My Challenge

When I was 24 years old, a year after I graduated with a Social Sciences Degree ,I had a fluke accident on the horse I had rescued and fell on my head ( my chin strap had broken the previous week and I had not gotten around to buying a new hat) My mare collapsed ( I think perhaps stung by a wasp on her sensitive bits because she was fine afterwards) I , however, took a sharp exit over her hindquarters, hat falling off,leaving my skull to connect directly with the road. I fractured my skull and had a brain hemorrhage This was critical and if it hadn’t been for the nurse who was traveling behind me in her car I would either have died, or been permanently brain- damaged.What divine intervention! It still makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up just talking about it. The nurse stopped; turned my head over to the right so that the blood would drain away. The result of this near- fatal accident was that I sustained a head injury and damaged the parts of my brain responsible for speech and coordination. To begin with I found it hard to walk and get dressed, but that soon returned; the speech took longer – five years in fact to completely recover and even then there were still words that I fluffed up.

I had to re learn to read, spell and enunciate and get back to work as soon as I could because the money was running out and I still had a horse to keep and they just eat money!

After I got over feeling very very grateful for being alive ( coincidentally a friend died of head injuries within a month of my accident; when he hit his head on a tree when he fell off his motorbike , but unlike me there was no guardian angel to help him) The challenge for me was to not get despondent about the time it would take for me to recover.

I started to read out loud; I laughed at my mistakes; I focussed on what I could do and not what I couldn’t; I took comfort in the kindness of friends and strangers; I continued to love my horse, after all an accident is just that, an accident. When struggling with some simple spelling I took comfort in reading a Pooh Bear story where Pooh goes to see the Wise Old Owl because he couldn’t spell Tuesday and he later came to the conclusion that it’s sometimes not important to know how to spell Tuesday!

So what did this experience teach me?

This recovery period taught me to have patience, to appreciate the small achievements I made and to take one slow step at at a time. Up until that point in my life I had had an active political conscious and held beliefs about change being made through a collection of people the expression ” If you cannot change the world change yourself ” came to mind and no amount of political action was going to help me now!I realised that change came on an individual basis and that’s what I needed to do. I never gave up on the belief that one day my brain would heal and be fully functioning again. It taught me humility, that being an clever didn’t really matter that much. I learnt the value of peace and quiet and to value just being.

What did it teach me about others? That some people had more patience that others and that some people could be cruel ( well,that was my interpretation at the time, if they took the mickey out of me for not being able to speak properly)

This challenge I think made me a better person, it made me question my value base and set new ones. It made me slow down and look at the world around me. It made me observe more and talk less.

This experience has enabled me to help others through recovery and given me a faith that we can all heal eventually. My experience will benefit my past and future clients to break what ever their challenge is into small, doing steps . It has given me and enduring trust that the universe looks after us.