trauma

I Can’t Really Complain

I’d never had trouble with finding meaning in life. I’ve moved pretty effortlessly from one goal to another, following my heart and my passion at the time. Don’t get me wrong, I have known hard work, but I enjoy and even relish a challenge, as so many people do. 

As a kid, I went to a bilingual school and learned French and English. Although I came from a decidedly middle-class family, attending a bi-lingual school had its advantages and I was lucky to go on exchange to two beautiful French islands, Tahiti and Reunion.

As a teenager, I discovered I was a natural athlete, regularly medalling at State Championships in high jump and the 100m and 200m. I achieved my black belt in Tae Kwon Do, but gave it up not long after discovering volleyball, which became an absolute passion. I was selected to represent my state and then my country in volleyball, and I was hooked on the sport instantly. After high school, I dreamed of becoming a journalist, so I enrolled at the University of Canberra and interned with The Canberra Times.

I applied for a scholarship as a student athlete at George Mason University in America, where I studied, played volleyball and landed a coveted internship at USA Today. I juggled my social life, being an athlete, working, and studying well, and was named to the USA National Dean’s List, graduating Magna Cum Laude with an offer to continue my studies at Oxford University. I instead joined a fortune 500 company working in public affairs and directly supporting tech industry leaders early in my career.

After returning to Australia with my amazing husband in tow, I found a great balance between growing professionally in Australian corporate life, playing competitive volleyball, including captaining the NSW women’s volleyball team, and exploring the world in any free time.

Life wasn’t always exciting or challenging, and it certainly wasn’t always easy, but life was good.

The Day Everything Changed

In 2017, it was on a trip to Cambodia and Vietnam with my best friend, Jo, and everything took an unexpected turn. In regional Vietnam, I took a corner too fast on my moped, hit the side barrier, went flying into the air over the barrier and tumbled down a mountainside.

It’s funny the things you think, in moments like that.

I was tumbling down the side of the mountain like a rag doll doing cartwheels. I remember the “thud, thud thud, thud” on my helmet and thinking “lucky I’m wearing a helmet” before thinking “oh jeez, I hope I don’t break my neck.”

I eventually stopped tumbling. The fall could have easily killed me, but I was lucky. Once I’d stopped tumbling, I looked down to see my thigh bone sticking out the end of my left leg. It was the end of my leg because I couldn’t see my knee or anything below it.

I think my brain was preparing me for the trauma, I remember knowing that my leg was gone below the knee, but not feeling anything with that realisation. It was just a fact.

Then the pain hit me. I mean, it really ‘hit’ me. Like the moment you get dunked by a wave and hit the sand and all the air leaves your lungs.

But the pain wasn’t coming from my leg. My right shoulder was in complete agony. I tried to move my arm and realised my shoulder was dislocated. Another fact, a clinical diagnosis, with no emotion or processing.

At that point, the pain was too much, so I stopped my self-assessment. Maybe it was my brain protecting me, I don’t think I could have seen any more without having to process the implications of just how serious my situation was. So I just sat awkwardly and waited.

I waited as people from the tour group slowly started making their way down the hill, including Jo who had been at the front of the motorbike group and at first had not realised there had been an accident.

Someone called an ambulance. Someone else threw up behind me… nice.

We waited.

I remember the heat and hot sun. I remember the rubbish around me, so common for the roadside in Vietnam. I remember the pain, and being decidedly frustrated that I hadn’t, couldn’t, just pass out.

At some point, the pain shifted to my foot as well, and I realised my leg was still there. It was just so unnaturally folded and twisted, and buried under me, that I couldn’t see it.

Two lovely French doctors stopped when they saw the accident. Not knowing I speak French, they spoke quietly to each other about how I would have to have my leg amputated.

There was no panic, just the pain and the heat.

The ambulance (a van really) came, with no doctor and no drugs. The French doctors sent it away and told the driver to come back with pain meds and a doctor. We waited again.

People began clearing a route for the stretcher, “should we go up or down?” Down. We waited.

The ambulance finally came back. I was given two vials of morphine. It made no difference.

Then somehow there was even more pain as I was moved to the stretcher and into the ambulance for the interminable and bumpy ride to the hospital.

Gee, Welcome Back Brain

It wasn’t until we got to the hospital that I started to panic. By that point, my brain had woken up and had processed enough to make me terrified. I didn’t want to lose my leg. All I could say as I was being wheeled into the surgery was “don’t let them take my leg.”

Again, I was so lucky. The local surgeon had trained in America. A world class medical education and training, and importantly, he spoke English. He did an amazing job of piecing my leg back together, the first of many procedures that would follow, but this would at least allow the bones to heal. He not only saved my leg, but given the severity of the open fractures, I was extremely lucky I didn’t get a post-surgery infection and lose my leg, as so often happens in these types of accidents.

