Joy’s swimming spirit still shines despite losing legs

It’s a story of triumph. A story of a bright teenager who wrote off her life when she lost her legs in an accident but soon realised she was still worth much more even on her wheelchair.

Joy-Faith Ndirangu’s ability to swim without legs best summarises her account of courage, positive attitude and desire to dream on even after a life-changing accident, which is the essence of the ever resilient human spirit.

We caught up with Joy at a swimming pool in Kikuyu town, Kiambu County where her love for water is often requited. She swam at the deep end, wiggling smoothly from one side of the pool to the other.

“I am not as fast as I used to be when I had my legs,” she said, wiping water from her face. “Swimming is an art that requires both limbs. But now my hands have to compensate for the missing legs and it can be very tiring.”

As a young, bright student, all Joy ever dreamed of was to be a doctor and she always worked towards it. She also loved ball games. Swimming was a one-time affair when she joined her classmates at a beach in Indian Ocean during a school trip at the Coast.

It was not until she joined Moi Forces Academy in Nakuru that her love for swimming was really rooted. There was a pool in the school, where you would find her in most of the physical education lessons.

Fast forward to the black day of the Naivasha accident.

“It was on April 16, 2019 and I was in Form Four. We were coming from a group discussion with friends as we prepared for Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) exams. On our way back we were hit by a trailer,” recalled the 19-year-old student at the Catholic University of East Africa.

They had been walking in a group and those ahead quickly realised that the driver of the lorry ahead seemed to have lost control of the vehicle, and jumped to safety.

“I was positioned in the middle together with others and a friend called Alfred shouted my name, but before I could do anything, I fell and the trailer ran over my feet,” she said.

Two of the students were injured in the accident that turned Joy’s life upside down.

That Tuesday afternoon, Mr Benjamin Ndirangu, a nurse at Nakuru Hospital, received a dreaded call informing him that his last born child and only daughter had been involved in an accident. He was in Nairobi at that moment. He recommended that his daughter be taken to the facility he worked as he made his way there.

Eyes swollen from crying and face pale from pain and loss of blood, Joy made one appeal to her father before going into theatre: “Dad, please don’t let them cut off my legs”.

Mr Ndirangu assessed the situation and the daunting MRI report from the laboratory, looked into her eyes and said: “Daughter, all I promise is that I won’t allow you to die.”

Her consciousness then faded away under the much needed anaesthesia in readiness for the three-hour procedure.

She opened her eyes at midnight and asked why her face was swollen. Her father told her it was because she had been crying a lot and fluids had been added to her body.

After a few minutes, she suddenly tried to move her legs and they weren’t there. “You lied to me, you allowed them to cut my legs,” she told her father in an intense moment of sadness. Her mother, Lucy, couldn’t hold back her tears. Her brother Amos too couldn’t handle it.

“Daughter, that’s the only way they would have saved your life,” Mr Ndirangu responded.

Joy then asked three questions in quick succession. “Will I ever walk again?” “Will I ever do my exams?” and “Will I ever swim again?”. It was a painful moment of truth for the family. The reality was slowly sinking in. They dispersed, wet handkerchiefs at hand and the father was left to reassure her that she would go back to school and they would support her every step of the way.

It wasn’t that easy to let go though. She was back at it in the morning, asking questions and feeling a great sense of loss, pain and self-pity.

“I was a bright student who wanted to pursue medicine. But it felt like the end of life for me,” Joy said.

Incidentally, she recalled, her father had taken pictures of her crashed limbs before and after they were amputated. He showed her as a proof that amputation was indeed the best the doctors could do to save her life. After that, she started accepting the reality.

“I started a new journey and healing process,” the radiant girl said.

“The accident changed my life in a 360 degrees turn. I had to change schools, depend on people, and I hate that fact because I am a very I dependent person. I hate asking for help. Even today, I get into problems with my parents at times because I try doing things on my own,” Joy said.

And she now had to deal with a post-amputation phenomenon called phantom pain.

“In phantom pain, you sense or feel the limbs that are missing and you feel them in pain. It was traumatising and hurtful because there is nothing you can do,” Joy explained.

“See the way you feel pain in your hand and you can scratch it? With my legs there was nothing I could do because they were not there, maybe just take medicine or get injection to sleep so that I wake up when the pain is gone.”

With the pain, she could barely do anything on her own. She relied on her mother for toileting since she couldn’t use her stumps, which had not healed, to move. The family had to make major adjustments in their home to make it disability-friendly.

Now being an amputee, Joy also had to part with a number of dreams and hobbies such as swimming and ball games. Cooking, which she loved, was no longer tenable over their raised cooker. She wasn’t the best of dancers, but she loved to move to the sound of music. That too went.

She missed school for the entire second term, and when she resumed, she had to stop boarding. She moved to a school near their Naivasha home, where she could be dropped and picked by a taxi on a daily basis.

In the end, the “A” student ended up getting a “B” in her KCSE. But her only worry was that she would never be a doctor. She enrolled for computer science instead.

One day in September 2020, Joy’s friends were going to swim and they suggested that she accompanies them. She did. With a strong urge to swim again, she challenged herself to try it. “Resuming swimming was hard,” she recalled. “I tried to enter the swimming pool but I couldn't stand, so I sat on the stairs for about five minutes, just thinking, ‘oh My God! I can't ever stand in water again! I can’t feel the water with my legs’. It was painful. I pitied myself. And then I was like ‘okay, it happened. I can't change it and they’re not going to grow back, so let's try something else.”

She was scared to get into the pool as she was second guessing her ability. However, she had a conviction to try.

“Before the accident, I used legs and hands, now I didn't have legs. I asked myself, ‘can I peddle with just hands?’ And I realised I could. Can I float? Can I move? I could do all that.”

That realisation made her so proud of herself, moreso the fact that she could move from shallow to deep end without needing any training. She had been a self-trained swimmer from the start.

“For a moment I felt so inspired by myself. People used to say, ‘oh she is so strong, she got an accident, went back to school, passed the exam and now she is going to campus’. That was the story people told but I never really felt it. But at that moment, I felt it. I said ‘If you swam without being taught, then you can do anything.”

That experience became her point of reference whenever she needed inspiration to do something she felt was hard to do. Joy hopes to one day be a notable paralympic swimmer in the world, just like gold medallists Ellie Robinson and Jessica Long of the United States.

She got the mojo. All she needs is time to quicken her pace again at the pool and new skillsets.

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