It’s been a week since Rodriguez reached one of her greatest post-amputation milestones, learning how to walk in a comparatively modest pair of four-centimetre kitten heels. “It’s bizarre, but I had to cut my feet off to walk again.” “Oh, I call her Alice, ignore her,” Rodriguez says as the voice-reactive lounge offers its services. Her 15-year-old son Constantine sits nearby with headphones on, and from a corner, a space-age-looking massage chair occasionally speaks to us. “It speaks to me about transformation,” Rodriguez says of the painting, which depicts the human soul going through different phases. On one wall hangs an artwork by her friend Athena “X” Levendi, a former star of the TV show The Real Housewives of Sydney. We’re sitting on black leather sofas in her tasteful apartment on the 42nd floor of a modern complex in Sydney’s central business district. There was no way I was ever going to part with them.” I guess he didn’t think I’d ever need them again.”īut not the Chanels? “No, they were my first Mother’s Day present. “They were all given away by my ex-husband. “I never really felt ‘dressed’ until I had a pair of killer heels on the higher, the better.

They’re the last vestige of a 400-pair collection of equally spectacular footwear by the likes of Christian Louboutin, Manolo Blahnik, Dior and Jimmy Choo that not so long ago graced her wardrobe, Carrie Bradshaw-style. Thirty-six surgeries and 368 hospital nights later, including endless hours of painful physiotherapy and pulsed radiofrequency treatments to her nerve endings, the 52-year-old is fit and well as she places the “Chanels”, as she calls them, in front of me. “It’s bizarre, but I had to cut my feet off to walk again,” Rodriguez says bluntly. “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.”Įventually, it was the Australian professor, Munjed Al Muderis, an Iraqi refugee who became a surgeon pioneering a new generation of robotic limbs, who convinced her that giving up her dead feet was her only chance of standing upright and walking again. Completely unimaginable,” she says of that moment.

At one stage, one of her necrosed, blackened toes fell off in her hand. Single mother, former social-pages star and digital entrepreneur wound up battling severe neurological complications in a Boston hospital, where she was given only a 2 per cent chance of survival. The drastic surgery was the final chapter in an 18-month battle to save her life, following a mosquito bite in Nigeria that gave her cerebral malaria. The kids in her apartment building call her the “robot lady” – and she doesn’t mind a bit. Six months ago, the American-born Sydneysider had both her feet amputated, then went on to become the first woman in Australia with above-ankle bilateral osseointegrated implants and mechanical feet.

When I make this observation to their owner, Stephenie Rodriguez, she gets a little misty-eyed and exhales a wistful “Oooooh, yeah”. With barely a scuff on them after 14 years, it’s clear these heels have been well looked after and thoroughly loved. They’re a striking pair of shoes, and just a little daunting: 12-centimetre-high Chanel pumps, made of blue suede and fire-engine-red leather with matching piping.

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