It wasn’t all perfect, in their efforts to save my leg that day, they forgot about my dislocated shoulder. So, I went back into surgery the next day where they finally put the shoulder back into the socket, but accidentally cut into my arm to fix a broken bone that wasn’t broken – they had the wrong X-rays.

I don’t remember much about the next four days. I know my husband, Francis, arrived. I remember he spent a lot of time on the phone, with the insurance company, my family, and trying to organise to get me airlifted to a modern hospital. I remember someone tried to feed me Pho broth. I wasn’t hungry.

Eventually I was stable enough to be airlifted to Thailand – not being able to make the long trip back to Sydney yet. In Bangkok, I started my real recovery: eating solid food, taking calls from family and friends and checking my Facebook profile for the first time, which was overwhelming.

I couldn’t sit up due to the bruising in my abdomen. I couldn’t even roll onto my side due to my leg and shoulder injuries. But two weeks later, I flew home to Sydney with Jo, Francis and a medical team, strapped down to a stretcher the whole way.

Coming Out of the Fog and Preparing to Fight

Back in Australia, I found the old me. I was ready to make it through this.

There was a comforting rhythm with the day to day happenings at Royal Prince Alfred hospital. Mornings started with rounds from the doctors, sometimes they had students with them, and we’d have a chat. Then breakfast would arrive, followed by a wash in the bed I couldn’t yet leave, and then the sheets were changed under me while I tried to deal with the pain. Morning tea arrived, and a nurse would come it to replace my catheter or check my stats – starved of meaningful conversation, I would try my best to be cheerful and positive, have a joke and relate to the hospital staff who always had too much to do and not enough time.

Lunch would follow shortly after, again a slow affair when you can’t sit too well and only have the use of one arm. Not long later the kitchen staff would take my food order for the next day and drop off afternoon tea. Early in my recovery, I would nap in the afternoons, later I would mindlessly watch YouTube videos or binge watch Netflix series. Despite being a book lover all my life, I didn’t have the attention span or energy to read. Dinner was served at grandma time, and I would see my husband or friends and family in the evenings before going to sleep. I slept a lot, but I was mostly in good spirits.

Once the physical pain became more manageable, I started dealing with the physiological scars. For weeks after the accident, I would get complete body-wracking shakes just thinking about the accident. Yet every visitor asked, “what happened” and so I would tell the story. One day after telling the story for what felt like the hundredth time, I realised the shaking had stopped.

One morning while doing his rounds, I flinched when my surgeon reached for my knee. “You need to work on that, or it will become a thing,” he said before leaving the room. So that evening my husband and I Googled a variety of search terms before “psychological pain management” gave us results. We began ‘working on that’ by lightly pulling the sheet over my knee. Then I started trailing my fingers lightly over my knee, then I let my husband run the sheet over my knee, etc… Over time, that worked too and I stopped flinching like a beaten dog.

I had further surgeries on my shoulder and leg – a metal plate and bone graph from my hip helped the broken tibia which wasn’t healing. A skin graph from my thigh was needed to replace the missing skin around my knee and calf. Five full ligament tears and one partial tear were repaired in my dislocated shoulder, and I had multiple knee surgeries in the hope that I would get adequate use of my leg back, whatever that means. The gashes and bruises all over my body healed.

The doctors had to make sure I had realistic expectations for my recovery. They told me I was lucky to have my leg and that some day to day activities would be difficult. With a few years of rehab, I should be able to walk, hopefully without pain.

“Years!?” I remember asking, “Really, that long? Surely not?” The doctor looked me in the eyes and said, “The alternative is amputation. You would be up and recovering a lot faster then, with a prosthesis.”

I laughed, before realising he was serious and he was presenting a serious option. My leg was truly that mangled, and it would be easier to cut it off. Our goal was to get me walking, hopefully without too much of a limp. I would never run again. I’d have to take stairs one at a time. I’d never play volleyball again.

That was a hard day and I mourned the loss volleyball, the sport that had been such a big part of my life and had given me so much, had given me. But I was determined and despite everything, I felt hopeful. I don’t know why, but I did. I took one day at a time.

About a month after the accident, I was able to sit up. After two months, I could be helped out of my bed into a chair. Three months and 10 surgeries later, I was moved from the confines of my bed to the confines of a wheelchair, and I was allowed to go home.

Until that point, I had been a mostly passive participant in my recovery. I had been at the mercy of the doctors’ schedules, the nurses’ routines, and the realities of my friends’ and family’s lives outside the hospital – neatly packaged into visiting hours. I ate when the food arrived, washed when I was told to, and slept when the lights went out for the night.

At that point, I didn’t know that everything had been easy. Physical pain sucks, but the next part was so much worse.

