Tell me about your life and who you were before the accident.
I was 32.
I'd spent all of my twenties living in London
traveling around Europe. I'd studied wine and managed restaurants.
Come back to New Zealand and opened a restaurant with my brother.
It was after work and I was rushing up the steps and
I tripped on the very top step, sort of fell out of my shoe and just went flying back
to the landing.
I knew straight away something was wrong like I just got this cold rush all through my body
What was life like in the days, weeks after?
Well it was a big shock
and it was scary because we didn't know
We didn't know what was happening. I knew that I couldn't move my legs and
if I closed my eyes in the hospital bed I didn't really know where my legs were
and I remember like the first time somebody pushed a wheelchair into my hospital room and
I thought "oh my god, that's for me."
I remember feeling grateful in a weird kind of way that I
still had my brain, my brain was still functioning perfectly,
I'd always thought you know whatever happens I can still...
I can still use my brain.
Is there any way this could have been prevented?
Yeah, there's lots of ways it could have been prevented.
If only you weren't always
rushing everywhere and you just, you know, took your time
and were a bit more mindful about what you're doing, like this wouldn't have happened
But there were other things as well.
The staircase where I lived, we used to refer to it as a staircase of death.
There were so many things wrong with this stair case and
one of the main things was that the hand railing
was really wide, too wide to
grab and I remember grabbing for the handrail and my,
you know, and just my hand just sliding down it because you couldn't grab the handrail.
There, was no lighting. Like, just everything,
everything about it was wrong basically.
How did you process what happened mentally?
A lot of people think "that must have been so hard to come to terms with" but there's so much you learn
slowly over a period of time that you just
work out-- I mean there's so much more to being paralysed than not just being able to walk. It affects
everything. It affects how you regulate your body temperature, it affects how you go to the toilet.
There was like, a lot of pain to deal with so each day
you sort of mentally had to come to terms with something else.
Every now and then the whole thing would hit you and think
"oh my god, this is--
You know, when I started to realise it was permanent and you'd get this kind of big wave of grief.
What helped with your recovery physically and mentally?
I sort of discovered that I had a
resilience that I never realised I had, and
if you'd asked me before something like this happened,
I would have thought that I would have been a complete mess like crying every day but
I wasn't and I just, you know, surprised myself with it
being reasonably
mentally strong.
It's been a long time now since
this happened but I just-- I can't believe really the kind of life I've had compared to what I
thought and what even the people around me first thought
when I had my accident. I think it seemed like the
expectations of what I would go on to do and achieve
were really lowered once I was in the wheelchair.
But yeah I never would have thought that I would have been
working in a job that I love.
Yeah, it's completely different to what I thought. It's better than I ever could have imagined.
Thank you.