Two years, a walker, a cane, and a wheelchair later...

Well hello there world. It's been a while :) I know some of you read my last post, which I wrote over a year ago and then awkwardly never looked back at. (Sorry about that by the way!) It's probably weird that I made this whole blog, wrote one post and then basically just said peace out world, it's been a good run!

But honestly, I know more than anything that in my heart it was God telling me to put the pen down (or the laptop in this case.. #twentyfirstcentury) because I just wasn't ready.

And I'll be honest with you, as I look back on the place I was in my walk with Jesus (if you could even call it that at the time...more like my standstill with Jesus), I've come to realise that I was still 1000% seeing life through the lens of all the physical, emotional, and spiritual pain that was consuming me on the daily and eating me alive...I was viewing my life through the lens of my circumstance. (Warning: I get majorly raw and real here. It might sound depressing at first, but I promise if you keep reading it gets oh so much better...)

Anyways, my days of rehabilitation were lengthy and lonely, day in and day out with no end in sight. And because of this, every day I saw life through the monotonous blur of my tears (which were actually a daily occurrence..true story!), so caught up in the world and everything that I was missing out on. So caught up in the physical pain, trying to gain muscle again and waiting for the bones to heal. Learning to walk again, and shower again, and clothe myself again... Every day strapping my good old back brace on and begging God to pull me out of bed and just live my life for me because I was genuinely too exhausted to do life myself.

Exhausted with hopping on one foot pushing the same walker across the gym of the inpatient rehab facility. Exhausted with feeling nauseous forty times a day from being given every single pain med in the hospital on the daily. Exhausted with the pain of feeling like my whole life was on hold, and the frightening uncertainty of what my life would look like later on in the completely unknown future ahead of me...

The hopelessness of the invisible disability left from the bruise on my spinal cord (which has not healed as of yet, for those of you who know what I'm talking about. Keep praying though! #Godgrowsnerves). It's changed my life forever, even if no one but Jesus knows I'm going through it at all.

And then there was the loneliness...I can't ever even begin to describe it. All I remember is that it felt like a razor that cut through my heart almost every single day. And I'll never forget that.

Basically the accident had left me separated me from all my friends around the world, and from the possibly of quite literally having any friends at all at the time. I couldn't go out and meet anyone because I was too injured to be in school or have a job, and this was particularly hard for me because I always had a severe past of depending on friends to be my god and validate my identity, which would continuously leave me feeling worthless.. And as the physical pain began to subside as the days went on, it became more difficult for me to grapple with the growing emotional pain that began to consume me as the pain meds wore off and I was able to think more clearly throughout the day.

So the more I focused on this loneliness, this sense that no one in the world could be there for me in my pain, the more bitter I became, avoiding God at all costs and ignoring Him even though I knew He was there, simply because I was so angry and confused at how He could ever allow something like this to happen to me in the first place.

And the part that truly breaks my heart is that I knew God had just saved me from paralysis after being told by the doctor that the severity of my injuries shouldn't have even left me with the ability to ever walk again... And yet, I was still so incredibly angry at Him simply because He was the easiest for me to blame.

The crazy thing too is that this attitude I held, so selfish and full of all the bitterness that welled up inside of me, was actually making me feel even MORE lonely, little did I know! Feeling so angry at God and so focused on not being able to have friends at the time, I just didn't see God as my Healer, my Comforter, or even my closest friend yet, and I know that's why He had to get me to a place where I genuinely had no friend at all to turn to...except Him.

I know you're probably thinking how depressing this all sounds, and I realise that being real about how hard it was will have to make it sound that way at first. But there's a reason all of this was so difficult at the time, and it's because at this point in my relationship with Christ, I was still so focused on...wait for it...myself. And this was stealing my joy, instilling fear and despair within me, and making me believe the lie that God didn't care about my pain or understand my struggle. When in reality, it was all just the complete opposite!

I can't sit here and lie to you about the severity of my injury, both physically as well as emotionally. I can't say that what I went through wasn't hard. That it wasn't so impossible I almost didn't want to exist. Telling you that it was easy in any way at all for the tiny little nineteen year old that I was to go through all of this, would be an absolute, flat out lie! And I just can't hide behind the facade of making everyone around me think that it "wasn't a big deal", because it was and it definitely still is. If  I told you it had been easy, then there wouldn't have been a need in the first place for God to step in and perform His masterful miracle makeover in my life like He so incredibly did.

