From the heart of New York, this local Porte Rican came to Australia in 1997, fell madly in love with an Australian Doctor, married and became a serial entrepreneur. This is where the journey begins for this tenacious, loved-up, impetuous young pillar of humanity, who has an incredibly optimistic and resilient conviction.
Stephenie Rodriguez is the founder of Wander Safe: a non-violent personal safety device that pairs with an app. “I was consulting in the digital transformation space between 2009 and 2015,” says Stephenie, “after almost getting raped in an elevator in Geneva and seeing the plight of young women in Africa walking to school with their head shaved dressed like boys, those were my two ‘aha’ moments for wanting to start Wander Safe. I raised $2 million in funding, launched my product and I also made my product in a factory that I designed. I went over to Africa in September 2019, then onto India to do exactly the same roadshow. I came back to Canberra, where I was living at the time, and then the next day, like an idiot, flew to Boston for a four-day weekend – I didn’t know it, but I was carrying the world’s deadliest parasite in my body, and I had been bitten three times by a mosquito in Nigeria.”
Exactly two weeks to the day, Stephenie was sitting in the Delta Lounge waiting for her flight back to Sydney. She had a seizure in the airport and did not wake up for two weeks. When she did regain consciousness, it was a horrific scene. Stephenie was completely paralysed. “There were tubes down my throat. I had been told that I had malaria, but that was a hard fact to get my head around. My first comment when they took the tubes out of my throat was, ‘who the heck gets malaria?’ I was really gob smacked that moving forward, this would be my fate.”
Stephenie was in the Harvard teaching Hospital, and the staff there liaised with her good friend, Doctor Zacharia, who insisted they test for malaria. Stephenie became the first case of malaria in Massachusetts General Hospital in history.
Malaria was the diagnosis that would plunge Stephenie’s life in a completely new direction. “My feet and my hands were turning black, and the cause of that wasn’t the malaria. The malaria made my blood toxic, and I experienced what is known as sepsis and severe septic shock. The parasite was so dense and toxic in my blood. Eight percent of my blood volume was dirty with a parasite. This meant that my liver, my kidneys, my heart could not filter it, and could not process it: I had complete organ failure. It was like a one, two punch: malaria was punch one, sepsis was the right hook, and I was down for the count.”
Waking up with a two percent chance of survival was the beginning of a long, painful journey through COVID, when the world was locking down their homes. “I was bandaged heavily in terrible pain. It looked like my feet had been burned, so they were turning purple, but they were blistered. It was just awful. I was completely atrophied. I thought that someone had strapped me down or put a lead sheet over me because my brain didn’t understand why I could not move.
“There were three times when I was in the coma that the doctors told my family, ‘She doesn’t have five minutes. We have no brain signal.’ The hospital had me on DNR: do not resuscitate. My family had agreed that if I flatline, to let me go. It’s not meant to be. I shouldn’t be alive.” Luckily for Stephenie, it was meant to be. “When I woke up from the coma, my 13-year-old was by my bedside, and I’m a single mum, so I’m pretty much all he has.”
Stephenie left the USA on 24 September 2019, and did not enter her doorstep on Australian soil until mid-January 2020: she moved to Sydney and relocated herself and her son so that she could attend a Sydney hospital to receive further treatments.
“My toes were turning purple and black, and my heels too. My toes didn’t only turn purple, but then they actually died. I learned about the body and its amazing function: what is not meant to be there will fall away. My entire heel cap was black, it was all the way to the bone. At the time, we didn’t know it, but the bones were dead. I went to hospital, but they sent me home on 19 December. I ended up going back on 15 February for the amputation of nine of my toes, not ten, because one had actually fallen off while changing bandages before the date of surgery.”
Since October of 2019 to June 2023, Stephanie has spent 443 nights in hospital and had 40 operations. The physical journey was simply one aspect of her emotional, spiritual, and mental battles. “Surviving was just day one. I needed to get back to being a CEO, to being a mum, to being a friend, and all of these things that I was thriving in before I lived a different story.”
Stephenie had so far survived her journey to February 2021, having undergone 29 surgeries focused on her feet and heels. Stephenie recalls her doctor telling her the shattering news: he can’t save her feet and she will not walk on her feet again, as they are structurally unsound. Stephenie was heartbroken: “so after going through all this pain, all of these operations, all this isolation, that the feet I had were just not going to serve me anymore.
“I recall being signed up to the NDIS program, and one of the questions they asked is ‘what do you want?’ and I remember saying, ‘I want my life back’ and they asked, ‘who can help you do that?’ I rewound in my memory to the TED Talk in 2015 at the Sydney Opera House, and I recall watching this amazing Iraqi surgeon, Dr Munjed, speak about how he helped amputees walk again and made them bionic. At the end of the TED talk, I went up to him, shook his hand, introduced myself, told him I was married to a doctor, and I knew how hard it was to be an expat, especially in the medical fraternity, and I wished him well. I had forgotten about him, and likely he forgot about me. So here we are in 2021 with this question ‘who can help you?’ and his name pops in my head. So, I message him and shared my story with him.”
As it turned out, Dr Munjed did remember Stephenie, and told her there are only three doctors worldwide who perform the specific surgery she required: one of them was at Macquarie University. “Dr. Munjed took off my bandages, looked at my feet and said, ‘I don’t have good news for you. I can’t work with these. But if you give them to me, I will have you standing and walking in two weeks.’ Now, I had been in a wheelchair since October 2019. By February 2021, I was frustrated, 20 kilos heavier, I couldn’t walk, and my feet were incredibly painful. So, on 31 March 2021, I became Australia’s first female bilateral Osseointegrated bionic woman. That wasn’t the plan, but that’s how I ended up. And there has been more surgery since: I had my hip replaced and I had my hand operated on four times. Losing my feet was a decision I made after being told they were unsalvageable, and I would never walk again if I didn’t choose Osseointegration. And here I am.”
When asked about her goals and purpose, Stephenie says, “I stood on the stage in Geneva in April of 2019 at the UN WSIS forum and said, ‘my name is Stephenie Rodriguez and I’m on a mission to impact a billion lives by 2025 and democratise safety and support of the UN SDGs.’ And this is a common question: whether I found my purpose after becoming an amputee…the answer is no. I had even more of a reason to live, and I believe that is the reason I didn’t die.”