Being busy is my thing. It has been for years, and even though everyone kept telling me to slow down, I refused. Running from deadline to deadline, I always promised my family that as soon as I got through this next month I’d slow down. I never did and in the end it turns out that the universe decided to do it for me. It started out as a normal Friday night in early January 2025. I took a trip to the shop, grabbed what I needed, which of course turned out to be more than I’d planned, paid, and was walking to my car when I fell.
Well, I didn’t fall, I tripped on a misplaced empty pallet, and while trying to catch myself with three heavy shopping bags, fell awkwardly on to my tailbone. At that moment my life changed. I broke my back.
The pain was out of this world, I couldn’t move. My husband and an ambulance were called, and I lay on the floor in the rain crying while my daughter tried to comfort me. I was given pain injections and anaesthetic vapour, but they didn’t dim a thing.
MEDICATION
My husband held my hand all the way to the hospital in the ambulance, I was sobbing uncontrollably and the pain of childbirth felt like it would have been heaven. Once there I laid flat on my back in an emergency ward for three days as I waited for a bed. I was still in the clothes I was wearing when I had the accident. I didn’t eat or drink during this time, got no sponge bath and received minimal care because it was assumed by everyone I would be transferred to a ward at any time.
At least the drugs were strong. Luckily I don’t remember much of this time, the pain medication blurred a lot, but I do remember my husband having heated discussions behind the curtain with doctors about moving me out of the emergency ward. Due to shock, my bladder had stopped working and I was catheterised. The nurses were run off their feet, the air-con had broken down, and the little fan my family had brought in offered minimal relief from the stifling heat.
To make matters worse, we were supposed to be going on a two-month trip to London to move my daughter over there just five days later. The trip was cancelled and my daughter delayed her move to stay with me.
PAIN IS LONELY
The fear on my kids’ faces as they sat by my bedside broke my heart. My wonderful staff were doing damage control, frantically cancelling my work schedule for the entire year. Life as I knew it had stopped dead. I kept thinking, “This can’t be real, it’s just a nightmare. When I wake up it will be over.” But of course it wasn’t. I had broken my L3 vertebrae, cracked L2 and L4, and suffered a 55% compaction on L2, L3 and L4. No mean feat for an accidental fall outside a shop.
For a usually very positive person I was in a world of “poor me”. I remember lying in that hospital bed after they kicked my family out each night, staring up at the ceiling with hot salty tears running into my ears.
Pain is lonely. Silent. An aching gnaw on sanity. Nobody can take it from you, the drugs appease it, of course, but along with that you lose your sense of self, in and out of a daze, sick to the stomach, numbed and cold. When you are in the depths of hell, it’s hard to imagine how you will ever climb out. Finally, I was transferred to one of four beds in a room.
There was a woman in her late 90s in the last days of her life, a man beside me who was blind and another elderly woman. I remember the exact moment when I was jolted out of my pity party for one.
STOIC AND BRAVE
It was late at night. The man in the bed beside me was crying and calling out for his deceased wife. The beautiful old woman who was in her very late 90s in the bed across from me had her granddaughters come to visit to say goodbye.
She was being transferred to her own room as she wasn’t expected to live for much longer, her time on our earth was running out. As they reminisced and laughed softly at stories about old times, I wept in silence. She wasn’t sad or scared, she was stoic and brave. They left and the old man beside me was finally given a sedative to sleep, and then it was just me and her, alone in the darkened room. I was trying to be discreet and wipe my eyes without her seeing and she looked over at me and said: “Don’t be sad for me dear. I had a wonderful life because that’s what I chose. Life is what you make it.”
I forced a smile and we talked a little more. When the nurses came to take her away, I knew it was the last time I was going to see her alive. I watched through tears as she was wheeled away and at that moment I decided: enough was enough. I wasn’t going to feel sorry for myself for a second longer.
Yes, I broke my back and life looked different now, but so what. Build a bridge and get over it. Nobody was coming to rescue me, I’d been lying here for a week waiting for a hero, but in this instance I needed to step up and be my own hero. I had to make the best of what I had.
For the first time since the accident I slept well. Not because my condition had changed… but because I knew I was going to be OK. I had decided that whatever the future held for me, I was going to make it through to the other side.
I was transferred to a rehabilitation hospital and the care I received was nothing short of incredible. My bladder took two weeks to start working again and, with my optimism in full swing, I started feeling a little stronger every day. I spent a month in hospital, and four months in bed at home. My husband, family and work family were beyond amazing. I shuffled around like a 99-year-old and I couldn’t sit in a chair for six months.
STRONGER
So I concentrated on the things I could control. I ate a low inflammation diet and sat in the sun every day, swam and focused on being optimistic. I did everything I physically could to try and heal my broken body. And then just as I was starting to recover and could get out of bed by lifting myself out on my elbow, I tore the rotator cuff in my shoulder… Are you kidding me?
But guess what? I survived and not just survived, I thrived. Gratitude is a wonderful thing and for anyone who is going through a dark time in their life I urge you to try and look for the silver linings because there are many.
In every corner of every dark room there is a spark of light. You just have to trust that you will find it. It’s been 10 months since my accident, I can move without pain… most days. I can work a few hours a day now, and the nonsense that I used to believe would bring me happiness is a distant memory.
I don’t need to slow down, I’m speeding up because if I’ve learnt anything it’s that I’m stronger than I think I am. I am 54 now, a mother-of-three, and I love working, I love being busy and I love the thrill of the chase, and more than anything, I love writing books. The best is yet to come. Health and happiness is worth fighting for, even if who you are fighting is yourself.
I’m quite sure that positivity heals way more people than medicine ever did. I sometimes think of that little old lady and I think she’s smiling down at me from heaven and she was right. Life is what you make it.
- T L Swan is a #1 Amazon bestselling author based in Sydney, Australia. Her latest series, The Miles High Club, consisting of five books, The Stopover, The Takeover, The Casanova, The Do-Over and Miles Ever After, is out in paperback, £8.99 each
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