But what I can honestly tell you from the bottom of my heart, is that there is absolutely nothing
about what happened to me, what I've been through and how my soul has been molded into who I'm meant to be, that I could EVER regret coming out of this healing process. I wouldn't want to do it again, but I can honestly say that this injury was one of the best things that ever happened to me, and I couldn't be more thankful for it.

Because through it all, God has revealed who He is, how INCREDIBLE He is, and just how BIG He is, in the most mind-blowing way possible...He's shaped me through it, expanded my soul through it, and given me the exceptionally radical, Christ-like ability and capacity to feel the pain of others and to love on them through it. It was exactly what I needed...coming to a place where I simply had to take Jesus's hand every single morning just to get out of bed and take one more step in His direction. It was the surgery my soul needed... "soul surgery", if you will.

I honestly couldn't ask for anything more than this. To look more like Jesus, my heart and soul continuously being molded into who I'm meant to be, refined like gold after walking through the fire. To experience God's comfort literally daily even now with the awful after-effects of my nerve injuries, growing closer and closer to Him in the process, hungry for more of Him because He's the only One who truly KNOWS me straight to my core. And for me to now know what it's like to have a disability, so that I can literally understand the pain of the disabled and what they go through! It's incredible and I'm just so unworthy of it.

Jesus suffered more than anyone will ever have to suffer, and because of this, He KNEW what I was going through and the pain I felt. And He knew just what I needed to empty me of myself and fill me up with more of Him so that I could finally experience true joy in this life. I needed to be at my weakest, stripped of everything I'd placed my identity and trust in at the time so that He could be my ultimate strength and step right in like the miracle worker He truly is to redeem my brokenness beyond anything my wildest dreams could ever comprehend. I needed to be broken, so that He could piece me back together, masterfully crafting my heart and soul into who I'm truly made to be, so that no one could ever look at my life and doubt that there is a GOD, and He is so incredibly GOOD!

He allowed this injury to happen to me for His beautiful, perfect reasons, and He has carried me and sustained me through it all. His strength, His power, His all-consuming, glorious beauty has literally SHONE through my weakness, and I wouldn't have it any other way... for now I've finally come to a place where I can confidently say with all my heart that when I am weak, THEN I am strong because of Christ within me and HIS perfect strength.

You see at the time, I had absolutely no idea whatsoever that there was SO much beauty in the brokenness. There was a hope and a future amidst the despair because of my position in Christ and my access to the Father. I had a Saviour right there in front of me, His heart BREAKING for me, just waiting for the moment I could take one teeny tiny step in His direction so He could take forty BILLION steps in mine, wrap His arms around me and finally take the burden from me that I was so desperately trying to carry on my own. To tell me that He was with me from the beginning. He was with me on that ski hill. He was with me in the ambulance, in critical care, in my wheelchair. He was with me as I laid in the hospital bed crying in pain because my spinal cord was entirely disconnected, each vertebrae being pushed and pulled back into alignment by three blankets underneath my back....

He was always there amidst my tears. He felt every single bit of the pain that I endured. He counted every single tear I shed.

And as those tears fell, all I needed to do was simply wipe them away and finally clean off the lens that I was looking at my life through. I needed a MAJOR shift in my "understanding" of the goodness of God.

Actually, I needed to understand in the first place that He is good, PERIOD. But boy did I so not believe that at the time...I would be lying if I said I believed in even just a pinprick of His goodness. And luckily we've come a very long way since then. Before this spinal cord injury, my soul was saved, but I was definitely NOT walking with the One who saved it. My understanding of who He is and just how BIG He is was so limited, I never wanted to let Him lead me because I had absolutely no idea of just how much He loves me...

But maybe I should go back and describe what happened to me, how my life has evolved up until this point and how my soul was transformed first before I go into anything else. It's been literally a million years since I last wrote on this ancient blog...this thing is practically a fossil by now. I realise it would make zero sense at all to talk about the beautiful perspective I've gained in life through experiencing this injury if I didn't provide you first with an overview of my story, starting from the very beginning.

And my sole prayer throughout the entire writing of this blog is that He would be MAGNIFIED through it. That you who are reading this (whoever you are...if anyone is! Ahah!) would see and understand just how incredible, how beautiful, how all-knowing, all-loving, and crazy radical...mysteriously creative, endlessly pursuing, beautifully compassionate, and just ultimately AWESOME our God really is.

