five things that terrify me about coming home.

5 months ago I tripped on the first step of a flight of stairs and fell all the way down to the bottom. After being rushed to the hospital, I found out I had a compression fracture on my spine. A few weeks later I was sent to a rehab unit as my legs were showing signs of severe weakness, and it turns out my spinal fracture has likely caused my long standing disorder called Neurological Congenital Hypotonia to worsen, resulting in a loss of mobility.

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Now, 5 months later, I have completed my inpatient rehabilitation program and have stabilised at a point which is very different to how I was before my fall.

And, even after these five long months of getting used to this new way of functioning, I haven’t fully lived within this new restricted body. I’ve been confined in 4 walls with doctors, nurses, Physio’s, and OT’s buzzing around. I haven’t been left alone for more than an hour, and have become quite accustomed to the background noise of constant care. However, in a few days, this is all going to change quite abruptly — it’s my discharge date.

All of a sudden I’ll be plunged into silence. Not necessarily a noise related silence (I’ll be back with my pup and the melody of her French-bull dog snorts), but more of a lack of all the things that make hospital … well, hospital.

To be completely honest, I’m really scared. Normally when I’m feeling this way, my go-to technique is to plan. Planning is my hidden talent, I can plan anything minute by minute and generally it helps, but I’m finding right now it’s just adding more questions then it does to resolve my nerves — what if I fall and no one is there to help me up? What if I’m in bed and need the toilet but no one is there’s to get me out? I’ve been lucky enough to have never experienced this sense of body non-autonomy before, but at the same time I also feel extremely disadvantaged because I have no idea what I’m doing.

So, whilst my first self-help technique isn’t working, (and none of the techniques I’ve acquired in the last 10 years of therapy have stuck) I guess my only option is to talk to someone about how I’m feeling, and if you’re reading this, congrats! That person is you!

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So, here are my top 5 honest things that TERRIFY me about coming home. I know a lot of these things might be ‘taboo’ or I ‘shouldn’t say that’, but I’ve never been one to hide my true feelings (plus I can’t lie to save my life).

1. You’ve probably already guess it - I can’t plan for it! Sure, I’ve planned how I’m going to get home, when I’m going to go home, how I’m going to go home, but after that … POOF, nothing. I cannot seem to imagine my new body living at home. I mean, I still can’t believe I even injured myself this badly in the first place so I guess I kinda understand why this seems surreal.

2. What if I fall again? In the words of my doctor, I was 🤏 *this close* to permanent paralysis. Every single day since my fall those words have echoed in my head, and going home, back to the place of the fall, scares me.

3. Going home is one thing but going in public with my walker is another. When I see someone with a mobility aid in public do I think badly about them? No, but am I petrified that everyone will think badly of me? 100% yes. Another thing is apart from my disabled friends on Instagram and TikTok, I have never seen a young person in public, in Australia, with a walker.

4. Although I’ve made a lot of progress in hospital, there’s still a lot of medical testing to go before I 100% know for sure what the future of my mobility is. It’s a daunting and uneasy feeling living in a body where I don’t entirely know what’s going on.

5. I have lost a huge portion of this year to my injury and I feel so behind in life. All of my goals and dreams were put on hold. So, being in hospital is almost like a pass for not achieving anything, and now going home makes me feel like I have to try and ‘catch up’ on everything I’ve missed. I know success and working hard is not the purpose of life but now that I have a visible physical disability it feels like I have to prove myself even more.

Are some of these points a little too honest? Probably — but I don’t believe in hiding my inner thoughts and feelings just to be ‘polite’ or fit stereotypes. Becoming visibly disabled isn’t easy, but it’s something a large portion of the population deal with in silence. If I can help one person by making them feel less alone than exposing my vulnerabilities will be entirely worth it.

I’ll continue to update my journey on here, but if you want extra content, check out my Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest ❋

Love Always,
Britt x