Lisa Fitzgerald has learned to navigate life on one leg—while keeping a smile on her face. Photo: Chris Buck
A year after Lisa Fitzgerald lost her leg on the NJ Transit train tracks in Morristown, her megawatt smile has not dimmed. Sitting in a coffee shop in her hometown of Verona, her crutches propped against the wall, the raven-haired 31-year-old, in a red dress, is still upbeat after the horrific accident, when she fell into the path of an oncoming train. Since then, she has endured a painful recovery, two surgeries, and the arduous adjustment to life on one leg.
Surviving an accident involving an oncoming train is exceedingly rare. Fitzgerald has been called the Miracle of Morristown by numerous media outlets, including the New York Post, People magazine, the Tamron Hall Show, and Pete Hegseth on Fox & Friends. The moniker fit, not just because she survived, but because of her remarkable courage and unrelenting cheerfulness.
On May 4, 2024, Fitzgerald was running to catch a train at the Morristown station after visiting her brother, sister-in-law, and the couple’s new baby at their Morris Plains home. Somehow, she slipped and fell onto the tracks and into the path of a 60-ton commuter train. [An investigation is ongoing, and NJ Transit officials did not respond to requests for comment.]
Her leg was immediately severed at the knee. The force of the impact spun her body around so she was on her stomach, watching another set of wheels rush toward her. By rolling onto her side and flattening her body against the platform wall until the train passed, she managed to escape with her life.
But her ordeal was just beginning.
With blood pouring out of her leg, she screamed for help. Nobody came. She waved to some people standing on the platform. Nobody responded.
“It hit me then that it was up to me to get myself up onto the platform,” she says. “I had to find a way off the tracks; another train was coming.” But her remaining foot was broken, so she had to launch herself up from one knee. “I could barely reach the platform,” she says. Thanks to her athletic lifestyle, plus a lot of adrenaline, she managed to heave herself up and over the edge.
Once on the platform, Fitzgerald, who’d trained as an EMT in college, knew she had to stanch the bleeding fast, but she couldn’t manage to get her shirt off to make a tourniquet. “I had no energy left,” she says. “So I just put my hands around my thigh and squeezed as tight as I could.”
Eventually, a ticket collector ran for help and returned with Nico Hollain, a police officer he found in the train-station parking lot. Seeing Fitzgerald in a pool of blood, Hollain ran back to his car for a tourniquet. Luckily, about a month earlier, he had attended a tourniquet refresher class. He tied her leg at the thigh, called for backup, and with the help of Officer David Moran, got her into an ambulance.
Fitzgerald’s legendary cheerfulness kicked in immediately despite the pain, which she describes as “excruciating.” According to Hollain, who rode with her in the ambulance, she joked about suddenly losing 15 pounds, and that her pedicures would now be half-price. “I told them, ‘I’m going to talk to you and joke with you for 30 seconds, then I’m going to scream at the top of my lungs in pain for 30 seconds,’” she says.
“She was pretty much a champ,” says Hollain.
Fitzgerald quickly endeared herself to the staff at Morristown Medical Center, too. She had emergency surgery to cauterize the wound when she arrived and, a few days later, surgery to amputate the leg above the knee, since the joint was too badly damaged to repair. (Above-knee amputations, known as AKs, are more challenging than below-knee amputations, since the loss of the knee joint significantly impacts mobility and prosthetic use.)
The day after the amputation, a physical therapist came to try to help Fitzgerald stand. Fitzgerald had other ideas. Her mother had just texted that she’d arrived to visit. “I’m going to walk out on crutches to surprise my mom,” Fitzgerald told the therapist.
“My mom was crying and cheering and laughing and smiling all at once,” she says.
Though she’d been told to expect a hospital stay of three to six months, Fitzgerald’s lasted less than three weeks. During that time, her room was filled with family (she’s one of eight siblings), and often, they were celebrating.
Fitzgerald turned 30 in the hospital, so her family tossed her a “glamputation”-themed party. “We had 60 people, friends and family, the whole staff. Nurses who were off their shifts came back to celebrate.”
Then came Mother’s Day and her sister Samatha’s law school graduation. Samantha chose to spend it in the hospital room, in her robes, while the ceremony was livestreamed; when her name was called, her sister draped her sash over her shoulders.
“They had to move me to a different room because we were getting noise complaints,” Fitzgerald says. “I felt terrible for the other patients, but I was never, ever, ever alone. I’m really lucky.” Her bandage changes were agonizing, but her brothers took turns squeezing her hands while she screamed.
