Author: reddywriting

“Your Bones Held.”

Author’s Note

Once discharged from the hospital and state-of-the-art rehabilitation facility on May 15, 2024 after a total of 15 days, we slowly started the recovery process. Day by day, we re-engaged with the outside world and started living again. Wearing matching back braces, we were hard to miss. Everyone who saw us wanted to know what had happened. Each time we told the story, the listener would inevitably say “you need to write a book.”

I did not take this project lightly. I knew I would have to relive the moments that my new nightmares were made of. Some of them may haunt me forever.

While trying to figure out how to get started, I read a lot. As I read, I realized there were many courageous writers, mostly women, who relived their most terrifying and excruciating painful experiences for me to learn from. These women gave me the strength, courage and comfort to sit with my fears, to recount them and let them go as best as I could.

Most of these women I have never met nor will I ever meet yet their profound influence will always guide me. In no particular order, they are:

  • Hillary Clinton
  • Barbra Streisand
  • Ruth Bader Ginzberg
  • Maya Angelou
  • Kamala Harris
  • Bille Jean King
  • Gloria Steinem
  • Ruth Reichl
  • Bonnie Garmus
  • Amanda Gorman
  • Dory from “Finding Nemo”

“Your Bones Held.”

Dedications

My sister Stacey who fortunately knows too many people whom she called upon to help get me home after our accident in Cozumel.

My husband Leslie who made sure I would not only live but live to walk and travel again with him. He brings joy to my life every day. 

My sons Kalen and Corey whom I am forever sorry I scared them half to death and love infinitely.

To “The Bo’s!” Suzanne and Bo McAninch – an unlikely friendship that I didn’t know I couldn’t live without.

To Dr. Barth Green, the world-renowned specialist in complex spine and spinal cord injuries at the University of Miami and co-founder of The Miami Project to Cure Paralysis, who gave the green light to treat me.

To Alan Brown, Director of Public Impact at Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation, who put me on Dr. Green’s radar and helped my sister fly me home.

And to my superhero neurosurgeon Dr. Timur Urakov who saved my life and continues to inspire and entertain us every day.

“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.