You Are Awesome!

Tragedy To Transformation “Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.” Aristotle Did you know that you are already Awesome? You do, that is Awesome, thanks for buying my book anyway. It helps to pay the bills. No you didn’t know that you were Awesome? Well let’s get to work then. Well before that let me start by telling you a bit of a story. I would like you to imagine being in your early 20’s. It is the end of summer and you are about to return to university. You and one of your best friends decided to go on a great road trip from where you live in Ontario Canada all the way to Tofino in British Columbia (the other side of Canada); an ambitious road trip travelling about 9000km for the return journey. 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 and only about an 8 hour drive from home; you and your friend have an unopened case of beer in the back and are looking forward to seeing your mutual friends and sharing your experiences with them when you arrive. Then you see a car coming towards you as it starts to spin into your lane. Everything suddenly seems to slow down. You see a drop off to one side of the car and you see a rock wall on the other. You swear out loud, all the while your foot is on the brake. Then SMASH BANG your whole world changes. Everything goes dark and blank and then you wake up in a daze and your world and life is impacted forever. You have been in a massive car accident. Your right knee is mangled and your right thighbone is at an unnatural angle. There is glass everywhere. The steering wheel is much closer to you and your friend appears to be cut and wide-eyed as well. You then notice many people around the car and 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 has smashed into you has a blanket draped over the driver’s side and you know that the person that was in that car must be dead, although no one assisting us would say so. You have no sense of time except the timelessness that occurs with the pain and horror of looking at your leg and knee, apparently it takes them maybe close to an hour to get you out of the car and 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 and that you have been in surgery for a full day. You feel excruciating pain. You feel anxious again and do not want to be where you are but no one seems to be listening to you. After a while your parents are there and you still do not fully understand what is happening to you. After a few hours of pain and on again off again sleep you blank out again. The next thing you know it is a full three weeks later and you are being told that you will be coming off of life support because you are getting better. You then also find out that you had to be flown to yet another hospital in Toronto where they could provide care and treatment for you that the previous one could not provide. Your parents and brother are there looking relieved and concerned and the same time. You are then informed that you have been lucky to survive, that you had a fat embolism in your lungs and they stopped working completely, 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. You find out that you were on a life support for a full three weeks. Apparently when you were on life support you were communicating with people but you have absolutely no memories of this at all or of the many loving and concerned visitors that 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 of life support you get moved to another hospital again and then yet another after that, making it five hospitals that you have been to since being in the car accident. You then have to learn how to walk again as your muscles that have been damaged have also become a bit atrophied. After all this you need to learn to confront a new found 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 and also from people that you were not necessarily close to previously. 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 part of my story. I was in a car accident where a driver that had a couple of drinks hit a car I was driving and this accident almost took my life and created a personal trauma for myself and for my good friend while also causing much distress for my family and circles of friends. This was also one of the biggest turning points in my life, one that created a new focus for me. Some of these changes were quick and others took me a number of years to learn, absorb and appreciate. In some ways I am still learning the lessons of that past experience. In fact I find I am often learning new lessons from not just this experience but from many of my life experiences, both the ones that I have labeled as good and the ones I have labeled 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. Then 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 bad and 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 and attention, which I did for many years, but rather in a way that 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 that I am grateful for that has helped me to grow and become the person who I am today.