Some stories find you and change you.
This one did.
In today’s post, I’m honoured to share a deeply moving account of pain, survival, and unexpected grace. It's a story of resilience, recovery, and what it means to return from the edge with five scars and a breath.
Shared with permission and written in her own words:
"At the beginning of last year, I became fluent in the language of pain. I knew the routine by heart - walk into the hospital, wince through registration, and recite my prescription like a nurse: Start with 40 milligrams of Nexium, top up with another 40 if the pain doesn’t retreat. I wasn’t a doctor, but I played one with practiced confidence. Until one day, the pain didn’t follow the script.
They gave me 80 milligrams of Nexium, then paracetamol. The pain remained, stubborn and screaming. Then came the opium. Relief arrived cloaked in a darkness so absolute it stole my sight. The pain retreated but not without a warning.
I finally surrendered myself to the hands of real doctors. The diagnosis: gallstones. Medication offered a reprieve, a fragile peace, until one night when pain came roaring back like a wounded animal. Vomiting, shaking, unable to stand, I was rushed to the hospital again. This time, it wasn’t a matter of pills. My gallbladder was inflamed, dangerously close to rupturing. Surgery was the only option.
I’ve been in theatre before twice for C-sections, a couple of ear procedures. But this time was different. As they wheeled me in, a cold shadow settled over me. It wasn’t fear; it was a premonition. A whisper in my bones that this might not end well.
When I woke up, the lights above me were blinding. I was being wheeled, someone saying the surgery was a success. Then...chaos. I remember trying to speak. I can’t breathe. Alarms. Voices. Panic. Then nothing.
Flatline.
I opened my eyes in a room so white I thought I’d died. Heaven, maybe? Oh shit, I’m dead. I closed my eyes again, not ready to process the enormity of it.
The next time I woke up, I was in the High Dependency Unit. Not my private ward. A white oxygen mask covered my face. That’s when the psychiatrist explained: I had flatlined. My body had gone limp. For a moment, I had stopped existing.
Later, piecing together the missing minutes with my siblings, my sister told me what I missed. She saw the monitor stop. Saw the numbers freeze. Heard the silence that never means peace. They were pushed out of the room. My mother-in-law screamed outside, mourning me before the doctors finished fighting. My husband, dazed, paced the corridor, his world suddenly reduced to two people our one-year-old daughter and the woman he wasn’t sure he’d ever see alive again.
My sister had to call my mother. But fear is an editor. She hung up and chose to text. “She’s in ICU.” That was enough. My mom, mid-sip of soda, spilled it all over herself. Her mouth had gone dry. She called my dad and, in the strange poetry of panic, told him, “Continue drinking with your friends. Your daughter is in ICU.”
Everyone says death is peaceful. Maybe. But dying? Dying is a battle. Each breath becomes a negotiation with a body that wants to quit. There is no poetry in suffocation. The peace comes not in the dying, but in the giving up when the pain stops and you no longer fight for breath.
I carry five scars now. Some small, some thick. The one next to my heart aches in its own language, it whispers the price of being brought back. Maybe a rib cracked during resuscitation. Maybe a reminder.
But the real mark is invisible.
Since then, I’ve learned to love on purpose. Not softly, not later, now. Because sometimes, it’s light off. No warning. No final line.
When I thought I was in heaven, I didn’t think about myself. I thought about my daughter. I thought about her hair how I always looked forward to doing it, how no one else would do it the way I did. That’s what love does: it pulls you back. Even from the edge.
That’s the thing about facing death: it strips everything down to truth.
Now, I choose to live with intention. I wake up with gratitude stitched into my skin. I laugh louder. Hug longer. And every time I brush my daughter’s hair, I remind myself:
I could have been a memory.
But instead, I’m here.
Living. Loving. Breathing.
On purpose. "
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