4C — Where Care Came from Everywhere
Let me begin with a fair warning: this is a longer chapter than usual, but only because some parts of a journey can’t be told in fragments.
In the last chapter we saw how my children taught me how to stay present. What was parallelly happening outside home was a bit different. It was overwhelmingly difficult and emotionally intense to trust and accept care from people I barely knew. Up until that moment, my village was small and deeply personal. But when in recovery, the universe has a way of expanding your world: Doctors, therapists, nurses, and sometimes strangers whose names I never learned became part of my village in ways I hadn’t expected. Some held me with practiced skill, consistently, every moment, every day. Others with quiet kindness that arrived unexpectedly: in hospital corridors, waiting rooms, sidewalks, parking lots, and fleeting moments that lasted only seconds. Let’s look at how each of those moments stayed with me long after.
Moment 1: Not Just Trusting, But Surrendering To The Skilled Hands
A lot of people think that to begin recovery you need to start “trusting.” What I realized was quite different. Trust allowed me to open up to my doctors and therapists, but it also allowed me to hold on to control. I would question, resist, push back, just to feel reassured that I was managing my recovery on my own terms. Then there came a point in recovery when trust wasn’t enough. In order to truly begin to heal what I instead had to do was surrender.
I would glare at the therapist for “hovering” over me while I was re-training to walk. I would be quietly annoyed at the nurse who offered help with my daily activities even before I even asked for it. I was convinced that accepting help meant admitting defeat. My pride, my self-confidence, and every instinct in every cell wanted to prove that I could still do things independently and that I hadn’t lost the version of myself I trusted most. But recovery has a way of exposing the limits of pride.
I was supposed to be the “patient” but the people around me were more “patient” than me! The moments of stubbornness would consistently show up even though my strength rarely would. I would insist on exercising alone only to stop midway feeling dizzy, weak, and frustrated. I would insist on walking alone only to pause every two steps feeling breathless and legs feeling like lead. I would hold on to walls or sometimes literally stick to the walls like a lizard just to “show” my therapy team that “hey I don’t need you…I have it all figured out…I can do this on my own.”
I would be very discouraged when my doctor would call out on my stubbornness or advise me that I need to take things slow. I would be angry when the nurse would hold on to me when I tried getting on and off the MRI machine. I would give a death stare to the physiotherapist who would be walking right by my side to hold me if I lost balance. Not because I was a bitter human being. It was because their offer to help kept reminding me of a truth that was scary and unsettling: I hadn’t regained control of my body. I imagined that they saw me as weak, requiring help, ready to fall, needing to be picked up.
The pride didn’t hold up for too long. There came a moment, and another, and then a few more where my “performance” of strength became difficult to maintain. After a couple of falls, a few incidents of loss of balance, tremors in the limbs, exhaustion after every single fake display of strength, I felt my pride being replaced with fear.
There’s a saying that fear keeps us alive and in my case it really did! I started treating fear as a friend who was warning me, as a teacher who was chiding me for my stupidity, as a wise elder who was trying to knock some wisdom into me. Fear reminded me that healing wasn’t a race I could win through stubbornness alone.
And from that day I began to notice the difference between courage and recklessness. Courage was taking the step with someone steady beside me. Recklessness was pretending I didn’t need the hand that was already there. Slowly, almost without realizing it, I stopped pushing away the help offered to me. I allowed the therapist to guide my pace. I let the nurse help me without protest. I listened when my doctor asked me to slow down, even when every part of me wanted to rush ahead.
Accepting help didn’t happen as a grand decision. It arrived quietly, in small moments where fear asked me to choose safety over pride. And in choosing safety, I discovered something unexpected: I wasn’t becoming weaker by leaning on others. I was learning how to heal without pretending to be invincible.
Somewhere along this journey, I stopped seeing my doctors and therapists only as professionals guiding recovery plans. They became the steady presence that held space for me when I didn’t yet know how to hold myself. They saw progress when I only saw setbacks. They insisted on patience when I only wanted speed.
There are people whose names I carry with deep gratitude, these are names held with quiet reverence. You know who you are! And there are many others who walked beside me through hospital corridors and therapy rooms, who sat through long conversations that reshaped what healing meant. I owe much of my recovery to your skill, your patience, and your quiet belief that I would find my way back, even on the days I couldn’t see it myself.
To all of you: I don’t know if I ever said thank you enough in those moments. But I carry your work forward in every step that I take today. If my recovery has a rhythm, it is because your hands helped me find it.
You didn’t just help me walk again.
You helped me learn how to trust the process of becoming.
You didn’t just help me return to life, you helped me learn how to live it differently.
Throughout my recovery, every time I stepped outside, I began to notice something else. The quiet kindness of strangers. People with no titles, no obligation, no history with me… yet they showed up in small, unexpected ways that softened the weight of recovery.
Their story belongs to the next part of this journey.