors discovered that an unremoved kidney stone had become infected.
She was told that she had gone into septic shock, with her organs beginning to shut down. Doctors stabilized her and placed on a ventilator before she was transported to a larger hospital in Lexington.
For a week, Mullins ‘wasn’t moving, wasn’t talking, wasn’t responding,’ DJ said.
‘They said she was on the edge of a cliff and it was about to get worse.’
Over the next several days, while her organ function began to improve, blisters broke out across her limbs.
When she was conscious again, doctors told Mullins that she would survive the infection – at the cost of her hands and legs.
Surprisingly, Mullins said she ‘was at peace’ and ‘okay with it’ when the doctors told her the news.
‘There was just this presence of God around me that told me this is all going to be okay,’ she explained.
‘I was alive and I got to see my family again and my friends. And if that was a sacrifice that I had to make, you know, I was fine with it.
‘That was the only way to save my life and I never questioned it. I just felt that God chose me for this to happen and he was going to use me in a big way.’
She then underwent a series of amputations concluding with the removal of her lower arms in February.
To get through the recovery, Mullins said she leaned on the comfort of knowing her family would be with her every step of the way.
‘I know there will be hard times ahead but just knowing I could see my kids again and that I had the support of my family, I think that gave me peace to be okay with it.’
With their support, Mullins was able to eat by herself within a matter of weeks – posting a video to her Facebook page showing her using a black strap that can be affixed to her arm with a fork jutting out of it.
Soon, she also learned to sit upright by herself and scroll on her phone using her nose.
By March, Mullins began the grueling task of learning to walk again on artificial legs.
‘Stepping in the right direction. One happy chick,’ her friend Heather Beshears captioned the photos. ‘These are the training legs. They will introduce the knees when she is ready.’
Now Mullins’ friends say she is truly is a ‘princess’ and a ‘soldier’ as they celebrated the news of her first steps on Tuesday.
‘Truly a soldier, so strong!’ one friend commented on her post. ‘You will be back, nothing will hold you back.’
Another called the video ‘wonderful’ and ‘a blessing.’