Those of you that read my previous OT Susnet blog last November may rightly have been expecting a number of other blogs to follow shortly afterwards. Indeed, I said that they would be. The next month I started a new occupational therapy post in the NHS. I’d only been in the job for five weeks when in January, I fell off my bike and fell off the radar.
My life was changed by a canvas bag, which was on the handlebar of my bike as I was cycling fast down a hill on my way home. The bag blew into my front wheel and stopped it suddenly. I went over the handlebars and landed on my head. With hindsight, it wasn’t one of my better risk assessments! I’ve never been more thankful for my bike helmet, which a few doctors have told me probably saved my life. My brain injury meant I had three months off from my new job and it was a further three months before I was back on my contracted hours.
My recovery journey this year has been one of the most amazing and life changing experiences I’ve had. With the brain injury I wasn’t able to think properly, some things were misfiring, and I had to find new ways of being. What I’ve learnt (and continue to learn each day) has felt so timely that part of me hesitates from calling what happened an accident. I am very thankful to say that in many ways, life has never been better.
And so I now feel like I’m coming back to the world again but seeing it with different eyes than before. In the time that I’ve been away, OT Susnet has risen to 400 members. A big thank you to Caroline Petley for her help with administrating this! We have over 500 likes on Facebook and a Twitter page that has a bit of catching up to do…
This year saw the publication of the WFOT position statement on environmental sustainability which was co-authored by Mami Aoyama, Moses Ikiugu, Roshan Galvaan, Samantha Shann, Sonia Roschnik and myself. Last month, an opinion piece that I wrote about sustainable global wellbeing was published in The British Journal of Occupational Therapy.
I’m really looking forward to picking up where I left off with OT Susnet and some of those blogs that I promised last year should start appearing soon!
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