In less than a week it will be one year since my biggest life changing event, it’s time for me to reflect on what it meant for my mind body and life.

On the 19th of May 2018 I underwent a leg amputation surgery.

The problems had started earlier that year. In the evening of the 21st of March I woke up in a dark and wet ditch, the taste of blood in my mouth, head slightly cracked, and pain coming from every part of my body. I looked down and I saw the sole of my shoe flat, pointing at me, it was not off, my right foot was in it.

I immediately realised what had happened, I had been hit by a truck while riding a bike in a tiny eastern seaboard islands of Thailand. I was alone, it was dark, I was bleeding and the driver who hit me had obviously decided to go home leaving me there.

I tried to move but any movement of my foot was excruciatingly painful. I fainted again. I woke up and knew I had to do something if I didn’t want to bleed to death, there, on my own, in the darkness and the pain.

My army background came back useful for the first time in my life, so I took the courage with both hands and with one fast move I turned my foot back in its original position. Fainted again.

Once I awoke again, I took a couple of branches that my fall had broken off a nearby tree, took my belt and my shirt off and used them to splint my leg.

Now I could crawl without fainting as my foot was not hanging loose any longer. I crawled out of the ditch using my hands, my left foot and my teeth to pull myself out. I was now on the edge of a road, total darkness, in the middle of nowhere. I could not stand up. I waited patiently, flat on my belly, on the side of the road for a car to drive by and eventually two locals that happened to drive by saw me, they stopped and lifted me into their car.

My memory of that night stops here, as soon as I felt the hands of the two men under my armpits, lifting me I collapsed and lost my senses.

I have no recollection of the trip in the car, nor of the boat trip from the island to mainland Rayong, nor being put in a bed in the hospital. I am grateful to those two strangers that saved my life, I have no idea who they are.

I’m going to skip for brevity my time in care, a total of 70 days in 3 hospitals in 2 continents. Seventeen full anaesthesia surgeries, each and every one eventually pointless as the eighteenth nullified all the attempts to save my leg through the amputation.

You probably feel terribly sorry for me right now, let me stop you right there. Don’t be.

What I just described, in retrospect, after a year, is by no doubt the best thing that ever happened to my life, ever, do you want to know why?

When we touch the bottom, we are scared for our life, and are faced with life changing events there are massive opportunities for growth, I took them with both hands.

The first week in the first hospital in Thailand was horrible. I was in a really run down hospital, I was the only white person, and the only one that did not have a relative or a friend to help. This ended up with me not being given any food to eat and having to crawl out of bed at night to steal scraps from my room mates, yes I did that and I would do it again because I was hungry.

Nobody spoke English and the first day I became very frustrated because of lack of water or food. I complained and screamed, the final result was that I was beaten up by the nurses and had my hands tied to my bed. Psychologically this was the lowest moment of my life, the humiliation and despair that comes from being tied to a bed is almost unimaginable.

The nurses did not allow me to go to the toilet nor give me a mean for doing it while in bed and I ended up spending 6 days in my own faeces on a plastic bed with no sheets.

The final reason for the amputation was due to an infection that my leg wound had contracted, you can guess why that happened, I do.

I will also skip on the disgusting behaviour of both the Italian embassy staff in Bangkok and my two private insurance companies, my health insurance and my travel insurance.

Let’s be said that my insurance companies have been my worst enemy since the accident and still today refuse to pay for my prosthesis, let’s move on.

Let’s skip on the shit I had to go through to get my insurance company to move me to a non third world hospital where I could be treated like a human, let’s skip on the tricks that the travel insurance pulled to force me to return to Ireland once I was in a very expensive clinic in Bangkok that they were according to their own policy obliged to cover. Let’s skip on the fact that when the insurance sent a doctor to escort me back to Dublin, he let me lie on a stretcher in the airport for 3 hours to eventually tell me that he didn’t have the visa to enter Ireland and they had to bring me back to the hospital and how such doctor abandoned me back at A&E and left without saying a word.

Let’s skip a lot of shit.

Let’s skip the lack of empathy of some of the doctors back in Dublin that would talk to me through the door because they could not be bothered putting on the anti infection gear and come to my bed for a visit.

Let’s not skip the work of the amazing nurses in St. Bridget’s ward of Vincent’s University Hospital. They can’t be skipped, they were amazing. They helped me when I was screaming in pain, they stopped by to talk to me when I was sad, they listened to my stupid rants, they were patient and loving when in the middle of my opioid withdrawal crisis I produced an Oscar winning performance for the worst patient of the year.

Thank you all lovely nurses, I love you.

Priceless and loving were all the staff of the National Rehabilitation Hospital in Dun Laoghaire where i spent 6 weeks relearning to walk. I would like to hug you all, thank you, i love you.

How did I manage to go through all of this and keep my sanity? It was not easy but it was a conscious effort.

I have struggled with depression all my life and when I found myself tied to my bed in a dirty hospital in Thailand simply for asking for water and food I told myself: “Gus, you got to keep it together, because if you get depressed now, before you know you’ll have a gun in your mouth”.

So every day I woke up in pain, more in debt, not able to move from my bed, I would tell myself “you are strong and you’re going to be fine, you are stronger than you think”

The first thing I had to resolve was to get at peace with what had happened. I could have focussed on hating the person that hit me and left me for dead, I could have focussed on how unlucky I had been, on how I got dealt the worst possible hand at the table, but I didn’t.

The first thing I worked on was to forgive the person that hit me. I decided to believe that he probably lost control because he had received some bad news about his family and was crying and distracted. I thought about this man I never saw, and I thought of him no longer as the person that ruined my life but as somebody that was suffering as much as me if not more. It worked, I don’t hate him anymore. I often think of him and I hope he doesn’t have nightmares thinking about the fact that he left me in a ditch with no help. You are ok man, if you are reading, I love you.

