Cartoon James

As I prepare for the official launch of The Limb Shift podcast later this year to coincide with Amputee Awareness Week in October, I am going back and editing and reflecting heavily on the earliest interviews I recorded. One of the first conversations I recorded—and undeniably one of the most memorable—was with Mandy McCracken.

Mandy’s life was completely upended by a sudden medical emergency. She did not lose her limbs to trauma, but to a silent and rapid killer. “I had no say in the amputations because my hands and feet were dead… The only say I would have is if I didn’t have them amputated, I wouldn’t be here today. So there was no choice,” Mandy explains.

“I got sepsis from a streptococcal infection… It kills more Australians than breast cancer, prostate cancer and the road toll combined. But of course nobody talks about it… sepsis can kill you in a matter of twelve hours”.

For Mandy, the onset was terrifyingly swift. She went to bed on a Wednesday night feeling slightly unwell, and by Friday morning, her body was shutting down and her hands and feet were turning black. She was placed in an induced coma for ten days to save her life.

Waking up from the coma, heavily medicated and experiencing intense hallucinations, Mandy faced the surreal visual of her dead limbs. “I looked at my hands and they were literally black and I was like, ‘Wow, look at that’… it looked like my hand had been dipped in paint,” she recalls. In those early, disorienting days in the hospital bed, a profound moment of connection arrived via the television screen.

It was a turning point that gave Mandy and her plastic surgery team a tangible blueprint for the future. As she describes it, “The real turning point for me was I had Matthew Ames on the television right at the time that I was having my amputations done. So I’m lying there in hospital and quite literally watching a fellow who had just had his hands and feet amputated twelve months before me… And he was playing cricket with his kids. So he was my pace car, quite honestly. Like everything I’ve done in life, I’m a year behind Matt”.

Having that representation on her television was “massive,” not just for Mandy, but for her entire support network. “My entire community watched Matt and, and it actually gave us a real sense of, ‘Oh, okay, you know, there’s life after this. We can deal with this. It’ll be fine'”.

Survival in the McCracken household became a collective effort driven by a very specific coping mechanism: dark, unapologetic comedy. While Mandy lay in the ICU, her husband had to bring their children in to say their goodbyes. When she defied the odds and survived, the family relied on wit to navigate the horror.

Mandy reflects, “He used a lot of black humour to get through it, which has actually been incredibly helpful across our entire family. Having a good giggle about, you know, leaving body parts around the place… If you can’t laugh about a situation like this, you’re just going to rock in the corner. So that’s pretty much what we did”.

Mandy laughs as she shares family anecdotes, like her husband being pulled over for a random breath test and telling the officer, “No, no, but my wife’s legless”.

Beyond the humour, raw psychological survival required a severe narrowing of focus. On day four, having had a tracheotomy and being unable to speak, Mandy mouthed the words to a nurse asking for a counsellor. The advice she received became her anchor for the next year: “Don’t look at tomorrow… Just get through today. Just do today”.

To pass the time during those long months, she literally watched the second hand of the clock tick by, turning her brain off to avoid dwelling on the situation. Slowly, the outside world crept back into her room. Her daughters—aged nine, seven, and four at the time—along with their school friends, began blanketing her sterile hospital walls from top to toe with paintings and drawings from home.

When friends visited, terrified of what they were about to confront, Mandy would crack a joke to break the ice. “One of them I remember saying to me, ‘Oh my God, you’re still you, you’re still Mandy.’ I’m like, ‘Of course I am. Like, I’ve just had my hands and feet chopped off, but I’m still me'”.

While hospital offered a controlled environment, returning home after a year away presented a harsh new set of psychological hurdles. Fiercely independent and fit before her illness, Mandy found herself navigating her old spaces in an electric wheelchair. As she notes, “My husband popped me on the wrong side of the kitchen bench… I was a stay at home mum… And then when I came home, he, my husband put me on the guest side of the kitchen bench. And I’m like, ‘No, this is not good.’ So I really had to learn where my new role was because of course, I wasn’t the boss of the house anymore… They had a routine that didn’t include me”.

The physical frustrations compounded the emotional ones as she tried to learn how to operate robotic prosthetic hands, dropping glasses constantly. Her stress levels skyrocketed, prompting her to lean heavily on her psychologist—a practice she maintains monthly. She learned to take deep breaths, give herself permission to fail, and drive her wheelchair out to the letterbox just to sit and calm down when she felt furious about what she had lost.

Eventually, determination won out over anger. Mandy consciously decided she was going to thrive, systematically ticking off milestone goals: learning to eat, going to the bathroom independently, learning to drive, and eventually rock climbing and holidaying through Europe.

She accepted her new physical form entirely. “My plastic hands are me… Everybody looks at you… I don’t really care anymore. I’ve just moved on”.

Mandy later crossed paths with Matt Ames again, along with another quadruple amputee, Korrin Barrett. Sitting around a busy pub table in Noosa with prosthetics resting among beer glasses, they realized the power of their collective visibility.

This meeting inspired Mandy to help form a Facebook group called the “Quad Squad,” which now connects over 400 quadruple amputees globally. The group allows members to openly discuss the universal, nitty-gritty realities of multiple limb loss—from car modifications to NDIS applications. “It’s fantastic for them to be able to see the likes of, you know, myself, Matt and Korrin who are traveling the world,” Mandy says. “We’ve moved beyond the trauma stage and we are now in the thriving stage”.

For Mandy, thriving means being an active, moving part of a community. After an arduous, highly complex building process, she recently constructed a fully accessible house. The emotional payoff was instant. “I rang my sister the day that we moved in… ‘I got into the shower by myself for the first time in eleven years.’ And the two of us cried”.

Ultimately, Mandy’s message to anyone sitting where she once sat is rooted in grit, kindness, and a refusal to self-pity. She often remembers a high-single-leg amputee at rehab who bluntly told her to stop being a martyr, get off her ass, and accept the electric wheelchair so she could look after herself. “I reckon that is invaluable. Like, okay, wallow in self pity, but times, time, get on with it,” Mandy concludes. “Be kind to yourself… talk to people who have been through something similar… Time and practice and, you know, grit and determination goes a very long way”.

Note: This conversation with Mandy will appear in the Limb Shift podcast launching in October 2026, and which will be available on this website, Spotify, YouTube & Apple Podcasts.