I Survived a Life-Changing Accident. It Transformed My Relationship with My Home (and Myself)

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published Jan 31, 2025
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illustration of a woman comforting herself with her living room area in the background with get well soon cards, wilting flowers, and prescription bottles

It was a brisk but sunny day when I bounded down the stairs, lifted my suitcase with ease, and breezed out the door to board a plane for a press trip to the Kalahari Desert. I was blissfully unaware that the next time I set foot in my house, I’d be bloodied, bruised, and broken. 

It was a freak accident. A scenic, slow walk on horseback through the arid desert — over red mounds of sand, weaving between thorn bushes and rocks — was on the trip itinerary. I’m not a horseback rider, but I’ve been on plenty of horses. And as long as it remained a walk, it would be fine — and it was, until the moment it wasn’t.

My horse went renegade, galloping off, unresponsive to any yanking on the reins. I clung on as long as I could, before tumbling off at top speed. I wish I’d lost consciousness but I remember every second. The crunching. The pain. The way I wondered if I was dead, the screams that confirmed I wasn’t. They told me not to move for fear of a broken neck. 

Ambulance rides, air transfers, countless scans, and a surgery later, a clearer picture emerged. The actual damage included a collarbone that had shattered into several pieces, three broken ribs, and a hematoma near the bone in my hip and thigh so huge it rendered me unable to walk or bear weight. My back was a crossword puzzle of lacerations after I’d ripped through a thorn bush in the fall. Purple, green, and yellow bruises started blooming as the hours ticked on. Every doctor, nurse, and radiologist I encountered told me I was lucky to be alive. 

The hospital was hell. Everything hurt but sleep was nearly impossible among constant beeping, loud nursing staff, and another patient (80, recovering from a knee replacement) who liked to talk to herself while opening sugar packets. I wanted to go home. 

When I was reluctantly discharged, I could barely breathe from excitement. Or maybe it was the broken ribs. Everything at home was just how I’d left it and the sense of sameness was exactly what I needed when so much had changed for me — physically and emotionally. My husband, Chris, picked up my favorite takeout, a creamy butter chicken curry. But when we went to eat, my sense of relief soured. I was home, but I still needed him to cut up my food. I had to be lowered into a chair. Soon, I realized my safe haven of a home had changed shape overnight. 

Credit: Amy Stewart

How My Healing Changed the Way I Saw My Home

My hospital room didn’t have stairs, but my home did. And it took 10 minutes to climb them, using only my left leg the way they’d taught me on a two-step platform in the hospital’s orthopedic ward. Chris walked in front of me as a support, carrying the bulk of my weight as I trudged up, pausing for a minute on each step to try to dispel the pain of moving. 

New hurdles appeared all over my home; obstacles to mobility that I’d never considered. I felt grateful to be back in my own bed, but I couldn’t get in or out of it unaided. Sleep was as far away as it had been in the hospital, as I had to sleep propped upright, wearing a sling on my right arm. If I dozed off, I’d wake shrieking from nightmares where my mind replayed the agonizing moment of my body breaking as I hit the ground at speed, and rolled through the dirt, again and again and again, hooves thundering in the distance. Chris would try to soothe me back to sleep.

Showering, which used to be the best part of my day, became torturous: Freezing cold because I had to shower with the door open, low pressure so the water didn’t rip open any of my tentatively closed cuts, leaning forward so Chris could wash me off as gently as possible. My office was out of bounds, as my swivel chair was too dangerous and using my laptop was frustrating now that my right arm lay useless and my left arm was subject to tremors. The plants I had tended to and placed all around my desk had wilted and died, as I had neglected them, unable to reach them, and Chris was more focused on getting me through the day than tending to greenery.

The hospital felt like a prison. And home had become another hospital. Walking the length of the living room was cause for celebration. I spent my entire day in a single room to avoid the pain of moving around. Well-wishers dropped off flowers and ready-made meals, which was an absolute godsend because Chris was spending his days looking after me and his nights catching up on work. My concussion made reading strenuous, so I sat on my couch glued to Netflix, surrounded by slowly rotting flowers. Occasionally, I’d go back to the hospital for follow-up scans, and some more poking and prodding.

And somehow, slowly, in the months that followed, I began to heal. I was cleared to start physical therapy, and my home transformed again — this time from a hospital into a rehab. The stairs became quicker to climb. I began to move between two rooms during the day. I propped my pillow at a lower incline and sleep returned one fitful hour at a time, with the nightmares lessening as I started trauma therapy and Brain Working Recursive Therapy with my psychologist. These days my dresser is scattered with silicon strips and tissue oil for wound care and scar treatment, heat packs and pain killers. 

Now, nearly eight months since the accident, my ribs have healed. My collarbone is titanium and I’ll need a second surgery in May. The hematoma is a quarter of the size it was, but still there. I still have no nerve sensation in the area. It may never return; the doctors are simply not sure. I’m aware of my sheer luck: my body is forever changed and some degree of pain is constant, but I know how fortunate I am not to need ongoing in-home care. I can’t do everything I used to, but I can do so much more than many who suffer from chronic physical limitations. 

Home health care expenditure hit $147.8 billion in 2023. My surgeries were mostly covered by medical insurance, but not my ongoing physiotherapy or trauma therapy. Those costs are out-of-pocket, and my savings look dramatically different to how they would if that horse ride had been just that: a ride. I’m well-aware of my privilege that my husband works from home and could take on my extensive care during recovery. The costs would have been exorbitant otherwise — especially when I was unable to work. 

Growing into a New Sense of Safety

Since the accident, my sense of safety feels utterly random: a trip to the grocery store could end in a car crash, a trot down the stairs could misstep and lead to disaster. I found trauma therapy incredibly helpful in dealing with these thoughts, as well as talking to friends who have similarly had their lives altered in split-second incidents. One of them had been a teacher on a bus that crashed. Another had also been thrown from a horse, and she was a much more accomplished rider than I was. 

I took comfort in seeing the growth in their journeys, and rather than instilling fear, my accident made me feel like each day is more precious. No one deserves more time here than anyone else. It’s what you do with the time you have, the memories you make, and the people with whom you share the banality and joys of daily life. 

I’m writing again these days. I’m working out, too, albeit with one-pound weights. I know the weight will increase with time. The scars are slowly fading, and the nightmares don’t visit quite so often. I’m trusting that I too will one day have scars that don’t hurt, that the memories will soften.

A few weeks ago, I decided it was time for a new couch. The old one isn’t comfortable for more than an hour — I’ve spent enough time on it to know. Home feels like a home again, even as I plod through my physical therapy exercises, smoothing tissue oil over the cuts, groaning as I turn over in bed. It’s taking time, but it’s time I’m grateful to have, when I came so very, very close to my time being up entirely. As I type this, there are new leaves on the calathea orbifolia perched on my desk. Three, actually, still curled up. They’re slowly releasing, pushing through their blackened, crispy neighbors. Still alive, then. It made it through.