After Toxic Shock Syndrome Claimed Her Legs, Lauren Wasser Set About Reshaping The Fashion Industry
As the child of two models, Pamela Cook and Robert Wasserburger, growing up in California in the early 1990s, my world up until that point had been defined by rare beauty. I was surrounded by the faces of the time: Stephanie Seymour, Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell. In hindsight, I realise how unusual my childhood was, but back then it was all I knew. It wasn’t long before I started to follow in my parents’ footsteps: I booked my first modelling job at just two-months-old, alongside my mother in Italian Vogue. But as I got older, I found a passion for athletics, too – basketball was my true love. Everything I wanted, I was continually told, was at my fingertips.
And so when I woke up from a medically induced coma in that Santa Monica hospital room one day in early October 2012, in excruciating pain, it wasn’t just that I was unrecognisable: I had been stripped of my entire identity, of the beauty and body that, I thought then, had made me me. I had been found unresponsive at home, having suffered a fever of almost 42C, my kidneys failing. I had had two heart attacks and was given just a one per cent chance of survival. When I came round a week-and-a-half later, after being placed on life support, I was pumped full of fluid, I weighed 200 pounds, my hair was so matted that my head had been shaved, and my legs were black with gangrene. It was only when I overheard a nurse saying they would need to amputate a young woman that I realised she was talking about me.
I left hospital three months later in a wheelchair and back at home, shell-shocked, tried to come to terms with my new