'When I saw myself, I saw the reality of what had happened': Model Lauren Scruggs talks on Dateline about her injuries and how her 'life changed in an instant'
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Lauren Scruggs has revealed that the first time she looked at her face after the horrific plane propeller accident that robbed her of left arm and eye, her life changed in an instant.
The 24-year-old, from Dallas, spoke to Natalie Morales on NBC's Dateline for the first time about the December 3 accident which changed her life forever.
She said: 'I think (when I saw myself) I just saw the reality of what had happened. I had my eye patch on and didn't have my hand and half my head was shaved and I was just thinking, "Wow, how life can change in an instant" and also how that was not the way I had looked in the past.'
The fashion blogger also spoke to People magazine this week about the future and learning to live with three different prosthetic limbs, hair extensions where her head was shaved and having to do everything with one hand.
Brave face: A long scar can be seen running down the left side of Lauren Scruggs's face as she talks to Dateline's Natalie Morales
Lauren said: 'I think I just saw the reality of what had happened. I had my eye patch on and didn't have my hand and half my head was shaved and I was just thinking, "Wow, how life can change in an instant"
A sometimes fashion model before the accident, Lauren revealed she has struggled to come to terms with her changing looks.
Still Lolo: A Spinning Propeller, a Horrific Accident, and a Family's Journey of Hope, by Lauren Scruggs and published by Tyndale House is out on November 15
She said: 'Sometimes it's easy to dwell on the fact that I don't look the same. I still struggle with that - I want to look nice. But every day I'm feeling better and better.'
'When I got home from hospital I would cry a lot and it was hard to look in the mirror. Before the accident I would get a lot of attention for the way I looked, so I held a lot of my identity there.
'But these things aren't going to make you feel whole. They're empty things.'
Wondering if any guy would ever like her because of her prosthetic arms, she reveals she now feels good about them.
Lauren has three different arms - her passive prosthetic which she can't move but looks incredibly lifelike, her workout prosthetic which she uses for boxing and other exercises and another arm that come with attachments, including a paddle-like device for swimming.
She is in rehab for up to three hours a day to practice ordinary tasks without her left hand and can now tie her shoes, put her hair up and drive - which she does with the help of her knee.
Referring to losing her hand, she said: 'Reality hit me when I got off my pain medication. I just wanted my hand back. I went through the process of grieving and still am today.
'My doctor told me that losing your hand is like losing someone in your family. Because it's a part of you.'
Publicize: Lauren with NBC's Natalie Morales plugging her memoir Still Lolo on Today - to be aired on November 16
Injuries: Lauren Scruggs tweeted this picture of herself with her parents and a friend last week - it is the first picture in which her arm scars can be seen
Lauren tweeted this picture today backstage at the Katie Couric show, with her twin sister Brittany and mother Cheryl. Her 'passive prosthetic arm' can be seen
The MailOnline revealed last week ahead of her book launch that she screamed: ‘I am so ugly!’ in a fit of rage as she struggled to come to term with the enormity of her horrific injuries after walking into the plane propeller.
Consumed with a 'primal, uncontrollable anger, she yelled: 'My life is ruined, no one will ever love me!'
The book also details the moment she looked at herself in the mirror naked for the first time since the accident and collapsed in a ‘storm of mourning’ after staring at the dent in her shaven skull with titanium plates in it, the scar down her face, her sagging lip, her missing left eye, her missing left hand and four cracked teeth.
The book is the first time the
24-year-old fashion blogger has spoken in depth of the moment she walked
into a spinning airplane propeller in December last year - and her
slow, agonizing recovery.
By January, Lauren was on her way to
recovery but suddenly found she was suffering from mood swings which she
had never encountered before.
Lauren writes: ‘From out of nowhere this phantom rage rushed over me. I was absolutely primal, uncontrollable.'
Lauren was eventually calmed down by relatives, but the pain still burned inside her.
Earlier in January she had stood in
front of a mirror naked for the first time since the accident, staring
at her body for a full ten minutes.
Brave: Lauren Scruggs, right, posing with her prosthetic left on display while out and about in Memphis, Texas
'My dream car': Lauren again with her mum and showing off her left prosthetic limb
She looks at everything including the eye which had to be removed and her missing left arm.
Lauren writes: ‘From deep within me a storm of mourning brewed and broke forth.
‘I climbed into the shower and the storm hit and the rain fell all around me.
‘Then I crumpled onto the floor of the shower and sobbed’.
The accident which changed her life
happened after she and family friend Curt Richmond had gone out in a
small plane to see the Christmas lights above his Dallas home.
In the dramatic 911 call placed at
8.43pm on December 3, a woman can be heard saying: ‘A girl walked into
an airplane prop - I need an ambulance immediately. I think it cut her
hand off.'
A male voice can also be heard
moaning and crying and when asked what part of her body was hit, he
says: 'We don’t know, we haven’t turned her over.’
In her own words, Lauren deals with the incident in the briefest terms.
Lauren Scruggs tweeted this picture yesterday saying: 'Doing some filming action. Long day. Fun day.'
She writes: ‘I remember the sky was black; we were on the dark side of the plane.
‘It was December 3, 2011, and after that split second, I remember absolutely nothing.'
The memoir includes chapters by Lauren’s family, including her mother Cheryl who was among the first on the scene.
In her dramatic account she describes the moment when she realized something was terribly wrong.
Cheryl writes that as the paramedics
were packing Lauren into the stretcher, she asked: ‘Why is my hand
white?’ Lauren asked loudly through the screams. ‘I can’t see it! I
can’t see it!’ Her shirt was over her hand’.
Lauren was rushed to Parkland
Hospital in Dallas where doctors stabilized her condition, and allowed
Cheryl and Lauren’s father Jeff in to see her for the first time.
In those early days Cheryl wrote on
her blog how the only way to keep her daughter from agonizing pain was
to keep her distracted but that when she tried to sleep it came
‘ferociously at times’.
Good as new: Lauren Scruggs pictured with a friend shows off her incredibly realistic left prosthetic arm and new eye in a photo tweeted yesterday
Despite all that she has been though, Lauren writes in the memoir that her trauma has given her a ‘new perspective’ on the world.
She has taken a long look at her life and has realized ‘there was so much more to my life than being worried about how I looked’, she says.
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