The second thing I had to work was forgive myself and forget the eyes of the man that caught me stealing his water in the hospital. He was in a worse shape than me and he opened his eyes while I was stealing his water. I remember feeling ashamed and guilty, but my thirst was stronger than that so I drank the water and crawled back to my bed. The morning after they took him out of the room because he had died during the night, I had been the last thing he had seen before dying and I was stealing his water. It took me about 3 weeks before I could close my eyes without seeing his eyes when he caught me, it was horrible. I got over it. I am sure he forgave me too, I’m in peace with it.

Harder than that was forgetting how some of my relatives and friends could not accept that I needed to talk about how I felt and kept on telling me to stay positive and stop thinking about bad things. I needed to talk, they didn’t want to hear my terrifying stories. It was hard. But I have forgotten and forgiven, I understand how pitiful I must have looked and sounded. I understand people don’t feel comfortable to be in the presence of pain and I have forgiven everybody.

Another thing it took me a while to forget was how my relatives and friends found it unacceptable that I elected to get an amputation instead of trying to save my leg. It wasn’t them that had spent already 2 months in hospital, it wasn’t them that had excruciating pain, it wasn’t them that could not go to the toiled unassisted, it wasn’t them that had not had a shower in 2 months, but it was them that continuously put pressure on me to make me change my mind and try to save my leg.

This was probably the worst type of pressure. It was exhausting. I felt I had to apologise for cutting my own leg. I was terrified that the amputation might go wrong less for myself than for the “I told you so” that I was going to face. But I have understood that they were afraid for me, they didn’t want me to be a cripple, and maybe they didn’t want to have a crippled relative or friend, I don’t know, but I forgave and forgot. I understand it must have been painful for all of you having to deal with me, thank you for being there, regardless of what your point was.

I have forgiven even the ones that asked me questions like: “why would you go to Thailand on holidays on your own?”. I mean what a fucking stupid question is this? I don’t ask you why the fuck did you get married in the first place when you complain about your wife every day, why would you want to associate my accident with me going on holidays on my own or being single in the first place? Some of the people asking seemed to have a deep sick desire to make me feel I deserved the accident for doing what I want when I want to do it, to some people this seems unfair. But I forgive you. I might have hung up the phone on you when you asked me that stupid question, yes you deserved it, but I forgive you now.

Enough with forgiving and forgetting, I now want to thank all the people that have helped me.

The ones that flew over to Thailand to be next to me when I was lost in pain and horrible thoughts, the ones that drove over two hours over and back to come see me for twenty minutes and hold my hand, the ones that decided to come visit me after work, over and over, the ones that just sat silent because they didn’t know what to say to help me, the ones that tried their best to console me, the ones that were encouraging, the ones that were terrified of talking but that did it anyway, the ones that cried with me, the ones that laughed with me, all of you. Thank you.

Being back in Dublin was amazing. I was overwhelmed with the love and support I received. I remember one evening I counted 9 visitors in my room, sitting around me and chatting about everything, mainly joking and laughing with me.

Some people, my closest friends and family, I knew would have supported me, but it was amazing to see how so many others that were living in a distant periphery of my life until then, showed up to support me when I needed it.

This immense love made me realise for the first time what the real important thing in life is. Love and compassion.

It’s thanks to this love that I today am 100% stronger and more confident than I ever was when I had two working legs. Today I feel that even if I end up going bankrupt and living on the streets, I will be happy because I have people that love me. It is this love that made me decide to treat my injury like an upgrade and not a handicap.

I want to show everybody that helped me that what they did really changed my life, I am 100% determined to make the rest of my life the best part of my life, restarting at 49 years of age. I would also like to show to other people in my conditions that the handicap is in our heads and not our body.

While in rehab, I saw many other people in conditions similar to mine and it breaks my heart but most of them have given up. People in their 20s that faced with the loss of a limb, consciously decide that their life is over and that they will spend the rest of their lives as a disabled person. Giving up on work, ashamed of their condition and their injuries, giving up on life and deciding to play the role of the victim of a very unlucky life. What I would like to tell my fellow amputees is that you can decide to see what you want to see in your life. It is very easy to find excuses for not pursuing your dreams, it is very easy to say, I can’t, I am disabled. What is more difficult is to seek the beauty in your new condition, but you can! Look at the things you can and want to do, not at the things you can’t do any longer. Where you see an injury, you can choose to see an upgrade, where you see a handicap you can choose to see an exciting challenge to face and win.

I love the new observer point of view that my new condition has brought to me. I now walk slower than before, believe it or not, I learned to appreciate it, it brought me a new perspective on the world around me. I take it as a blessing.

I watch people complain about minor problems and play the victim for real minutia, people complaining they can’t play football today because it is raining, the pint is too expensive, the commute is too long, complain because they don’t have the time or the money to do the things they would like to do.

I look at myself and remember when I also complained about the same things, what changed? Why am I not complaining about these things now that I have more things I could complain about?

The reason is that I understood that complaining was my choice, only mine.

Today I prefer to look for beauty in everything that the world can offer me, I look for beauty in a storm when I am outside without an umbrella, I look for beauty in a long queue at the supermarket when I am tired and hungry and all I would want is to sit on my sofa and rest, I look for beauty when people are rude to me, when everything seems to go wrong.

I try to increase the beauty for the other people, be through an act of kindness, or a compliment or a simple thank you. I don’t get angry anymore. I am content.

It works.

I am alive, I am in charge of my destiny, I can make others lives just a little better and I can choose what to see in this beautiful world of ours.