She finally enrolled in beauty school at age 21. But then she contracted Guillain-Barre syndrome, an illness believed to be caused by a virus that prompts the immune system to attack the nerves, resulting in muscle weakness and paralysis.įionda says she lived in a wheelchair for two years while she recovered, and then had to contend with more treatment when the cancer came back. A year of treatment left the disease in remission. She wanted to enroll in beauty school after graduating from Roseville High School, but the 17-year-old was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. She carried that aspiration with her after the family moved to metro Detroit when she was 12. She was fascinated by a family friend who was a beautician and who would practice on Fionda and her two sisters. It would be a huge struggle, but Fionda was used to hardship when it came to her health.Įver since she was a child, the youngest of five born to Italian parents who settled in Scotland, Fionda says she knew she wanted to be a hairdresser. The doctors told her that with therapy and determination, she could walk and work again. She was despondent and depressed, and mourned especially the damage to her hands. ‘‘I felt like my life had been taken,’’ she recalls.
In the throes of recovery, Fionda wondered if she’d be able to work and wield the tools of her trade again. On her left hand, the one that holds the hair as she cuts, she lost her index finger down to the second knuckle and just more than the tips of the remaining three. But on her right hand - the one she uses to hold her cutting shears, she lost most of four fingers, leaving them each about an inch long. On July 15, they amputated most of her fingers. On April 20, 2010, Fionda’s 48th birthday, doctors told her they needed to amputate half of her right foot and her left foot to the heel. They would talk to me and I’d say, ‘Get the hell out of my room.’ I wouldn’t even look at them when they talked to me.’’ ‘‘When I tell you they were black, they were the color of this table,’’ Fionda says, gesturing toward the dark, lacquered coffee table in her Clinton Township, Mich., home. But hands and feet are how she had made a career and a reputation. ‘‘The heart works hard to save the organs and forgets about the hands and feet,’’ is how Fionda described it. Her limbs were black up to her elbows and knees. She had developed a bacterial infection, which led to septic shock, and her body had shunted blood away from her appendages to save her vital organs and brain. The next thing she remembers is waking up in a hospital bed on March 13. DETROIT - Anna Fionda, a hairstylist who occupied the first chair at Edwin Paul Salon in Grosse Pointe Woods, Mich., for 27 years, drove herself to the hospital emergency room on Valentine’s Day 2010.
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