Grit Diaries
Stephenie Rodriguez · 55 min
After surviving cerebral malaria with a 2% chance of survival, losing both feet, and enduring 53 medical procedures, Stephenie Rodriguez turned catastrophic loss into a global mission to impact one billion lives.
Stephenie Rodriguez was 50 years old, building a global safety app and working toward a goal to impact one billion lives, when three mosquito bites in Nigeria changed everything. Two weeks after leaving a conference there, she collapsed at Boston airport with cerebral malaria at 8% of her blood volume. Her organs failed. The doctors gave her a 2% chance of survival and asked her family to prepare for the worst. When she woke in the ICU, paralysed and unable to move, her 13-year-old son told her something that became her north star: life is 10% what you're given and 90% what you do with it. That phrase, borrowed from Viktor Frankl, became the directive she needed to commit to recovery every single night.
Stephenie spent months in hospital during COVID lockdown, isolated and reduced to a patient number on her wrist. To hold onto her identity, she wrote 38 affirmations every morning and evening. She refused amputation when a doctor offered to remove both her legs from the knees down, instead fighting through two years of surgeries and stem cell treatments until the reality became clear: the bones were dead. Losing her feet meant she could finally walk again. Through it all, she danced with Beyoncé in her head, watched her body rebuild itself, and refused to let this near-fatal illness define her as anything but what came next.
Today, Stephenie is a bilateral amputee, a para fencer representing Australia, and an ambassador for the Global Fund working to eradicate malaria. The catastrophic loss became the vehicle that gave her access to global platforms she could never have reached alone. She built a para fencing program from nothing, recruited other disabled athletes, and became the first Australian woman to represent the country in international para fencing since 1968. She lives her eulogy every day, knowing she is living on borrowed time.
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