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Stephanie Albert decided to blog because she thought she was dying — and she didn’t want to go quietly.
At the time, the pain was so intense and her mind so muddied by opioids that Albert believed she was scratching out her final testimony: a memorial to the last days of a life and body shattered by an alleged drunk driver.
“When I took that first picture of myself, I was so high on painkillers, I thought, ‘This is it, this is my ode, my tribute, I hope someone reads this,’” recalls the 29-year-old.
Before being hit, Albert was living life on her own terms. She was a successful graphic designer with a happy hodgepodge of passions: electric guitar, origami, volleyball, photography, hand lettering, motorcycles. For Albert, riding a motorbike was an exercise in personal freedom: a risk, of course, but one well worth the returns.
The events of Sept. 1, however, obliterated that risk-reward calculation.
Albert suffered life-threatening injuries: an “open-book” fracture of her pelvis and a broken tailbone; a shattered left wrist and a broken right one; a ruptured spleen and bladder; fractured vertebrae and ribs; leg lacerations and massive blood loss. The broken bones of her pelvis pierced the skin of her legs.
Stephanie Albert in her hospital bed.
“Sweetie, you’ve been in an accident,” one of her rescuers told Albert as she lay, confused and disoriented, on the highway. She had suffered a severe concussion and was in and out of consciousness.
“It hurts, it hurts, it hurts,” she told the woman.
In hospital, Albert underwent seven surgeries and was kept in a medically induced coma for a week. Doctors built a stabilizing scaffold for her pelvis with screws, pins and carbon fibre bars that protruded from her body like the frame of an unfinished house.
When she woke up, Albert couldn’t move. A nurse had to turn her when she became hot, itchy or sore. Sleep came in the form of one-hour gifts.
Sometimes, Albert had to bawl for help since she couldn’t press the nurse-call button with both hands in casts. The pain, she says, was like nothing she had ever known: “It’s a deep-seated pain that goes through your entire body, through your bone. It’s so deep, it’s hard to fathom.”
Albert sat up in bed for the first time at the end of September. “I was very happy about that,” she says, “but the highlight was going to the bathroom by myself.”
During her worst moments, Albert would scream into her pillow in frustration. She hated being immobilized and her feet constantly pedalled to dissipate her unspent energy. “The hardest part of being in the hospital was not being able to move — and dealing with your own thoughts and pain. Because no one can help you. They can only give you drugs, but at a certain point — I was on the maximum of everything — you just have to work through whatever’s left.”
“No one can help you. They can only give you drugs, but at a certain point — I was on the maximum of everything — you just have to work through whatever’s left.”
Three weeks into her hospitalization, Albert began to document her experience and blog about it on imgur.com.
It began as a cri de couer, but it soon became something else: a record of both her suffering and progress. Her graphic and unsparing posts have attracted more than 759,000 views worldwide.
Albert hopes her account might lead one unsteady drinker to decide against climbing behind the wheel of a car.
“People need to know what it does to a life: that choice,” she says. “You don’t see the aftermath. You hear about what happens in the news, but you don’t hear about the people who got hit: what they’re facing, what their life is like day-to-day.”
Still, Albert says she holds no malice in her heart for the other driver, who now faces charges, which are as yet untested in court.
“I don’t have any anger at him,” she insists. “I’ve thought about it so many times. . . . but life’s too short to be mad at someone for something you can’t change. It’s not worth the energy.
“I need all the energy I can get just to, one: stay sane; two: to get better; and three: to sleep and eat properly. It’s way too much to be angry at someone I don’t even know.”
That’s just some of Albert’s hard-earned wisdom.
Stephanie Albert would, lovingly, call her Honda CBR500R ‘Pookie.’
As a child, she loved playing Hot Wheels. In high school, her favourite courses were art and auto shop.
“I’m the oddball of the family,” says Albert. “I have this passion for anything with an engine. If I could fly a jet, I would.”
The daughter of two civil servants, Albert grew up in Barrhaven. A competitive swimmer, she struggled in school because of an unrecognized learning disability and dropped out in Grade 11. She worked for five years as a Rexall cashier then panicked one day at the idea of spending her life behind a pharmacy checkout counter.
So Albert went back to St. Nicholas Adult High School, obtained her diploma, built an art portfolio and enrolled in graphic design at Algonquin College. She threw herself into the course work — and excelled. “It was like I was a completely different person,” she says. “I really wanted it.”
She earned a co-op placement at Shopify and secured a full-time job redesigning materials for Elections Canada even before graduating. In early 2016, she moved to the communications team in the Privy Council Office.