Back in Queens, where she’d moved just before the accident, Fitzgerald set a goal of walking a mile a day and learned to deal with constant pain, real and imagined.
To her disappointment, 15 months later, she’s still on crutches, despite a typical timeline of three to six months to get a prosthetic limb. The problems began when her original prosthetist retired after months of measurements and fittings, which meant she had to start from scratch with a new one. When a new limb was finally produced in June, it fit poorly and had to be redone. The next one didn’t fit, either.
“I’m very excited to be back on two feet again,” she says. “My right leg will be so happy to get some of the weight off.”
Pain is still a constant. She has nerve pain, which doesn’t respond to painkillers, and phantom pain. She’s developed neuromas on her sciatic nerve that make it very painful to sit or lie down. Her wrists throb from the crutches. “I’m kind of used to the pain at this point. And nothing compares to the pain of the original incident, so comparatively, it’s not that bad,” she says. “But it’s all the time, all the time.”
She has three more surgeries on the horizon. One, called TMR surgery, involves excising the neuromas, which are basically tangled nerves, untangling them, and re-attaching them to the femur (thigh bone). A second procedure will aim to straighten the femur where it was cut during the amputation. “It’s really crooked, and not where it should be in terms of healing. I can’t put any pressure on it, and it makes fitting the prosthetic difficult,” she says. Finally, her surgeon will reshape the bottom of her leg and remove some extra flesh to aid in fitting the new limb.
Money is tight, and her debt is mounting. With “exhausting” PT sessions, endless medical appointments and red tape to navigate, plus difficulty sleeping because of the pain, she hasn’t been able to return to her job as a financial advisor in her family’s insurance company, Fitzgerald Wealth Group. “I just can’t hold a normal schedule,” she says. Yet disability services has twice denied her claim. Her GoFundMe account, which raised over $120,000 following the accident, is pretty much tapped out, she says.
Fighting with disability services and her insurance company takes up a lot of time. The insurance company is balking at paying for anything more than a basic prosthetic leg.
None of these setbacks, which she calls “bumps in the road,” have dampened her determination to “live my best life,” she says. “It’s just a constant flow of hiccups and successes, and eventually, everything’s going to work out. I’ve always had the mindset that a day being upset or pitying yourself is a day of progress that you waste.”
She’s full of plans to return to the activities she loves, such as snowboarding, indoor rock climbing and surfing, and has found a climbing gym in Brooklyn and a snowboarding program in the Catskills that accommodate amputees. She’s had less luck with surfing programs, she says, “so I might just have to test it myself.” But returning to these sports requires a high-tech prosthetic limb that costs around $100,000 and must be replaced every few years.
“I don’t like sitting still,” she says. “Before my accident, I traveled every month—Nashville, Florida, Montana, Yellowstone. I was surfing in Hawaii just before the accident. Now I’m getting back to doing everything I was before. I just got back from Florida. I babysit my niece and my nephew. I do Pilates and yoga and swim. Everything’s decently back to normalish.”
Yoga has been particularly helpful in combatting the lower-back and hip pain common in AK amputees. Her sister Samantha got certified in amputee yoga to teach her sister.
Fitzgerald has even found a nail salon willing to give her half-price pedicures.
Always, she steers the conversation to the good that’s come from the accident. She’s bursting with excitement over the change she helped to inspire in her mother. “She’s a completely different person,” she says. “She’s gone from having trouble walking up stairs to a crazy fitness and wellness journey. She said seeing how I didn’t let anything stop me made her stop making excuses.”
Perhaps it’s this forward-thinking mindset that has kept Fitzgerald from having flashbacks or bad dreams. A month after the accident, she was riding the subway again. Still, while waiting, “I’m very cautious,” she says. “I stand back against the wall, and my head’s on a swivel.” She looks away as the train approaches.
People often call her for support and inspiration, and she’s begun giving talks about her journey. She speaks regularly with young trauma survivors at Morristown Medical Center, and will fly this fall to Kansas City to speak to a resilience organization.
“If someone walks away thinking a little more positively, or their depression lifts a little, that’s what I want to accomplish,” she says.
But, she admits, “everything’s not sunshine and rainbows. There are bad moments, and I get frustrated, and sometimes the pain is overbearing. But that’s a minority of the time.”
“You have to look for the good and keep on moving. I don’t want to look back.”
