Former model Lauren Scruggs screamed “I am so ugly!” in a fit of rage as she struggled to come to the enormity of her horrific injuries after walking into a plane propeller.
In her memoir, Lauren Scruggs says that she started yelling: “My life is ruined! No one will ever love me!” as she was consumed with “primal, uncontrollable” anger.
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.
Lauren Scruggs tells her story in her memoir Still Lolo, published next week.
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 Scruggs was on her way to recovery but suddenly found she was suffering from mood swings which she had never encountered before.
Lauren Scruggs writes: “From out of nowhere this phantom rage rushed over me. I was absolutely primal, uncontrollable.
“I started yelling: <<My life is ruined! No one will ever love me! I am so ugly!>>”
Lauren Scruggs 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.
She looks at everything including the eye which had to be removed and her missing left arm.
Lauren Scruggs 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 8:43 p.m. 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 Scruggs deals with the incident in the briefest terms.
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 Scruggs’ 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 Scruggs writes that as the paramedics were packing Lauren into the stretcher, she asked: “Why is my hand white?”
“I can’t see it! I can’t see it!’ Her shirt was over her hand.”
Lauren Scruggs 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 Scruggs 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”.
In the book, Lauren Scruggs tells her side and how she regains consciousness, begins to walk again and two months later is well enough to return to editing her fashion blog, Lolo.
In April this year, Lauren Scruggs stepped out in public for the first time showing off her amputated arm as she sat in a Dallas cafe with friends.
Over the summer she Tweeted to her 12,500 followers that she “surfed the afternoon away” during a “great day” out.
As she regained her strength, Lauren Scruggs recently posted a photo on Instagram of her showing off her incredibly realistic looking prosthetic limb in public and is preparing to appear on Katie Couric’s ABC show, NBC’s Today programme and has done and interview with People magazine, all out next week to talk about her ordeal.
She has also had to work out how to live and function with her impairment – including learning how to drive a car stick shift.
Despite all that she has been though, Lauren writes in the memoir that her trama 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”.
what a courageous young woman. wishing her all the blessings in life …she is strong and a SURVIVOR!