The Adaptive Climbing Group is the brainchild of Kareemah Batts, of Brooklyn, who once swore that she would never rock-climb. But she came around to the sport after a battle with cancer that cost her a part of a leg. She then found that she wanted to climb with other amputees and formed the group.

Young and in relatively good health, Sedor and Batts represent a small portion of all amputees.

“There’s two major classes of patients,” said Dr. Jeffrey M. Cohen, a co-founder of the Amputee Support Program at the Rusk Rehabilitation at New York University’s Langone Medical Center. “You have your patients who have had a trauma, like a motor vehicle accident. And then you have long-term diabetics who have peripheral vascular disease and coexisting cardiovascular problems. That group makes up a majority of our amputees, about 80 percent.”

Batts’s left leg was amputated below the knee on Aug. 21, 2009 — a date she calls her “ampuversary” — while she was battling synovial sarcoma, a type of malignant tumor that required radiation and chemotherapy. It was a battle she eventually won. While attending a support group, Batts learned of a program that sends cancer survivors on adventure trips. She went on one and found that it alleviated her depression, something that attending cancer and amputee support groups had failed to do.

“If you are not born with a disability, you tend to compare everything to before you were disabled,” Batts said. Her rock climbing excursion to Colorado was “something neither the new Kareemah nor the old Kareemah did before.”

When Batts returned to Flatbush, she resolved to incorporate climbing into her routine. Batts had difficulty finding a job, she said, “because you’re no longer a female with experience, you’re a disabled person; you’re a liability.” But she was hired by the outdoor retailer Eastern Mountain Sports. From there, her rock climbing acumen and access to New York’s community of climbers expanded.