I was sleeping in the basement of the Royal Children’s Hospital when it happened. My 4-week old son was in a ward a few floors somewhere above me, waiting to receive open heart surgery to repair a valve in his heart. Sleep had been intermittently disturbed by emergency MET calls over the hospital's PA. You don’t want your child’s room number mentioned in this announcements - resulting in some of the best doctors and nurses around the globe dropping what they’re doing and madly rushing to a scene of human fragility. 

The room was spinning. There were hundreds of people. Intelligent, impactful people. As I stood on the platform in front of the crowd, everything went out of focus, as though I was being sucked into a vortex. Blood rushed to my head and I couldn’t think. I couldn’t speak...

I didn’t know about the loaded gun hidden under his shirt but the instant Captain Jason Fuller walked into my El Pasco office on a summer day in 1980, my gut tightened and the back of my neck stung.

It’s that time of year when many of us have looked in the rear vision mirror at the year that has been, and now consider what might lay ahead. This year I’ve given myself a word for the year… that word is acceptance. Acceptance of others, acceptance of myself. Acceptance of what I can control and that which I can’t.

Every morning I would wake up and bang, it would hit me first thing. My very first moment, thought of the day… chronic pain. That constant ache, that umbrella of dread, fear and worry about where I was, what I’d become, what I might have to live with for another day, week, month - who knows, maybe even a life sentence?