“Your bones held.”

A Memoir?

Synopsis

“Can recounting a tragic event even be considered a memoir?” I wondered.

“You’re very lucky,” said every single person who saw me after the accident in the back brace and asked what had happened.

“You can thank God, and you can thank me, but the fact is that your bones held,” said the neurosurgeon who saved my life, during his first post-op visit to my hospital room. “Whatever you did over the course of your life worked.”

It was four months later, after telling this story over and over, that I decided to write it down. Everyone who heard it had the same reaction; they said the same thing. I began to think I had something worthwhile to share. Something everyone who had experienced trauma could relate to.

I decided to chronicle the sequence of events that cut our seven-day Western Caribbean cruise vacation short by five days, sending us to the hospital in Cozumel on day three in the midst of our first shore excursion. A day later I was medivacked via a private jet to Fort Lauderdale International Airport and driven by ambulance to the Ryder Trauma Center at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami for emergency neurosurgery on my crushed vertebrae.

This is our story of not only the dark times, but the resilience and gratitude we had to find in order to heal during the most difficult period of our lives. It is about knowing there was a silver lining even when we couldn’t see it.