The last time Brenda Ogden saw her leg — her waterproof, titanium, prosthetic leg — waves were sweeping it away.
Ms. Ogden, 68, felt bereft. She had come to Bridlington beach that day, on England’s North Sea coast, curious to see if her first ocean swim might become a new hobby. But it was over before she had really started.
A wave knocked her down as she was standing for a photo. She had planned to remove the leg to swim, but lost it before she had the chance. And then, almost a year later, an improbable discovery brought it back to her.
For Ms. Ogden, swimming was a possible second act. Until five years ago, she was a dedicated runner. She ran with her husband. She ran with her friends. She ran the New York City Marathon three times.
As a joke, she and a friend had a saying: “We wouldn’t get out of bed for less than 10 miles.”
Then, in 2020, came a life-changing accident: As she was driving, a deer ran in front of her car. Ms. Ogden swerved into another vehicle and was trapped in the wreckage for several hours. She broke her back and other bones. Her left leg was crushed and later amputated.
“It was awful,” she said of the aftermath. “There was days when I didn’t get up.”
A retired nurse, Ms. Ogden focused on her recovery and started using a prosthesis for walking, provided by Britain’s health service. The way she eventually saw it, every day was a clean page.
“That piece of paper can say, ‘Oh, my God, I’m in bed. I’m miserable,’” she said. “Or it can say, ‘OK, we’re just not too great. But we’re going do this.’”
Last April, what she wanted to do was to swim in the sea. But that would require a new leg, as regular prostheses are not designed to be submerged.
Friends of Ms. Ogden donated funds for a titanium waterproof blade, worth about $2,700, which she could use to help get into the water and then detach before going for a swim.
A wave knocked her down in her first foray into the ocean, with enough force to carry the leg away.
In Bridlington, as news of Ms. Ogden’s loss spread, sympathetic volunteers searched local beaches for the limb. Some started a fund-raising page to help her buy a new one. Ms. Ogden gave up on ocean swimming, and stopped thinking about the leg.
In the end, it took a keen beachcomber to find it.
On Monday, about a dozen miles away in Atwick, Lizi Forbes, 38, was picking her way through one of her usual coastal walks when she saw something unexpected wedged in some rocks.
“There’s this prosthetic leg with a sock still attached,” she said. “I immediately looked around and thought: Oh, where’s the rest of this person?”
Ms. Forbes, who scours the coastline for fossils, often has her eyes on the rocks. Jurassic-era finds such as ammonites litter this stretch of Yorkshire coast.
This find from the modern day, wedged at the bottom of a cliff, was unusual enough for her to snap a photo and post it to a local Facebook group, though she did not retrieve it. The eccentricity of the situation spread the news of the find and, within hours, the post made its way to Ms. Ogden’s friends and family.
Ten months after the sea had swallowed up her leg from one beach, Ms. Ogden learned, it had yielded it back.
“I laid in bed thinking, I need to go back for that leg,” Ms. Forbes said, worried that it would be washed away again. “I can’t leave it there. That poor lady.”
It was high tide when Ms. Forbes arrived the next morning. After the sea retreated, she picked her way through the rocks. There, damp and sandy, was the titanium prosthesis.
On Saturday afternoon, on the beach where the leg was lost, the Flamborough Flippers, Ms. Ogden’s swim group, gathered for a toast as Ms. Ogden and her limb were reunited.
Ms. Forbes said in a text message after the reunion, “It felt great, like closure but positive closure.”
She said in an interview that she hoped that she and Ms. Ogden could remain friends.
“Fate brought it along and brought us together,” she said, adding that she had been inspired by Ms. Ogden’s grit.
The leg may need some maintenance before it goes out for a swim with Ms. Ogden, who said she was hopeful that she would be able to use it. Still, it would be nice to be reunited with “half of my body,” she said.
“It’s sort of given me a jump start again,” she said on Friday, adding that she wanted to improve her fitness to return to swimming and running.
“Life’s good and you just take every day,” Ms. Ogden said. And she still sees running in the future. Her new goal, she said, was to run the London Marathon.
Isabella Kwai is a Times reporter based in London, covering breaking news and other trends.
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