Around the same time, a friend offered to take her out on his motorbike. “As soon as we took off, I thought ‘This is neat,’” she remembers. “It was exhilarating.”
After obtaining her M2 motorcycle licence, a friend lent her a Suzuki 600cc sport bike on which to learn. Albert says she loved everything about riding.
“It’s almost a primal kind of feeling,” she says. “You can’t think because, if you have to think, you’ve already made a mistake. It has to be a reaction. You can’t force the bike: You can only guide it, and it will right itself. You can’t panic. If you panic, you stiffen and you can’t steer if you stiffen.”
She learned the art of motorcycle maintenance and invested in a set of bike leathers (Alpinestars Stella jacket, pants, gloves and boots) and a top-of-the line helmet (Shoei X-Fourteen) as she saved to buy her own motorbike. In April, she purchased a brand new Honda CBR500R, a sleek orange-and-black street bike.
She called it “Pookie” and washed it every day.
“I loved that thing,” she says.
Albert also loved who she was on a motorcycle: Her bike persona boasted the daring and assertiveness to which she aspired. “I do well in groups, but I’m an introvert,” she says. “Everyone has an alter ego, that other side of you. For me, that comes through on a bike.”
That doesn’t mean she was reckless. Albert practised difficult, low-speed turns in parking lots, and said she assumed a disciplined, defensive posture on the road. “Anyone who rides has to assume that everyone else is trying to kill them,” she says. “I wish I was joking, but you can’t believe how many people don’t check their blind spots.”
Stephanie Albert, 29, says she did not have time to react to the other vehicle suddenly in her lane.
Albert doesn’t remember much about Sept. 1, 2017. Her account of the day has been rebuilt with the help of friends, witnesses and emergency personnel.
It was a clear, sunny afternoon. Many people were driving home to begin the Labour Day weekend. Albert was going to visit her boyfriend. She stopped at the Tim Hortons just inside Carleton Place before continuing on Highway 7 through town.
At 5:23 p.m., she passed the intersection with Highway 15 that takes drivers to Smiths Falls, and crested the gentle hill that leads down to the Mississippi River.
She says she had no time to react to the car in her lane; her motorcycle slammed into the passenger side.
Albert’s pelvis crushed the raised gas tank in front of her seat and her body catapulted over the bike’s handlebars and over the car. She somersaulted and landed on her back, flat on the highway. Her crumpled motorcycle travelled an equal distance, about 15 metres, in the opposite direction.
Brian Panchuk, 67, a motorcyclist who was in the eastbound lane, said he was so close to the collision that he might have been able to catch Albert had he been able to get off his bike sooner. He was the first to reach her in the westbound lane. “I held her hand and told her not to move,” he says.
In mid-January inside The Ottawa Hospital Rehabilitation Centre, Stephanie Albert walks up and down the gym as physiotherapist Marie-Andrée Paquin studies her gait. She strides slowly, stiffly, like someone on a sheet of ice.
“Looser with your arms,” Paquin coaches her. “Relax, breathe. Don’t guard yourself so much.”
Albert arrived at the rehab centre in a wheelchair in early December.
She threw herself into twice-a-day physiotherapy sessions: strength training to build muscle in her core and limbs. The program was designed to help Albert better support her still-healing pelvis, the pretzel-shaped collection of bones that anchors some of the body’s biggest muscles. It also plays important roles in walking, sitting and childbirth.
Exercise was a balm for Albert’s psyche after so many motionless months in a hospital bed. “You’re in control and you can push yourself,” she says. “You can feel the energy coming back. You feel pain, but it’s a good pain, because you know you need that to get better.”
Albert maintains a detailed record of each day’s physiotherapy session in a small black book and pushes hard to surpass the previous day’s numbers for abdominal crunches, leg lifts and elbow extensions.
“I have this conversation constantly with myself in my head, ‘Do a little more. Are you tired? Yeah, I’m so tired. But you can do one more, right? Just one more. You can do that. It’s just one. Well, you’ve done one so you can do another one.’”
More than once, Albert says, she’s wanted to stay in bed, exhausted. In those moments, she has drawn inspiration from her family, friends and readers. More than one thousand people have commented on her blog post. “After going viral, I got so many messages from people all over the world, sending their well wishes,” she says. “I’d read those and it would help.”
The long ride back: Stephanie Albert's remarkable recovery
Paquin says Albert’s attitude has been key to her steady recovery. “She’s determined and she’s positive,” says Paquin. “She’s moving on with her life and not dwelling on how it happened. That’s remarkable — I’m not sure I could be like that.”
