You are my hero: surviving the medical mystery tour

This is one of my favourite photos of Meg from our recent trip to Byron Bay. It’s a stunning silhouette — but that’s not why I love it. I love it because it is one of the few moments in the past three years where I have seen Meg completely free and unencumbered. As she danced and twirled in the wind on Wategos beach, she had a lightness to her. After years of daily struggle, she was finally excited about the possibilities of life again…

For those who don’t know, since late 2019, Meg has been on an epically painful and unbelievably challenging medical mystery tour. Suffice to say, it has been all-encompassing: so inconceivably relentless and crippling, that it has completely broken down the person I know and love to the bare bones of her being—multiple times.

She has withstood and survived more surgeries, medical procedures, complications and pain in three years than entire families encounter in a lifetime. Along the way, she had to give up her work, and everything else that she loved doing, for almost two years. Even basic tasks that we all take for granted every day were no longer possible. Many times, all she could do so was lie in bed, stare at the walls, and recover and heal, on repeat.

Whenever something new would come along and erase her progress or physically cripple her again, I would look at her and think, “How on earth is she going to survive this?”. But somehow, she would. And every single time her life as she knew it was taken away from her again, I would look at her and think, “This is going to mentally break her”. But it wouldn’t.

Every morning, for hundreds of consecutive days, she would wake up and try again. When I asked her how she felt, she would tell me that she had no choice but to try to get better. And so that’s what she’d do. She’d go to rehab physiotherapy, see countless doctors and specialists, and do exercise classes with people twice her age — taking baby steps towards a new reality she was trying to carve out for herself, but one she wasn’t even sure existed. And for hundreds of days in a row, I would look at her and think to myself, “If I were you, there is absolutely no way I could go on, day after day, year after year the way you do. I would have given up long ago.”

Honestly, I don’t know how she does it. I don’t know how she survives, and keeps surviving, and keeps trying to get better. The way Meg has handled years of pain, abject torture from her own body, profound uncertainty, and the repeated dismantling of almost every area of her life, while still waking up every morning, wanting to try again, is unbelievable. The strength she has displayed is the kind of strength that comes from deep within your soul. She has fought deeply personal battles on a daily basis, down in the dirt of life, as she tries to sculpt something new and beautiful from the mud that surrounds her. In fact, she doesn’t even ‘fight’ these battles, she has more grace than that. She just persists. She keeps going. She keeps walking towards the light, even when the darkness tries to pull her back in.

She won’t tell you most of this. And she won’t win any awards for it. Because the world doesn’t celebrate these kinds of struggles—the kind where you have to dig yourself out of a hole so deep that just reaching ground level takes everything you have. Forget the mountains and the stratosphere, every time Meg claws her way back to the surface, I just watch in awe at this beautiful person’s unrelenting commitment to rebuild a life for herself, any kind of life, and be there for her family.

In fact, just this past week she has dug herself out of a COVID-induced medical hole and a forgettable trip to hospital where the negligence of nurses led to a fainting episode and a black eye. Yet here she is, home again, and recovering again. Hoping to carve out some kind of life for herself — again.

Meg, I know that it often feels like there is no one there to cheer you on through the invisible trials and tribulations you navigate daily, but I am here to cheer for you. Quite simply, you in inspire me every day. You are my hero. Honestly, you are incredible.

I love you with all my heart,

Ross

xo