Â鶹APP

Amy Purdy, Paralympic Snowboard Crosser. Photo by Thatcher Cook for PopTech.

Top 10 Incredible Facts about Amy Purdy

Amy Purdy had no idea what her life would be like after losing both of her legs as a teen due to an infection.

Amy Michelle Purdy is a model, para-snowboarder, motivational speaker, clothing designer, and author from the United States. Purdy is a 2014 Paralympic bronze medalist, a 2018 Paralympic silver medalist, and one of the world’s best motivational speakers. She also co-founded Adaptive Action Sports.

She is the only female in the world with two prosthetic legs who snowboards competitively, so she has no one to learn from. She must figure it out for herself.

1. Amy Purdy contracted meningitis

Amy Purdy. Photo by PopTech from Camden, Maine and Brooklyn, NY, USA.

Amy Purdy, then 19, was an avid snowboarder. She had planned to travel the world for the sport, but her plans were dashed when she went into septic shock (organ failure and dangerously low blood pressure caused by widespread infection) after contracting bacterial meningitis — she was given a 2% chance of survival at the time. She was placed on life support and eventually required both of her legs below the knee to be amputated.

Amy decided to continue snowboarding only seven months after losing her legs in an attempt to climb out of the deep depression she had fallen into. She won bronze in the snowboard cross event at the 2014 Sochi Paralympics 16 years later.

2. Amy Purdy was on dialysis for two years

Amy Purdy’s kidneys went from working normally for a 19-year-old to completely shutting down without warning.  A nurse had to sit by Amy’s side 24 hours a day, seven days a week to manually control her blood pressure and heart rate. If her heart rate dropped, they would adjust a medication to raise it, if it would drop and they would give her another medication to bring it back up, all while the machine was filtering her blood. At that point, her life was completely in the hands of the nurses, and any wrong decision or move would have resulted in her death.

After a few weeks, she was switched from 24 hour dialysis to Hemo Dialysis. Every other day, she’d watch them roll in the machine, terrified of what was about to happen for the next four hours. They would connect the tube from the machine to the tube inserted into her heart. When they turned on the machine, it slowly began sucking her blood out and passing it through a network of tubes and filters.

The filtered blood would then pass through a network of tubing before returning to her heart. In about 50 seconds she would become dizzy, begin shaking, and vomitting, necessitating the nurse’s administration of a sedative. She would wake up about two hours later to discover that I still had two hours left on the machine.

After 5 months of dialysis, she wasn’t getting any healthier and, in fact, was getting weaker. She was fortunate enough to be switched to a different type of dialysis known as Peritoneal Dialysis. After seeing how sick she was becoming, her new kidney doctor switched her to this dialysis. She felt better within days of using it.

3. Amy Purdy was opposed to the idea of a kindey transplant

A year and a half after dialysis, they realized that her kidneys were not going to recover. The thought of a kidney transplant was so overwhelming to Amy. She couldn’t wrap her head around it. She had just lost both of her legs.

They were hoping that they would because she was 19 years old, her kidneys would regenerate. When they are injured, they tend to deteriorate until a transplant is required. Her kidneys had functioned normally up to a point; she was fortunate to be able to eat as much as she wanted without worrying about sodium or potassium, but they could not filter enough toxins out of her blood on their own to keep her alive and healthy.

She couldn’t fight it any longer in October of 2000, a year and a half after leaving the hospital, and agreeing with her doctors that the only way forward was to have a transplant. She had no choice; if she ever wanted to snowboard again and live a healthy life, she would have to face her worst fear.

She was working so hard to stay healthy so that she wouldn’t get something like Meningitis again. However, if she received a kidney transplant, she would be forced to take immune suppressive medication for the rest of her life in order to avoid rejecting the kidney. 

4. Her father was her kidney donor

Donation of kidney and hand of donor concept photo. Photo by Shidlovski.

She always assumed that if she went ahead with the surgery, her sister would be the donor. She reasoned that their similar ages and her good health would make her an ideal candidate. That is, until she realized that under a microscope, they had nothing in common.

The first thing that has to match is your blood type. The antigens were the next thing that had to match. They look at six antigens in total, and the more antigens that match between the donor and the recipient, the more likely your body will accept the kidney.

She matched with her father better than most children’s parents, 4 out of 6!

5. Amy Purdy was admitted to the hospital for another serious health scare

In 2016, she was diagnosed with rhabdomyolysis, a muscle condition that can cause severe kidney damage. Amy explained in an Instagram post that she had been overworking her muscles during training in preparation for snowboard season. She noticed some soreness and swelling, which would not have been unusual to her, but she recognized the possible symptoms because a friend of hers was diagnosed with the condition last year. Fortunately, she caught it in time to be treated and get back out on the snow.

6. She created her own prosthetic feet to aid her snowboarding

Three disassembled prosthetic foot on table. Photo by MykolaSenyuk.

When she couldn’t find prosthetic feet that allowed her to snowboard properly, she collaborated with a designer to create her own. “You realize what you need when it’s your own body,” she told Sports Illustrated. “So, if I noticed my ankles weren’t flexing properly, I’d take a piece of wood and place it under my heel, then duct tape it in place. That would get me up on my toes a little. It took quite a bit of… trial and error.”

7. She established Adaptive Action Sports

According to its website, is a non-profit dedicated to assisting individuals with disabilities in participating in snowboarding and skateboarding. They helped get snowboarding into the Paralympic Games for the first time in 2014.

8. Amy Purdy enjoys green smoothies

A green smoothy. Photo by Alina Karpenko.

She refeers to her new green drink recipe as lean green machine! She started making them because she realized that most of us, no matter how healthy we eat, we simply do not consume enough vegetables!

It’s difficult to eat plates and plates of salad and fruit on a daily basis. So she decided to throw all of her vegetables into the Vitamix first thing in the morning, so she’d feel good for the day and get a lot of nutrients! 

9. Purdy was the first double amputee contestant to appear on Dancing with the Stars

Purdy appeared on season 18 of Dancing with the Stars. Purdy was the first double amputee contestant to appear on the show, paired with five-time champion Derek Hough.  Hough had just won his fifth Mirrorball trophy and had no intention of returning to the show. However, he changed his mind when Purdy became a contestant on the show.

Purdy was repeatedly praised throughout the show for her quick learning abilities, immense natural dancing ability, incredible endurance and passion, and for being a role model. She was never given a score lower than an 8. She received her first perfect score (40 out of 40) for her eighth dance, the Argentine tango, while performing it the week after suffering a severe back injury.

10. Amy Purdy released a memoir in 2014

A sketch of Amy Purdy. Photo by PopTech from Camden, Maine and Brooklyn, NY, USA.

Purdy’s memoir, On My Own Two Feet: From Losing My Legs To Learning The Dance Of Life, was published by HarperCollins on December 30, 2014, and quickly became a New York Times Best Seller.