Getting your life back after a big setback

Four years ago, I was hit by a car as I crossed the road like a good little pedestrian. For the record, I was NOT distracted by my phone and I didn’t play chicken dangerously with traffic. In fact, I was such a good pedestrian, I even waited for the next set of traffic lights, aka flashing green man, to be safe. Yes!

TO. BE. SAFE.

Oh, the irony. Despite all the vestiges of control we amass around ourselves in our lives, turns out none of us are actually ‘safe’. Bad things can and do happen at any given point in time. Monday 14th May, 2018 was my day for the bad thing to happen. 7.30am and I managed to stop peak hour traffic in downtown Sydney on an eight-lane major road for at least an hour.

Sadly though, it wasn’t just that day that the ‘bad thing’ happened. It was the beginning of a long string of bad things happening that cemented how little control we really have over our worlds.

• The hospital missing the flesh-eating bacteria in a wound they didn’t bother to clean.
• My doctor dismissing awful pain symptoms that should have been referred to an orthopaedic surgeon for 19 loooong months — just long enough for my hip bone at the top of my femur to begin to die from lack of blood flow from a ruptured ligament.
• The PTSD that prevented me from continuing to live my life because I couldn’t do basic things like cross a road or be around cars — even on TV (sad but true).
• When I eventually got to the second hip surgery (aka this time a full hip replacement), the surgeon managed to knock out all the feeling in my thigh down past my knee and yet still give me pain to boot — for the rest of my life.
• During that surgery, I lost 30% of my blood volume which left me at death’s door for nearly a year.
• When I begged for my ‘new’ general practitioner to check why I kept falling asleep whilst driving, it took three months for her to report my results. Yep that 3 months prior, I had required an ‘emergency’ iron transfusion, that had then put my life further at risk.
• And whilst all of this was going on, my dearest friend died from a super rare version of ovarian cancer. She was 47 and if there was a poster child for a ‘healthy life’, it was her — besides which she taught the profoundly injured how to begin to live their lives again — yep, seriously universe what were you thinking??!!).

When the original bad thing happened, I had a life. I had a family, friends, a successful business that I’d run for nearly 10 years, a second job teaching because I loved my students, and I was mid-way through a PhD in my field of expertise. And I wrote, a lot.

Almost all of it vanished within months. I couldn’t keep building my business pipeline, hell I couldn’t actually go to meetings that required getting out of my car or using public transport and crossing roads (and this was before the days of Zooming everything). I was dropped from the teaching roster — because I couldn’t get anywhere near the university campus (so much for their religious-based pastoral care). And then I was magnanimously dropped from the PhD program for failure to complete, despite continuing to work at the top of my albeit diminished capacity. I challenged and won, but was beaten down by the process and timeframes I could no longer meet.

And as for friends and colleagues, well, they couldn’t understand why, when I had no broken bones per se, wasn’t in a wheelchair or an institution, I didn’t resume life as I ‘should’ have and they too dropped by the wayside. And let’s face it, my 90’s TV series, House-like obsession with figuring out what was wrong with me that the Drs hadn’t picked up on, probably didn’t help either. Let’s just say, I watched a LOT of anatomy videos, reviewed a lot of cadaver photos and read a lot of medical journals.

I had nothing left except my family and even that got weird. I went from being a mum and wife who ran my family’s show (and our finances) to being not far off a total invalid who required a LOT of care particularly by my husband — I couldn’t even make tea and toast at the same time without staring at the butter wondering what to do next (thank you, PTSD). And that, despite my best intentions, put my family, even my children, into carer roles. My youngest, still doesn’t talk to me when I have to go into hospital — she equates hospital with people dying, so she figures, she’ll talk to me when I’m out. Plus, I was so focused on fixing myself, I completely missed my oldest child’s ADHD symptoms. Ugh. Just ugh, ugh, ugh (my missing them, not her symptoms).

I described what went on over those now missing years as being taken out of my life and put in a glass box — kind of like being undead. I could watch, but not take part in the life that continued around me. It was pretty surreal.

And I missed important things along the way — like graduations and final farewells — not for want of trying.

Recently, I watched (okay, binged) Manifest where a plane disappears and then returns 5.5 years later. The world, including everyone in the passengers’ lives had moved on, but for the folks who returned on Flight 828, only a few hours had passed. You can imagine the issues that might have caused. Relationships, careers and lives broke because of one, albeit giant, anomaly.

Whilst I’ve been here for every minute of every day that passed in those intervening four years since my anomaly, I have, to a greater extent, now popped out the proverbial ‘other side’.

My own flight 828 has finally returned — four years later. I have come back to life.

I can finally cross roads, walk like a regular human (still working on running), I’m getting my real strength back, and can even make tea and toast at the same time again. And I can finally drive my little manual sports car again as of yesterday. It’s a weird place to be. I’m back baby — but not to life as I left it. My suits, heels and type A workaholic tendencies are gone for now. Rather, I have something of a new life now — one that I’m slowly rebuilding. As yet, I have no idea what I want to be when I grow up — a writer, an astronaut, a famous actress, a good doctor? Maybe that knowledge will come, maybe it won’t. But I’ll be damned if I’m not going to have a hell of a lot of fun figuring it out.

A lot has changed since my accident including my understanding of the universe and how it operates and how we need to operate within it. We are not inherently safe as we like to believe — rather we do things anyway, hoping that things go our way. And if they don’t, we’ll figure it out as we go along.

I really appreciate you reading my work. I’d love it if you clapped it too. It lets more people see it — maybe even someone who desperately needs it to get their life back.

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