I was just being honest in a way people aren't used to seeing.
Aos 24 anos, Leticia Fabri entrou em um hospital com pneumonia e saiu, três meses depois, sem os dois pés — mas com uma clareza sobre si mesma que raramente se encontra sem travessia. O que poderia ter sido apenas uma história de perda tornou-se uma plataforma de presença: ela fala sobre deficiência, sexualidade e saúde mental com o humor herdado do pai, transformando o silêncio em conversa. Sua trajetória lembra que a identidade, às vezes, só se revela depois que tudo que era supérfluo é retirado.
- Uma pneumonia bacteriana evoluiu para sepse e consumiu os tecidos dos pés de Leticia em semanas, forçando uma amputação bilateral aos 24 anos.
- Além dos pés, a doença levou sua audição, prejudicou sua visão e afastou o namorado de três anos no momento em que ela mais precisava de companhia.
- O vídeo gravado na alta hospitalar — leve, direto, bem-humorado — viralizou e transformou uma atualização pessoal em uma audiência de centenas de milhares de pessoas.
- Nas redes, ela quebra tabus que raramente são nomeados: fala abertamente sobre sexualidade após amputação, desmontando a ideia de que corpos com deficiência não desejam nem se conectam.
- Hoje, com quase 500 mil seguidores no TikTok, Leticia usa a plataforma como extensão de um aprendizado de infância — o de que o humor não nega a dor, mas recusa deixar que ela seja a última palavra.
Em março de 2018, Leticia Fabri foi ao hospital com pneumonia bacteriana e ficou três meses internada. A infecção evoluiu para sepse, comprometeu a circulação nos pés e tornou a amputação bilateral inevitável. Ela tinha 24 anos. A doença também afetou sua audição — hoje usa aparelhos auditivos — e sua visão. O namorado de três anos foi embora durante a recuperação. A família ficou. Sem eles, ela diz, não teria sobrevivido ao que veio depois.
Quando recebeu alta, Leticia gravou um vídeo para atualizar amigos e colegas. Falou sobre a amputação com leveza e humor — um jeito de encarar o difícil que ela e o irmão mais velho desenvolveram desde cedo, crescendo entre internações por uma doença autoimune rara que ambos compartilham. O pai, que morreu em 2017, ensinava que se podia rir de quase tudo. O vídeo viralizou. Estranhos começaram a segui-la, a escrever para ela, a dizer que sua história havia mudado algo neles.
No TikTok, acumulou quase meio milhão de seguidores. No Instagram, mais de 160 mil. Mas os números são apenas o contorno do que ela realmente faz: falar sobre o que costuma ser evitado. Ela discute sexualidade após amputação com a mesma franqueza com que descreveria qualquer outra coisa — as próteses são como sapatos, diz ela, você as tira, e nada muda além desse detalhe. O silêncio em torno de deficiência e desejo, para ela, é uma forma de apagamento.
Leticia tem quase 30 anos e descreve a mulher que era antes da amputação como alguém que ainda estava se tornando. A crise abriu algo. Forçou perguntas sobre o que importava, quem merecia seu tempo, que vida ela queria construir. A resposta não veio na recuperação em si, mas no ato de falar sobre ela — alto, sem vergonha, com o dom herdado do pai de transformar escuridão em algo que se pode enfrentar junto.
In March 2018, Leticia Fabri felt unwell at work and went to the hospital. The diagnosis was bacterial pneumonia. What followed was three months of hospitalization, a descent into sepsis, and a choice that would reshape her entire life. The infection spread through her body, starving her tissues of blood. Both her feet died. Both had to be removed.
She was twenty-four years old.
The pneumonia took more than her feet. It took her hearing in both ears—she wears hearing aids now. It blurred her vision so badly she needs glasses to see clearly. It took a relationship too. Her boyfriend of three years, faced with the reality of her recovery, simply left. In the moment when she needed someone to sit beside her, to listen, to offer the ordinary comfort of another person's presence, he was gone. Her family stayed. Without them, she says, she would not have survived what came next.
When Leticia was discharged, she made a video. She wanted to update friends and colleagues, to reassure them that she was alive and moving forward. She spoke about her amputation the way she had learned to speak about everything difficult in her life—with lightness, with humor, with the kind of brightness that comes from having faced hard things since childhood. Her older brother shares a rare autoimmune disorder with her, thrombocytopenia, which causes dangerous drops in blood platelet counts. Both of them grew up in and out of hospitals. Both learned early that you could either let the weight crush you or you could laugh your way through it. Their father, who died in 2017, had taught them this. He made jokes about everything. They became that way too.
The video spread. Strangers began sharing it. People she had never met started following her, messaging her, telling her that her story had moved them. What she had not anticipated was that her particular way of speaking—direct, unsentimental, funny—would resonate so widely. On TikTok, she accumulated nearly half a million followers. On Instagram, one hundred sixty-eight thousand. The numbers kept climbing.
Leticia Fabri, who describes herself online as "an amputee with both feet in the grave and hearing loss," began using her platform to talk about things people usually whisper about or avoid entirely. She speaks about sex. She speaks about desire and intimacy after amputation. She says it plainly: it is the same as before. The prosthetics are like shoes. You take them off. Nothing changes except that detail. She breaks the silence around disability and sexuality because the silence itself is a kind of erasure, a way of saying that disabled people do not have bodies that want, that feel, that connect with other bodies.
She is nearly thirty now. She looks younger, she says, but she has lived enough to know who she is. The woman before the amputation feels like someone else entirely—a person she was becoming, not a person she was. The woman after the amputation is the one who found herself. The crisis cracked something open. It forced her to ask what mattered, who deserved her time, what kind of life she actually wanted to build. Her answer came not in recovery but in the act of speaking about recovery, in refusing to let her story be small or quiet or ashamed. She inherited her father's gift for turning darkness into something you can laugh at together. Now she uses it to tell other people that you can survive what seems unsurvivable, and that on the other side of it, you might find yourself.
Notable Quotes
The prosthetics are like shoes. You take them off. Nothing changes except that detail.— Leticia Fabri, on sexuality and intimacy after amputation
The woman before the amputation feels like someone else entirely. I found myself in my disability.— Leticia Fabri, on how the crisis reshaped her identity
The Hearth Conversation Another angle on the story
When you say the video wasn't supposed to go viral, what do you think changed between the version of yourself that made it and the person who watched it spread?
I think I was just being honest in a way people aren't used to seeing. I wasn't performing recovery. I was just... existing, and talking about it the way I talk about everything—like it's not the end of the world, even when it feels like it is.
Your boyfriend left during your hospitalization. That's a specific kind of abandonment. How did that shape what you wanted to say publicly afterward?
It made me realize that the people who matter are the ones who stay. And it made me want to be very clear about my own worth, you know? I wasn't going to disappear just because he did. If anything, I was going to take up more space.
You talk about sexuality and disability together. Why is that connection important to you?
Because people treat disabled people like we're not sexual beings. Like our bodies are only bodies that need care, not bodies that want things. I wanted to say: I'm still here. I still desire. I still have a life that includes intimacy. It's not complicated. It's just life.
Your father died before all of this happened. Do you think he would recognize himself in how you handle things now?
I think he'd be proud. He taught me that humor isn't about denying pain—it's about refusing to let pain be the only thing you are. He lived that way. I'm just continuing it.
What do you want people to understand about what happened to you?
That it was terrible and I survived it and I'm not special for surviving it. Other people survive terrible things too. We just don't talk about it the way we should.