The Hardest Part was Learning How to Live Again After Everyone Else Went Home

It wasn’t until I left hospital that the real challenge started. Now that I was out, it was all on me. I had wanted to be home so badly. I thought I was prepared for things to be difficult but doable. I had no idea what awaited me.

My brain told me I was lucky to have my leg, and there was hope. Sometime soon I could get out of the wheelchair and start learning how to walk again. My shoulder was recovering well, and soon I’d also be able to use my arm. The rest of my cuts and bruises were healed.

I was lucky to have an amazing boss, who allowed me to work part-time from home around my rehab schedule. Most of all, I was extremely grateful for all the times things could have gone wrong and didn’t. I was so lucky, and I was so grateful.

But suddenly, for some reason I couldn’t wrap my mind around, that was when I became desperately lost and depressed.

Four months after the accident…

… after the worst of the pain had subsided

… after the joy and excitement of being discharged from hospital

… my world fell apart.

I curled up on the couch and cried. I truly mourned for the first time since the accident four months before. After a while, I moved from my wheelchair into my bed and continued to cry. That was where my husband found me when he came home from work that night, sobbing uncontrollably into a soaked pillow. That was where I stayed, and all I did, for four days. It hurt. It was an emotional pain that was so much worse than the physical pain had been.

On day five, I got out of bed, showered and went to my standing physio appointment, but the positive, driven athlete and career-woman in me was broken. Gone. I felt flat and empty. I just really didn’t care anymore. I went through the motions of living, but I felt lost and empty. I went from feeling the most gut-wrenching emotional pain imaginable to feeling nothing at all.

After some time, I found the words to express that I felt lost. It was a Aha! moment. But then people would ask, “Well, what do you want to do?” And that just compounded the problem, because for the first time in my life, I just didn’t know what I wanted. I remember thinking, I know I need to get up and put my big girl pants on and move forward, but how do I do that when I don’t know what I want? So, I did nothing.

Next came the guilt. I was lucky. I had said as much multiple times in my recovery. I was also grateful. So grateful to the team of doctors and health professionals who had saved my life and my leg, to my family and friends who had rallied around me and continued to help me to recover. I was lucky and grateful, really I was, and I felt horrible for feeling horrible and being so selfish.

With hindsight, what I had failed to understand is that the fight to survive and keep my leg had given my life meaning. The hospital environment had given me structure and purpose. And even though being discharged from hospital was a monumental achievement and happy day, I was not prepared for the transition from being sick to being just another everyday person on this planet.

Being healthy and normal was what I wanted so badly, yet once I had left the hospital and the structure and support of my army of health professionals, my life lost purpose. And even though I had been discharged from hospital, I felt far from normal. I still couldn’t walk or stand, and I couldn’t use my right arm. I was still dealing with pain, which had changed from a constant deep overwhelming pain to the shooting pain that comes with nerve regeneration.

But time goes on.

I was mostly stuck at home, but three times a week, I went to physio. I worked from home for a few hours in the afternoon. I had 2 more surgeries. Friends and family would occasionally visit. Six months after the accident, I took my first steps. I slept. A lot. Life was happening, that was the most I could say about it.

Finding Happiness

One day, a good friend called me and begged me to help him establish a competitive volleyball program for Sydney’s LGBTIQ Volleyball Club. He wanted to grow the club by offering competitive opportunities to play volleyball, not only social participation, but they desperately needed a coach. He said he would drive me to and from trainings and look after me at competitions. He had it all planned out, so I didn’t have any excuses. I reluctantly agreed, not having the strength to look my friend in the eye and say no, even though that’s all I really wanted to say.

A few weeks later, he rolled me and my wheelchair into the gym for tryouts, and I prepared myself for the looks of confusion and doubt from the adult men in the gym.

I couldn’t have known at the time that these fabulous, dramatic, caring men would save me. Because they might not know it, but they gave me back my identity, my community and a purpose. They gave me back some meaning. And slowly, I began to heal. To move on.

My Next Chapter

If you’re still with me this far down the page, thanks for sticking with this long story! I am happy to say that things have gotten a lot better since coming out of that very dark place.

I have set some pretty aggressive rehab goals, and am smashing all expectations. Last year, I hiked to Machu Picchu and despite what the doctors said, I have started playing volleyball again.

Since my accident, I have also become passionate about mental health and have launched this site and our podcast, which aim to raise awareness of the impacts of change on our mental health, build understanding of how we can be more resilient to change, and ultimately how to find sustained happiness.

Finally, I am also researching and writing a book to better understand how people cope with major life changes, focusing on why some people are really good at dealing with whatever life throws at them, while others struggle. If you or someone you know have recently been through a major life change and would like to contribute to this important work via a short interview, please reach out.

Thank you for reading my story,

Marie

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If you want to see more, watch my 5-minute story on YouTube below.