Five lessons from my near-death experience
A car cracked my skull four years ago, during my postdoc in California.
My chances of survival were around 1 in 4. A neurosurgeon saved me; love and months of rehab brought me back.
The long jagged scar across my scalp constantly reminds me of my odyssey, from neuroscientist in a coma to scientific writer planning my wedding.
Along the way, I picked up five life lessons. I hope they can be of help.
- You can count on more people than you know.
“Matteo is not good at asking for help “, a friend warned my doctors in the Intensive Care Unit. He was right. I was a loner, I didn’t rely on people and I didn’t expect them to care about me. I was wrong, and the accident proved it. So many rallied at my bedside with acts of kindness and displays of affection: letters, cards, videocalls, wish-you-well gifts, visits (often from other states). Their love taught me I wasn’t alone, that actually more people had my back than I could count. I learnt that asking for help is ok.
2. Don’t fear failures on your way to success.
The accident damaged the muscles controlling my eyes, giving me double vision. I spent weeks working these muscles out so that my eyes would move together again. The “pencil-in-the-cap” was the hardest exercise in my eye training: fitting a pencil into a pencil cap held one meter in front of me. Faced with numerous failures, the years in research came in handy: as a scientist, you expect experiments to need tweaking, and a few of them to fail multiple times. This mindset supported me over the many setbacks of my rehab, and especially during this exercise. It took me hours of “eye gymnastics”, but I became a “pencil-in-the-cap” master eventually and the double vision greatly improved. As Samuel Beckett wrote “Try again. Fail again. Fail better”, and, I’d like to add, eventually, you’ll break through.
3. Show, don’t (just) tell.
Walking again — walking properly and not just wobbling under concerned eyes — took me months. But as soon as my physical therapist deemed me ready to start walking again, I returned to my hospital room, videocalled my parents (we were on separate continents), rolled my wheelchair back from the phone, stood up and walked towards them. I didn’t announce my achievement, I proved I could. And that little display disintegrated months of fears in my parents’ heart. Words go a long way, actions usually go even further.
4. Control the future, do not let the past control you.
For months I obsessed over the accident, my brain surgery, my parents’ anguish, and, foremost, about the meaning of it all. Slowly, I came to accept that not everything has a predetermined meaning. Instead, I was the one who had to decide what significance the accident was going to have in my future, how it would define it. As my fiancée says “it’s ok to glimpse at the past, but don’t stare. Looking ahead has enabled me to take my life back.
5. You can’t win them all.
The hardest lesson for last. I survived a gruesome accident, I recovered beautifully, personal and work lives are splendid, and yet I still cope with the aftermath of the accident to this day. My left arm has a reduced motility, so I’ll never start canoeing, as I wished. Despite mastering the “pencil-in-the-cap”, I still need special glasses to correct a slight double vision. My sense of balance is a bit off, which forces me to walk more carefully. But these are little losses, I am alive and well. You won’t win all the challenges you will face, that’s just life. Try winning those that count the most and accept the outcomes of those you couldn’t win.
