6 years and still feels like yesterday…..

As I sit down to write this, I truly can’t believe that it has been six years to the day since I was admitted to the ICU. Six years since I so very nearly died. It often feels like yesterday, yet here we are—six years later!

Every year I take time to reflect. No matter how many years go by, this will always be my time for reflection. I still struggle to comprehend what happened. It’s said that things get better with time, but for me, things seem to be getting worse! Is this normal? Who knows…

Every time I volunteer, I walk down the same corridors that I would’ve been taken down 6 years ago – rushed to scans, theatre and then taken to ICU. In my head it must’ve been all very dramatic: everyone running me along corridors like something out of a hospital drama…..but I suspect it wasn’t! However, it struck me today that every time I volunteer, I am facing my trauma…. head-on. A fellow ICU ‘escapee’, nurse and lovely friend once told me this from their therapist: ‘We are working in the very environment that triggers us’. How true!

There is no escaping the triggers – sounds, smells, memories….. they all come flooding back every time I volunteer, but I’ve learnt how to live with them. Occasionally something new will catch me out, but now it’s more out of curiosity than fear. I have a chuckle with my PTSD gremlin mischievously sitting on my shoulder and off we go once more.

I am incredibly passionate about my volunteering role. It’s a pure privilege to support some of our most vulnerable patients and to have the knowledge and experience of my own journey to help them in the way only I can. I recently saw a quote that resonated with me: ‘There’s a stranger out there who still thinks of you because you were kind to them when they really needed it’ (https://www.instagram.com/tinybuddhaofficial/). I am that stranger, and I hope, without sounding arrogant, that the people I help might also become that stranger……

Those who helped me will never know how much their kindness meant to me. There are so many strangers I will never be able to thank as I don’t know their names. So many people helped me through the toughest 3 months of my life, the months that followed and the hospital stays since. To them, they are doing a job…….to me, they will forever be on the list of people I am indebted to.

.Here’s to being alive and being able to walk down the corridors for another year!