Flying on the Inside by Rachel Gotto

Flying on the Inside by Rachel Gotto

Author:Rachel Gotto [Gotto, Rachel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Memoir
ISBN: 9781542028738
Publisher: Amazon Publishing
Published: 2021-11-15T00:00:00+00:00


By now my insistence on pushing myself and my determination to make ground in my recovery had become my trademarks. The staff recognised this, and I was gratified when one day one of the occupational therapists approached me to ask if I’d have a chat with a fellow patient. Sophie, who was in her early twenties, had been shot in the head during a drive-by shooting outside a nightclub. As a result, like me, she’d sustained substantial damage to parts of the motor centre in her brain, which had left her struggling with physical coordination, so even the most basic everyday task was hugely challenging.

‘Sophie is having a really hard time, Rachel,’ the therapist explained. ‘She says it’s not worth bothering any more with physical therapy or our work with her and is just sitting in her room for hours at a time. She won’t even come out to eat her meals in the café.’

I had been aware of the struggles Sophie was having. On a couple of occasions at least, I’d been in the kitchen when she was there, being coached on how to pick up her cup of coffee. After several tries, when her arm kept swooping through the air and crashing down on the countertop, always missing the cup, she’d become very upset and angry and refuse to give it another go. The few times our paths had crossed in the day room more recently, I’d noticed how despondent and withdrawn she was becoming.

So, when I was asked to have a chat with her, as a fellow patient, I was happy to help, and I went on to become a mentor of sorts for Sophie during our shared time in the BIRU. I was able to convince her of the key importance of challenging what her inner voice was telling her as she tried to make herself do things that initially seemed impossible. So, instead of repeatedly saying to herself, ‘I can’t’, when faced with a task, she could instead create an opportunity for progress by saying something like, ‘I’m going to give this a try and see what happens.’ I seemed instinctively to have worked out for myself the value of positive self-talk and the influence that the internal environment we create has on our thought patterns. I was also discovering a tremendous drive to help and encourage others. I’d been aware of this at other times in my life, most notably in my determination to help Dominic throughout his illness, and now it seemed to have come to the fore once again.

I was soon asked to help other patients in the unit and in doing so found some small sense of purpose and direction, which also drove my own recovery. I realised that if I was telling other people how crucial it was to keep trying and to keep encouraging themselves, I needed to do the same in my own rehab. (This determination to not only ‘talk the talk’ would eventually enable me to ‘walk



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