What's up, Badi Bees? I'm Brianna, mom, wife, serial entrepreneur, and host of the badass basic bitch podcast.

Each week, I sit down with a seemingly ordinary woman who's doing extraordinary things,

and I get to share her story with you.

So let's go.

Buckle up as we're going to get real and dive into the shit nobody talks about.

Welcome to the Batty B Club.

So I woke up in the Badgett emergency room, and that's where I learned that my leg was gone. But you're still kind of, you know, on these pain meds. You're not really thinking about, like, what your life is going to be like. It's probably not until I got to Walter Reed, and I was there and was able to kind of get out of my hospital room, like put in a wheelchair. Maybe that's the moment.

You know, when you wake up and you're kind of not on as much of the pain medication, you

can actually kind of think about what's happening. And you look down at the sheets and you see not

the outline of one leg instead of two legs. Welcome back to another episode of Badass Basic Bitch. On today's episode, we have Melissa

Stockwell, who is a mom veteran, three-time Paralympian triathlet, Purple Heart recipient,

speaker, and author. And today, we are going to hear all about Melissa's story from her deployment to where

she is today and all the lessons she learned in between. Melissa, thank you so much for being with us

today. Thank you for having me. Happy to be here. So I have actually watched a ton of your interviews.

I am a big fan. And I was really excited when you agreed to come on the

podcast. So first, I want to say I'm like fan-girling a little bit right in here, but thanks

so much for being here. And why don't you go ahead and give our listeners a short summary

about you and what you do? Ah, well, thank, yeah, thank you for having me on. I kind of saw a list of others that have been on the podcast, so just kind of pretty honored to be speaking with you. So thank you. So, yeah, I'm, you know, my story, I feel like I can go as long or as short as we wanted. So I will kind of give a brief overview and then we can kind of dive in deeper where we need to.

So I like to say that I was born a patriot.

So I loved our country from a very young age, wanted to give back and serve in the military and decided to join the ROTC program in college at the University of Colorado.

And I graduated and got commissioned

as an officer into the Army in May of 2002. Two years later, I was sent off to my first

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