Lazarus running in a positive life marathon

Erin Lazarus, a 26-year-old amputee, who went from feeling lost to a “you-set-the-tone” mindset, will soon be running the London Marathon, her first-ever full-length marathon at the end of April.

Lazarus, who grew up excelling in many sports, had visions of how she could continue playing sport even as she lay in the hospital bed with a dead foot, and the prospect of losing it. Lazarus said to herself and her family, “I want to be happy and live life again. So, I pictured myself with that blade.”

She recalled saying to herself at the time in January 2022, “My new journey is starting.” She recalled her doctor looking at her, telling her he was going to operate and try and save her foot. “But I don’t know if I can,” he said. “All I pictured in that moment were the fancy Paralympians on TV with their blades,” Lazarus told the SA Jewish Report this week.

Now she’s going full steam ahead with her training. But her journey, she says, is special because “it’s not about me running, it’s about doing it for other people”. She’s running for two charities at the moment which help less fortunate people access rehabilitation and people with amputations access mobility aids respectively.

Lazarus described how after a series of unusual health crises in 2021, doctors eventually discovered that she had Lupus, an auto-immune disease in which your immune system attacks the body’s healthy tissue. It was discovered only once it had led to a clot in an artery in her leg, which ultimately caused her to lose her foot. Lupus can be controlled with medication, however, which has allowed Lazarus to live a completely normal life since finding out what the issue was.

Looking back at her time as a pupil at King David Linksfield, Lazarus said, “It was as if life was really perfect and I had it all. I was healthy, sporty, I had the high school boyfriend…” However, at university, without competitive sport driving her, she went through a phase of “feeling lost”.

Looking back, she said, “In 2021, I was doing my honours, and these odd symptoms just started hitting me. I’d have one symptom and then it would disappear. So, we would treat it as an individual symptom and move on to the next.” At the end of year, however, “all the symptoms hit at once”, and there was a bruise on the side of her foot.

She went to her general practitioner to find out what was wrong with her just before going on a family trip, and he gave no indication that the situation was dire. Lazarus recalled that the doctor “didn’t actually look at my foot, he looked at a photo of my foot”, and put her symptoms down to “anxiety manifesting in physical pain”.

That time away with her family turned into a life-changing experience. “We went to Sun City, I stuck my feet in the pool, and the left one turned completely black and it felt like blue blisters underneath,” Lazarus said.

She checked herself into the emergency room as the pain in her foot became unbearable. Lazarus was then diagnosed with Lupus in a phone call with a physician a few days before her left foot was amputated.

As she lay in her hospital bed, she made some clear decisions. “This is my new life. I’m sick of the pain. I want this new journey to start, and I need my Lupus to get to a level of not being life-threatening anymore,” she recalled saying to herself.

While still in hospital, undergoing her amputation ordeal, she and her dad told each other that when she was up again and had her blade, “we would run a marathon together”.

Lazarus made up her mind then and there that her disability wasn’t going to define her or stop her from accomplishing her dreams of being active again.

And so, she’s now an aspiring marathon runner, and she and her dad have signed up for the London Marathon 2025.

“For so long, I’d felt like I was in the slump of not having anything competitive,” Lazarus said. “I had nothing pushing me. So, I chose to make this normal, make a metal leg normal, make an auto-immune disease normal. Go out there, meet new people. Go on this new journey, and be confident about it.”

Early on in her journey, her psychologist said to her, “You set the tone” and “Your leg isn’t growing back. So, rather choose to make this a new journey and find your new purpose.” Lazarus says she lives by those words every single day.

Running long distance was never her thing in her youth. “I actually hated cross country, I would cut corners wherever I could,” she said. But running has always been in her family. “My dad is also a Comrades Marathon runner. So running is kind of all I’ve known,” she said, even if she used to prefer short distances.

Lazarus describes her attitude to her new life as wanting everyone around her “to feel empowered and uplifted” in her presence. She said she didn’t want to present herself as an “energy sucker, because there’s nothing worse than being around someone who plays the victim”.

Lazarus refused to throw a pity party for herself. In fact, two years after the amputation, having been fitted with a prosthetic leg and a blade for running, she “wanted to have a celebration rather than a sad day”. Her celebration was opting to do a 5km run.

She started off running 5km a time with her new blade, which soon stretched into 10km races for a charity linked to the biokineticist she goes to every week. Lazarus runs for others in need of rehabilitation who can’t afford the same healthcare as her. She’s inspired by the fact that her running helps others. She’s running for another charity, Rejuvenate, which raises funds to help less fortunate people with amputations to get access to mobility aids.

Her training for the marathon is in progress, and her weekends are filled with half marathons around the country. She ran her first half marathon last September in Cape Town, and remembers “just looking down at the blade” and then her “human foot” and thinking how “privileged” it made her feel to be able to run. She felt so grateful that on top of that, she could “help other people get a prosthetic leg or get the rehabilitation they needed”.

“I’m running a half marathon next weekend,” she told the SA Jewish Report. “I’m running a half marathon in Cape Town the week after, and then another half marathon in Pretoria. And then mid-March, a half marathon in Durban”.

Lazarus’s story shows the power of changing one’s mental picture and choosing to make the best out of a bad situation because as she puts it, “my life is so much better now” even if she has “bad days”. Lazarus hopes to show the Jewish community and those entering the running world that “if I can do it, so can they” as she changes the culture of running as an amputee and Lupus warrior.