Albert has learned things about herself in rehab — a place where patients face enormous physical challenges at the weakest point in their lives.
“I didn’t know I had this kind of strength to be honest: I didn’t know I could keep pushing myself,” she says. “Maybe I’m stubborn.”
Her recovery is still unfolding. She had an eighth surgery recently to remove the rod that held her left wrist in place while it healed, and she faces more rehab as a hospital outpatient. Albert continues to suffer short-term memory and concentration lapses and has limited feeling in some of her fingers, which is a problem for someone who made a living as a graphic designer.
A return-to-work date has not yet been set.
“I know this hand that was dealt to me sucks, yeah, but my life’s not over. My focus is on getting it back. I just want to get my old life so badly: That’s the thing that’s driving me.”
One of things she misses most is her motorcycle. She has already bought a new helmet in preparation for the day when she can again take to the open road.
“There was never a point where I thought, ‘Maybe it’s not for me, maybe I just shouldn’t do it anymore,” she says. “I’ve thought about it extensively. I think that’s something that everyone should do if they go through something like this: to seriously re-evaluate your life choices.
“I had all the time in the world to think about it, weigh the pros and cons. I know I could die. But I could die crossing the street, I could die from a disease, I could die of so many things.
“So yeah, riding a bike is something I love with every fibre of my body. There’s no way I can’t not get a bike again. Because after knowing what that feels like, and not being able to do that again, that would be heartbreaking.”
Stephanie Albert
—
Roy Radke, 36, of Ottawa, has been charged with dangerous driving, impaired driving causing bodily harm and operating a motor vehicle with a blood-alcohol level of more than 80 milligrams. He next appears in a Perth courtroom on Monday. The charges against him have not been tested in court.
查看原文...
At the time, the pain was so intense and her mind so muddied by opioids that Albert believed she was scratching out her final testimony: a memorial to the last days of a life and body shattered by an alleged drunk driver.
“When I took that first picture of myself, I was so high on painkillers, I thought, ‘This is it, this is my ode, my tribute, I hope someone reads this,’” recalls the 29-year-old.
Before being hit, Albert was living life on her own terms. She was a successful graphic designer with a happy hodgepodge of passions: electric guitar, origami, volleyball, photography, hand lettering, motorcycles. For Albert, riding a motorbike was an exercise in personal freedom: a risk, of course, but one well worth the returns.
The events of Sept. 1, however, obliterated that risk-reward calculation.
Albert suffered life-threatening injuries: an “open-book” fracture of her pelvis and a broken tailbone; a shattered left wrist and a broken right one; a ruptured spleen and bladder; fractured vertebrae and ribs; leg lacerations and massive blood loss. The broken bones of her pelvis pierced the skin of her legs.
Stephanie Albert in her hospital bed.
“Sweetie, you’ve been in an accident,” one of her rescuers told Albert as she lay, confused and disoriented, on the highway. She had suffered a severe concussion and was in and out of consciousness.
“It hurts, it hurts, it hurts,” she told the woman.
In hospital, Albert underwent seven surgeries and was kept in a medically induced coma for a week. Doctors built a stabilizing scaffold for her pelvis with screws, pins and carbon fibre bars that protruded from her body like the frame of an unfinished house.
When she woke up, Albert couldn’t move. A nurse had to turn her when she became hot, itchy or sore. Sleep came in the form of one-hour gifts.
Sometimes, Albert had to bawl for help since she couldn’t press the nurse-call button with both hands in casts. The pain, she says, was like nothing she had ever known: “It’s a deep-seated pain that goes through your entire body, through your bone. It’s so deep, it’s hard to fathom.”
Albert sat up in bed for the first time at the end of September. “I was very happy about that,” she says, “but the highlight was going to the bathroom by myself.”
During her worst moments, Albert would scream into her pillow in frustration. She hated being immobilized and her feet constantly pedalled to dissipate her unspent energy. “The hardest part of being in the hospital was not being able to move — and dealing with your own thoughts and pain. Because no one can help you. They can only give you drugs, but at a certain point — I was on the maximum of everything — you just have to work through whatever’s left.”
“No one can help you. They can only give you drugs, but at a certain point — I was on the maximum of everything — you just have to work through whatever’s left.”
Three weeks into her hospitalization, Albert began to document her experience and blog about it on imgur.com.
It began as a cri de couer, but it soon became something else: a record of both her suffering and progress. Her graphic and unsparing posts have attracted more than 759,000 views worldwide.
