Completely unimaginable’: How a business trip changed Stephenie’s life

They’re a striking pair of shoes, and just a little daunting: 12-centimetre-high Chanel pumps, made of blue suede and fire-engine-red leather with matching piping. With barely a scuff on them after 14 years, it’s clear these heels have been well looked after and thoroughly loved.

When I make this observation to their owner, Stephenie Rodriguez, she gets a little misty-eyed and exhales a wistful “Oooooh, yeah”. Her yearning is
understandable. Six months ago, the American-born Sydneysider had both her feet amputated, then went on to become the first woman in Australia with above-ankle bilateral osseointegrated implants and mechanical feet.

The kids in her apartment building call her the “robot lady” – and she doesn’t mind a bit. “I just smile and show them my feet.”

The drastic surgery was the final chapter in an 18-month battle to save her life, following a mosquito bite in Nigeria that gave her cerebral malaria. The
single mother, former social-pages star and digital entrepreneur wound up battling severe neurological complications in a Boston hospital, where she was given only a 2 per cent chance of survival. At one stage, one of her necrosed, blackened toes fell off in her hand. “It was horrible, absolutely horrible. Completely unimaginable,” she says of that moment. “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.”

Eventually, it was the Australian professor, Munjed Al Muderis, an Iraqi refugee who became a surgeon pioneering a new generation of robotic limbs, who convinced her that giving up her dead feet was her only chance of standing upright and walking again. “It’s bizarre, but I had to cut my feet off to walk again,” Rodriguez says bluntly.