A 41-year-old mother of two is leaning into her faith after a harrowing ordeal that began with a small kidney stone and ended with the news of a quadruple amputation.
“It’s one of the worst-case scenarios that can happen, and it just happened to me,” Lucinda Mullins told TODAY.com, adding that she has “never been so happy to be alive.”
In December 2023, she was rushed to Logan Hospital in Stanford, Kentucky, by her husband, DJ, after he found her lying on the bathroom floor in pain, in and out of consciousness.
Lucinda had recently undergone a routine procedure to clear a kidney stone. However, another kidney stone had become infected, and as a result, Lucinda went into septic shock.
Lucinda had multiple organ failure, including kidneys, liver, and lungs. She required a ventilator, dialysis, and an ECMO heart-lung machine. She remained sedated for roughly a week.
The efforts to keep her alive came at the expense of circulation to her arms and legs.
“It was basically life over limb,” DJ explained. “That circulation [in her arms and legs] never did come back.”
When Lucinda awoke from sedation, DJ told her that her legs would need to be amputated above the knee. Her response was remarkably calm.
“I just had this peace. I just felt this presence of God with me telling me it was going to be okay,” Lucinda recalled. “I was alive, and if that was the sacrifice that I had to make to be alive, I was okay with that. I wasn’t angry. I wasn’t upset.”
Lucinda’s hands and forearms will also need to be amputated.
“Without my faith, there’s just no way I could be where I’m at today,” she said.
Even more than the faith to continue, Lucinda has expressed a sense of purpose in her pain.
“I just felt that God chose me for this to happen and he was going to use me in a big way,” she told Daily Mail. “We’re not done with our story yet.”
Now back home in Waynesburg, Kentucky, Lucinda has begun adjusting to her new way of life with the help of her twin sister, Luci Smith, and mother, Reba Hatfield.
Despite the challenges that lie ahead, Lucinda is hopeful. She said that one of the first things she wanted to do after returning home from the hospital was to attend a service at her church, Ferguson Baptist Church.
“If one person from this can see God from all this, that made it all worth it,” Lucinda told LEX 18.
The Mullins are in the process of making adjustments to their home to accommodate Lucinda’s new physical limitations and are looking ahead to Lucinda’s life with prosthetic limbs.
Friends and community members have responded by donating to a GoFundMe campaign established to help cover the cost of these adjustments and other medical expenses.