Tragedy to Transformation

Knowing others is intelligence;
Knowing yourself is true wisdom.
— Lao-tzu

Did you know that you are already awesome?

How is that? I know that you are awesome because you bought my book! Thank you; this helps to pay the bills.

You didn't know that you were awesome? Well, let's get to work then. But before that, let me start by telling you a bit of a story.

I would like you to imagine yourself in the following scenario. You are in your early twenties. It is the end of summer, and you are about to return to university. You and one of your best friends decide to go on a great road trip from where you live (in Ontario, Canada) all the way to Tofino in British Columbia (on the other side of Canada). This is an ambitious road trip, totalling nearly nine thousand kilometres.

It is the end of this journey, and the two of you are returning home for the final few days of the last long weekend of summer. You are behind the wheel of the car with only about eight hours to go. You and your friend have an unopened case of beer in the back. You are both looking forward to seeing your mutual friends and sharing your experiences with them when you arrive.

Then you see it. A car is coming toward you, and it is spinning into your lane.

Everything suddenly seems to slow down. You see a drop-off to one side of the car and a rock wall on the other. You swear out loud; all the while your foot is on the brake. Then, with an enormous crash, your whole world changes.

Everything goes dark and blank.

You wake up in a daze and realise that your life has been forever impacted. You have been in a massive car accident. Your right knee is mangled. Your right thighbone is at an unnatural angle. There is glass everywhere. The steering wheel is much closer to you than it was before. Your friend appears to be cut and wide-eyed as well.

You then notice many people around the car. Soon after, the pain and anxiety start to set in. You look out of where the window used to be and see the car that smashed into you. You see a blanket draped over the driver's side, and you know the person who was in that car must be dead, although no one assisting you would say so. You have no sense of time except the timelessness that occurs with the agony and horror of looking at your leg and knee. Apparently it takes them close to an hour to get you out of the car, into the ambulance, and on the way to a hospital.

After being driven to one hospital and then flown to another because of the nature of your injuries, you come awake to discover that there are tubes attached to you. You learn that you have been in surgery for a full day. You feel excruciating pain and crushing anxiety. You do not want to be where you are, but no one seems to be listening to you.

After a while your parents arrive. You still do not fully understand what has happened to you. After a few hours of suffering and on-again/off-again sleep, you blank out again. The next thing you know, you come to in a haze. They tell you that you have been on life support for three full weeks, but they brought you out because you are getting better. You then find out you had to be flown to yet another hospital in Toronto, one that provides care and treatment for you that the previous hospital could not provide. Your parents and brother are there with you, and you see they are simultaneously relieved and concerned for you.

You are then informed that you are lucky to have survived and that you had a fat embolism in your lungs that caused them to stop working completely. You learn that your parents, brother, and best friend were told at one point that you would not make it through the night. In other words, they were told to prepare for your death.

When you were on life support, you were apparently communicating with people, but you have absolutely no memories of this at all. You don't remember the many loving and concerned visitors who saw you while you were in intensive care. All you can remember are visions or hallucinations that are still vivid to you to this very day. After being taken off life support, you are moved to yet another hospital and yet another after that, making it five hospitals that you have been to since the car accident.

You then have to learn how to walk again. Your muscles have been damaged and have become a bit atrophied. After all this, you need to learn to confront a newfound fear of cars and driving.

You also need to learn how to take in and accept an outpouring of love and care from everyone around you, as well as from people you were not necessarily close to before your accident. And all the while, you are trying to deal with a post-traumatic stress disorder brought on by your experiences. Then you undergo a few more surgeries on your knee as the years go by.

This is my story. I was in a car accident where a driver who had a couple of drinks hit the car I was driving. This accident almost took my life. It also created a personal trauma for myself and for my good friend and caused much distress for my family and circles of friends.

This was also one of the biggest turning points in my life, and it created a new focus for me. Some of these changes were quick; others took me a number of years to learn, absorb, and appreciate. In some ways, I am still learning the lessons of that experience. In fact, I find I am often learning new lessons from not just the accident but from many of my other life changes as well, both the ones I have labelled as good and the ones I have labelled as bad.

These experiences have taught me to learn how to accept myself for who I am. I have also learned a great deal about what love is. Eventually, I also discovered how awesome and extraordinary my life really is. Finally, I discovered that there is a fire burning in me that compels me to share my story and what I have learned with you.

I can also see that as horrible as this experience sounds (and it was pretty horrible at the time, I can tell you), it has also become an awesome experience for me. Not in the way of getting attention by bragging about it to gain sympathy (something I did for many years) but, rather, in that it allows me to see the beauty in my life and all of life, for that matter. I can say in full confidence that the car accident that almost took my life has become an awesome experience for which I am grateful. It has helped me to grow and become the person I am today.

More of My Story

As it is with each of us, my life experiences have informed who I am. They have also contributed to the insights I will be sharing with you. Like you, I have had my ups and downs, my joys and grief, and my happiness and frustrations. Like you, I have had an awesome life, although it took me a long time to realise that. To be truthful, I still...