Albert hopes her account might lead one unsteady drinker to decide against climbing behind the wheel of a car.
“People need to know what it does to a life: that choice,” she says. “You don’t see the aftermath. You hear about what happens in the news, but you don’t hear about the people who got hit: what they’re facing, what their life is like day-to-day.”
Still, Albert says she holds no malice in her heart for the other driver, who now faces charges, which are as yet untested in court.
“I don’t have any anger at him,” she insists. “I’ve thought about it so many times. . . . but life’s too short to be mad at someone for something you can’t change. It’s not worth the energy.
“I need all the energy I can get just to, one: stay sane; two: to get better; and three: to sleep and eat properly. It’s way too much to be angry at someone I don’t even know.”
That’s just some of Albert’s hard-earned wisdom.
Stephanie Albert would, lovingly, call her Honda CBR500R ‘Pookie.’
As a child, she loved playing Hot Wheels. In high school, her favourite courses were art and auto shop.
“I’m the oddball of the family,” says Albert. “I have this passion for anything with an engine. If I could fly a jet, I would.”
The daughter of two civil servants, Albert grew up in Barrhaven. A competitive swimmer, she struggled in school because of an unrecognized learning disability and dropped out in Grade 11. She worked for five years as a Rexall cashier then panicked one day at the idea of spending her life behind a pharmacy checkout counter.
So Albert went back to St. Nicholas Adult High School, obtained her diploma, built an art portfolio and enrolled in graphic design at Algonquin College. She threw herself into the course work — and excelled. “It was like I was a completely different person,” she says. “I really wanted it.”
She earned a co-op placement at Shopify and secured a full-time job redesigning materials for Elections Canada even before graduating. In early 2016, she moved to the communications team in the Privy Council Office.
Around the same time, a friend offered to take her out on his motorbike. “As soon as we took off, I thought ‘This is neat,’” she remembers. “It was exhilarating.”
After obtaining her M2 motorcycle licence, a friend lent her a Suzuki 600cc sport bike on which to learn. Albert says she loved everything about riding.
“It’s almost a primal kind of feeling,” she says. “You can’t think because, if you have to think, you’ve already made a mistake. It has to be a reaction. You can’t force the bike: You can only guide it, and it will right itself. You can’t panic. If you panic, you stiffen and you can’t steer if you stiffen.”
She learned the art of motorcycle maintenance and invested in a set of bike leathers (Alpinestars Stella jacket, pants, gloves and boots) and a top-of-the line helmet (Shoei X-Fourteen) as she saved to buy her own motorbike. In April, she purchased a brand new Honda CBR500R, a sleek orange-and-black street bike.
She called it “Pookie” and washed it every day.
“I loved that thing,” she says.
Albert also loved who she was on a motorcycle: Her bike persona boasted the daring and assertiveness to which she aspired. “I do well in groups, but I’m an introvert,” she says. “Everyone has an alter ego, that other side of you. For me, that comes through on a bike.”
That doesn’t mean she was reckless. Albert practised difficult, low-speed turns in parking lots, and said she assumed a disciplined, defensive posture on the road. “Anyone who rides has to assume that everyone else is trying to kill them,” she says. “I wish I was joking, but you can’t believe how many people don’t check their blind spots.”
Stephanie Albert, 29, says she did not have time to react to the other vehicle suddenly in her lane.
Albert doesn’t remember much about Sept. 1, 2017. Her account of the day has been rebuilt with the help of friends, witnesses and emergency personnel.
It was a clear, sunny afternoon. Many people were driving home to begin the Labour Day weekend. Albert was going to visit her boyfriend. She stopped at the Tim Hortons just inside Carleton Place before continuing on Highway 7 through town.
At 5:23 p.m., she passed the intersection with Highway 15 that takes drivers to Smiths Falls, and crested the gentle hill that leads down to the Mississippi River.
She says she had no time to react to the car in her lane; her motorcycle slammed into the passenger side.
Albert’s pelvis crushed the raised gas tank in front of her seat and her body catapulted over the bike’s handlebars and over the car. She somersaulted and landed on her back, flat on the highway. Her crumpled motorcycle travelled an equal distance, about 15 metres, in the opposite direction.
Brian Panchuk, 67, a motorcyclist who was in the eastbound lane, said he was so close to the collision that he might have been able to catch Albert had he been able to get off his bike sooner. He was the first to reach her in the westbound lane. “I held her hand and told her not to move,” he says.
In mid-January inside The Ottawa Hospital Rehabilitation Centre, Stephanie Albert walks up and down the gym as physiotherapist Marie-Andrée Paquin studies her gait. She strides slowly, stiffly, like someone on a sheet of ice.