I am nothing, but He is everything.

My story, my struggles, my weaknesses and strengths...everything I've become through all of this is through Christ and Christ alone.

I pray with all my heart, all my mind and all my soul that as you read my story and hear what's on my heart, you would just be overwhelmed with the absolute incredibleness of our God. And I also pray that God will give me the grace and the strength to let my guard down, to be as transparent as I can possibly be, for the first time ever since my accident...

This is a HUGE step for me in the recovery process...it's something I've been learning to do all the way up until literally now, and God has been so graciously patient with me throughout the process of it all...slowly teaching me that it's okay to be embarrassed. It's okay not to know how to describe the pain, the awkwardness of my nerve injuries, and to learn to talk about all the amazing things that God is doing through them. To be truly vulnerable and to lay down the walls I've built up inside of me, hiding my deepest hurts and my most penetrating scars out of pure fear...the fear of others thinking I simply want attention by talking about how difficult the accident was or how life changing my disability is from the damaged nerves.

This injury has affected me in a thousand more ways than one, but I believe it's finally time for me to open up about it - the good, the bad, AND the ugly, and to just be real about my struggle, instead of trying to cover it up and pretend that everything is fine.

I believe it's finally time for me to strip off the bandages and let the wounds heal, so that the redemptive love of Jesus can truly shine through my testimony, and God will be glorified through it all like He so truly deserves.

"When you give your pain to God, He heals you and refills your heart with His purpose. 

You lay down your fear, and He fills your heart with faith. 

Pour out the pain in your heart to God, and He refills you with Himself...

...And there is truly no greater joy than this."

* This is an excerpt from my nerve journal, which I would write in daily just to be able to look back on where I was each day in my recovery process. 

It's so funny to see how excited I got over something that was such a big deal for me at the time...

Even just being able to get from my bed to the walker was such a huge thing to overcome, and the moment I was finally able to lift my right leg up even just a small amount was truly a gift from God!

~ Isaiah 40:31 ~

And So It Begins..

My life was as perfect as I could possibly make it.

I was, according to my dad, a "nutrition and exercise Nazi" (thanks dad ;) who refused to touch anything that didn't consist of fruits, vegetables or protein. Every day after dinner I ran six and half miles on the treadmill in the gym, then saved an extra half hour for weights and sit-ups. Yeah, I guess you could say I was a bit over the top...just a bit. I was 126 pounds, 100% muscle, physically strong in every possible way you could imagine...and yet one day in my seemingly "perfect" life that I had attempted to control completely, I found myself waking up from a concussion with my spine being held together on a board, too in shock to feel the pain- yet.

I think it would be useful to note that waking up from an accident with four random strangers holding your body together on a cold hard wooden board with a blanket over everything but your toes isn't exactly an ideal situation to assume you can even move at all. I began to beg-mutter "Am I paralyzed? Am I paralyzed?" which probably sounded a lot quieter in the ambulance than it did to me. Nobody would answer, so I gave up and started shifting every single gear in my brain to prepare to live my life paralyzed. Why else would nobody answer me when I asked? I felt a prickly wave of fear shower itself through my innards, and started rambling off cries for help to God in my head.

Please be with me. I can't live this life without your help. Please give me the peace to accept that I'm paralyzed. Please, God! 

I swear I had never felt so desperately hopeless in my entire life. My whole entire body began to reevaluate how to live, and I felt like I had reached the ultimate rock bottom, preparing to live my life paralyzed from there on out. I considered that moment what I like to call a "Gethsemone moment" (totally coined that term by the way :D I mean when Jesus was in the garden of Gethsemone, He cried out to the Lord to spare Him from His purpose the Lord gave Him to fulfill here on earth. All His friends abandoned Him, asleep in the garden even when Jesus specifically told them to stay awake. His family wasn't with Him. His own race, the Jews despised His guts and planned to kill Him. If that isn't the most despairing, exasperating situation then I don't know what is. But the reason I call moments like that "Gethsemone moments" is because when Jesus cried out to the Lord in sorrow, He told the Lord "Not my will be done, but yours". It was a moment where He was on His knees, at complete rock bottom, knowing His purpose but begging not to have to endure it. And then the Lord gave Him the peace to accept it. On that board, believing I would be paralyzed for the rest of my life, I felt like I had hit one of the lowest points of my entire existence. And that's why I began to silently beg the Lord for the peace to accept that this must have been what the Lord planned for my life here on earth...or so I thought.

