Minna Lederberger tells her story to a group of young women.
Source: Izzinizm
When Minna Lederberger opens the door the first thing I notice is her smile. She is warm and positive and exuding happiness. She invites me inside and as I follow her into her lounge room I start to see she has a slight limp. It takes me a second and then I remember why I am here.
Minna Lederberger is a loving mother of two. She spends her days cooking, ironing, running errands and raising her children. She truly is the typical mother. Except for one thing. Minna is a survivor of an auto-immune disease called HLH and a Streptacoccal A infection which took both her legs.
On the 9th of December 2012 Mrs Lederberger and her family decided to take a trip up to the northern New South Wales coast before sending her eldest daughter, Dalia off to study in a Jewish seminary in Jerusalem. Little did they know that this trip was about to change their lives forever.
For Minna it was a chance to give her daughter the send off she deserved and a chance for a family vacation.
‘We are going to have a little family holiday and life will continue on, as I thought. Not everything always goes to plan,’ she said.
After what seemed like a typical plane ride, Minna said she had a horrible pain in her ear and a bloody discharge. Her husband Sam took her to the hospital where they treated her for an ear infection.
‘I was just feeling so unwell, everything was hurting me,’ she said.
Mrs Lederberger said she decided to use the facilities at the Salt resort and get a massage, in the hope that it would make her feel better.
By the end of the massage Minna could barely stand.
‘I couldn’t sign the credit card slip, I could barely stand up,’ she said.
From this point on, Minna can’t remember what happened and relies on the blog that her daughter, Dalia kept during her illness to keep her family around the world up to date.
‘When I read her blog I was amazed at how clinical she was, she was really able to tell the story dispassionately,’ Mrs Lederberger said.
She was taken to Tweed Heads hospital and put in the Intensive Care Unit. Doctors first diagnosed her with Guillain-Barre Syndrome but when the antibiotics weren’t working they diagnosed her with HLH and Streptacoccal A.
‘when you have that infection your organs don’t get enough oxygenated blood and they begin to stop working and you die… your immune system is not only fighting infection but it’s fighting you.’
Minna is an orthodox Jewish woman and she believes that throughout her journey, God was by her side.
‘I’ve always been a firm believer in divine providence and you have to paint a picture for yourself that this is a really small, rinky-dink country hospital, Tweed Heads and this doctor saw four cases of HLH that year. And for me that only means one thing. There is a saying in Hebrew, G-d sends the cure before the plague and so this is what I acknowledged,’ Mrs Lederberger said.
Minna said the doctors decided to put her on life support so that she would have the support of the machines to fight her infection.
She began responding to the steroids and chemotherapy but the infection caused bad circulation to the large arteries in her legs and the doctors failed to find a pulse.
‘In the ICU everything is a spectrum of stability, sometimes your up and sometimes your down, it doesn’t all stay the same: while some things were improving other things were deteriorating,’ she said.
When she woke up her daughter told her she was surrounded by diet coke.
‘I said to her what do you mean? I don’t even drink diet coke…apparently when I woke up from my coma all I asked for was diet coke!’
When the doctors told Minna that they were going to amputate her feet she remembers thinking only one thing:
‘I said you can’t do that I have to dance at my daughters wedding! And he said, oh is she engaged? and I said no she’s not engaged but she will get engaged and I will need to dance at her wedding…that was the most important thing.’
‘I think it’s very important to set goals…my number one goal is to be able to dance at my children’s wedding’s, but my other goal…I really would like to walk the old streets of Jerusalem,’ she said.
Minna was sent to Caulfield hospital for rehabilitation where she met other bilateral amputees.
‘We formed a clique there and we were very protective of each other.’ She said.
She remembers one day watching a man without his legs swinging from his bed to the chair to the shower commode.
‘I thought, how am I ever going to do that?’
When Minna finally got her legs ‘it was huge and it was hard.’
On March 1st 2013, almost 3 months after her planned 10-day vacation to the Gold Coast, Minna finally returned home.
Mrs Lederberger said she gets her strength from her parents who both survived the Holocaust during World War Two.
After her aunt passed away, Minna’s family found letters that her grandparents wrote to their children during the war.
‘Through it all my grandfather is writing to his children, telling them to be strong that God is with them and will look after them and they will soon be together,’ she said.
‘I have a wedding picture of my parents and they’re beaming out of this wedding picture and it was 1946 and they both lost their parents, home, family, they were in a new country and they are beaming!’
‘How are they smiling out of this picture and yet they managed through the ashes of the Holocaust to go to New York and raise my brothers and myself with this constant belief that if you’re going to turn to anyone to help you with something, the one you turn to is G-d.’
There is no doubt in Minna’s mind that her life has changed after loosing her legs but she tries to maintain her role as a normal and healthy mother of two.
‘I am certainly a bit slower doing things and I fatigue easily but I seem to be able to be happy doing the things that I do.’
Leah Chaiton 