“Looser with your arms,” Paquin coaches her. “Relax, breathe. Don’t guard yourself so much.”
Albert arrived at the rehab centre in a wheelchair in early December.
She threw herself into twice-a-day physiotherapy sessions: strength training to build muscle in her core and limbs. The program was designed to help Albert better support her still-healing pelvis, the pretzel-shaped collection of bones that anchors some of the body’s biggest muscles. It also plays important roles in walking, sitting and childbirth.
Exercise was a balm for Albert’s psyche after so many motionless months in a hospital bed. “You’re in control and you can push yourself,” she says. “You can feel the energy coming back. You feel pain, but it’s a good pain, because you know you need that to get better.”
Albert maintains a detailed record of each day’s physiotherapy session in a small black book and pushes hard to surpass the previous day’s numbers for abdominal crunches, leg lifts and elbow extensions.
“I have this conversation constantly with myself in my head, ‘Do a little more. Are you tired? Yeah, I’m so tired. But you can do one more, right? Just one more. You can do that. It’s just one. Well, you’ve done one so you can do another one.’”
More than once, Albert says, she’s wanted to stay in bed, exhausted. In those moments, she has drawn inspiration from her family, friends and readers. More than one thousand people have commented on her blog post. “After going viral, I got so many messages from people all over the world, sending their well wishes,” she says. “I’d read those and it would help.”
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The long ride back: Stephanie Albert's remarkable recovery
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The long ride back: Stephanie Albert's remarkable recovery
Stephanie Albert, 29, suffered grievous injuries when she was struck, head on, by a drunk driver on Sept. 1, 2017. She documented her injuries in a graphic blog that went viral. Soon, after numerous surgeries and months of intensive therapy at the Ottawa Hospital's Rehabilitation Centre, she'll be getting back to life outside the hospital. Julie Oliver/Postmedia JULIE OLIVER/Postmedia
/OTTwp
Stephanie Albert crash was a horrifying sight, one witness says. /OTTwp
/OTTwp
/OTTwp
Stephanie Albert /OTTwp
JULIE OLIVER/Postmedia
Stephanie Albert works out with physiotherapist Marie-Andrée Paquin. JULIE OLIVER/Postmedia
More crunches, more everything, each day. JULIE OLIVER/Postmedia
The road back is long and painful. JULIE OLIVER/Postmedia
JULIE OLIVER/Postmedia
Albert is making progress day by day. JULIE OLIVER/Postmedia
JULIE OLIVER/Postmedia
JULIE OLIVER/Postmedia
Paquin says Albert’s attitude has been key to her steady recovery. “She’s determined and she’s positive,” says Paquin. “She’s moving on with her life and not dwelling on how it happened. That’s remarkable — I’m not sure I could be like that.”
Albert has learned things about herself in rehab — a place where patients face enormous physical challenges at the weakest point in their lives.
“I didn’t know I had this kind of strength to be honest: I didn’t know I could keep pushing myself,” she says. “Maybe I’m stubborn.”
Her recovery is still unfolding. She had an eighth surgery recently to remove the rod that held her left wrist in place while it healed, and she faces more rehab as a hospital outpatient. Albert continues to suffer short-term memory and concentration lapses and has limited feeling in some of her fingers, which is a problem for someone who made a living as a graphic designer.
A return-to-work date has not yet been set.
“I know this hand that was dealt to me sucks, yeah, but my life’s not over. My focus is on getting it back. I just want to get my old life so badly: That’s the thing that’s driving me.”
One of things she misses most is her motorcycle. She has already bought a new helmet in preparation for the day when she can again take to the open road.
“There was never a point where I thought, ‘Maybe it’s not for me, maybe I just shouldn’t do it anymore,” she says. “I’ve thought about it extensively. I think that’s something that everyone should do if they go through something like this: to seriously re-evaluate your life choices.
“I had all the time in the world to think about it, weigh the pros and cons. I know I could die. But I could die crossing the street, I could die from a disease, I could die of so many things.
“So yeah, riding a bike is something I love with every fibre of my body. There’s no way I can’t not get a bike again. Because after knowing what that feels like, and not being able to do that again, that would be heartbreaking.”
Stephanie Albert
—
Roy Radke, 36, of Ottawa, has been charged with dangerous driving, impaired driving causing bodily harm and operating a motor vehicle with a blood-alcohol level of more than 80 milligrams. He next appears in a Perth courtroom on Monday. The charges against him have not been tested in court.
查看原文...