But amidst all the crazy and wild feelings that seemed to go explosively ballistic throughout my quivering body, I instantly felt a sense of tranquil serenity. It wasn't that I heard God's voice whisper into my ear or anything. That's not how it worked. I just remember feeling a beautifully calming voice in my heart telling me to simply Be still. 

All of a sudden, a short stocky man with glasses and a thick accent from somewhere in Eastern Europe asked "Can you move your toes? Listen to me. Can you try to move your feet? Focus on where I'm touching."

He gently pressed the balls of my feet, then let go. I felt his cold hands on my cold feet, trying to sense where the feeling was coming from, and after closing my eyes in concentration.....I began to wiggle my feet back and forth. I can't really try to explain the feeling I had when I moved my feet on that board in the ambulance, but it was probably the most incredible feeling I've ever felt in my entire life. I could feel the Holy Spirit pulsating through my inner being, and I swear I could feel every organ in my body smiling and laughing and crying, all out of thanks to the Lord. I may have even shed a few tears, but how could I know?

I don't remember much else about that ambulance ride except that there were lots of people surrounding me on the floor of the vehicle, holding my spine together on the board all the way to the hospital. I don't even remember feeling any pain yet from my injury, that's how badly my body was in shock from the trauma! Which freaks me out now that I think about it..I always knew the human body went into shock when it experiences a traumatic accident, but this was the first time I had ever experienced it myself...and it was on a whole new level of anything I'd ever imagined about traumas.

We finally reached a hospital in Maryland where there were surgeons ranked fourth in the entire country. In the emergency room, I laid on the board with a blanket covering me and they placed the board on the stretcher with three different square blankets laid in a row so that once I was laying on them the nurses could pull different sections of my spine in order to be sure that it was always aligned. The transfer was not comfortable, let me tell you....that's one thing I've developed a threshold for, besides the pain. Feeling UNCOMFORTABLE. I've learned not to expect to be able to feel comfortable anywhere I sit or lay unless I really get lucky. But usually I'm not. Not with an injury like mine...

I was wheeled to the emergency room, still unable to feel any pain anywhere in my body out of shock. My coworkers stayed with me in the room, praying over me unceasingly as we waited for my surgeon to come in. I still had no idea what was wrong with me...all I knew was that I had begun to feel fire all over my body. It was shooting down my spine and spidering into the backs and front of both my legs... I wanted to cry out in shock, but random nurses had already entered the room on cue, poking holes in both my arms and hooking me up to countless IV stands that began to pump several intense, heavy narcotic fluids into my body that eventually calmed the pain to a manageable degree.

When my surgeon came, the first thing I instantly asked was "Will I ever be able to run again?" Running had become such a huge part of me. It was the most amazing way for me to let my energy out, and I'd taken up running about six and a half miles a day last semester in college. I ran every single day of my second semester off, and took my training seriously. Without running, I had no idea what I was going to do with myself. The thought of losing something so close to my heart literally made me want to cry.

Lucky for me, Doctor Karuso reassured me that eventually I would be running again. BUT (of course these reassurances are always conditional...) it would take time. He told me I would be okay, and that he was going to do everything he could to make sure I'd be healthy and happy again. But TIME was going to become my biggest battle yet. And that it would take a full year for a healthy recovery, but I was lucky to be so young and healthy when this happened. Youth was on my side, and I was lucky for that.

When my parents finally got to the hospital which was a two hour drive from our apartment in DC, I literally started crying the moment they walked in. I can't even explain why....I just broke down. There's something comforting about having your parents with you after almost dying on a ski slope.

But the moment lasted only for a bit before my surgeon began describing the details of my injury after evaluating some of the X-rays that had been done in the emergency room....and I wanted to break down and cry all over again, not out of thankfulness that my parents had made it all the way to Maryland while I lay in the emergency room with an out of tact spine, but because I finally knew what had happened to my body. And it made whatever functioning organs that existed in my body want to churn inside and out.

This is right after the surgery, my first time transferring from the bed to the chair! Sounds super unimportant, I know. But it was a huge jump for me ;)