Paralympian Amy Purdy on Her 2-Year Battle to Walk Again: 'My World Turned Upside Down'

"Twenty years ago when I lost my legs and lost my kidneys and almost lost my life, I never said 'Why me?' " says Paralympian snowboarder and Dancing with the Stars finalist Amy Purdy, whose legs were amputated ten inches below the knee after contracting bacterial meningitis when she was 19 years old.

But, she says: "Two years ago — that was the first time." It was February 2019 when Purdy felt a sharp pain in her left calf. "I was healthy, strong, snowboarding, and traveling the world as a motivational speaker," she says. "I was at the top of my game and then the rug got pulled out from under me."

At first she thought it was her left prosthesis that was causing pain but she soon realized it was her left leg. She flew home to Denver and went straight to the emergency room. There, doctors discovered a massive blood clot from the hip down through the arteries of her left leg. They immediately operated.

It would be the first of seven surgeries over the next two years.

"We are fighting to keep everything I've got and do whatever we need to make sure my leg is healthy again," says Purdy, who shares her health journey in this week's PEOPLE and in her new weekly podcast featuring stories of resilience called Bouncing Forward.

"It's one thing to go through a challenge, overcome it and share what you did," says Purdy. "It's another to be going through the challenge and be honest about not having all the answers."

After the first four surgeries needed to improve circulatory issues, Purdy faced additional challenges when her doctors found that the left leg muscle had atrophied. "All that was left was skin and bone," she explains, "and that made it impossible to walk comfortably in a prosthetic leg." Over the next six months, she underwent two revisions to the original amputation of her left leg at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.

Watch the full episode of People Features: Amy Purdy streaming now on PeopleTV.com, or download the PeopleTV app on your favorite device.

Now back home — where she and her husband Daniel Gale run the non profit Adaptive Action Sports — she is recuperating through daily workouts, weekly physical therapy and by tapping into the determination that made her a role model of strength and perseverance.

Four weeks after her latest procedure, she says, "My leg feels fantastic," but she won't be able to get back on her prosthetic leg until she has healed from the latest surgery — so she's unsure how soon she'll be walking again.

"I've realized I can inspire even more by being vulnerable and sharing my journey along the way," she says. "But you can't just be focused on the outcome. I'm not completely on the other side of it but I also know that resiliency isn't just standing on the mountain top to say 'Yes I did it' because then you look at the horizon and you've got even more mountains to climb."