As many of you already know my fiance Robert Wickens was in an IndyCar accident back in August of this year. He suffered many orthopaedic fractures as a result of the crash, but the worst injury he suffered was a spinal cord contusion. We’ve mentioned briefly on our social media pages what a spinal contusion is, but I’ll go into a bit more detail on my blog because we can! I am not a doctor, but I have learned a hell of a lot about SCI during this whole process, so bare with me while I do my best to explain this. After the crash I worked with our PR team to write up a press release listing out all of Rob’s injuries. He was in an induced coma, but I knew he’d want to be as transparent as possible online about his injuries, so that’s what we did. Here is the list of Rob’s injuries after the crash in Pocono on August 19th.

Thoracic spinal fracture



Spinal cord injury



Neck fracture



Tibia and fibula fractures to both legs



Fractures in both hands



Fractured right forearm



Fractured elbow



Four fractured ribs



Pulmonary contusion

We announced the spinal cord injury pretty early on, but SCI is so rare that I guess people did not understand what it meant when we said he had a thoracic spinal fracture AND a spinal cord injury. Essentially what that means is that he broke his back (his T5 mainly) and pieces of his broken bone hit his spinal cord which caused the contusion which results in swelling of the spinal cord. Swelling of the spinal cord results in paralysis because the nerve signals cannot run from the brain past the level of injury. It’s like there is something in the middle of the spinal cord blocking the nerves to run down. However, because Rob’s injury is incomplete that means over time his spinal cord swelling will go down, and there is potential for the nerves to learn a new path through the spinal cord. To be completely honest I had no idea what all this meant until finally a doctor broke it down for me in layman’s terms. I knew he was paralyzed but I didn’t understand why. I didn’t take it very well either when the first doctor told me when I arrived at the ER.

Fast forward 3 months later! Now we are starting to share the spinal cord rehab on social media which brings me to this blog post. We want to share the road to recovery, but let me tell you it is not easy. Both Rob and I think it’s important to share the recovery for a number of reasons. First of all, it keeps all of you in the loop! The people who have cared and cheered for him all these years. Second, it’s educational. We have been told since day one not to compare his injury to others because each SCI is different. You can have two people with the same level of injury but one may recover more than the other and thats just how it goes. Some of the reasons for that could be age, health, and simply its just your body is different and heals differently than others. But we can’t lie to you, every person we meet in rehab we ask about their injury and recovery. It’s hard not to compare, and for that reason just sharing his recovery online could mean so much to someone who is going through this themselves. Rob was told he’d never have feeling below his injury or walk again, and look at him now! He’s got a lot of feeling & sensation back, plus he’s been up walking on the vector machine 5 times now. Heavily assisted, but he’s moving! I couldn’t be more proud of him, and for him to share his recovery and be a positive light for someone out there is such an amazing feeling.

I could talk about this all day. There is so much we could cover, from our journey, how I reacted to the accident, how I’ve dealt with things, the major struggles we’ve faced, being a caregiver, to adapting to our new life. We can’t cover it all today, so we are going to stick to the social media topic!

As I mentioned earlier there are so many reasons we want to share the recovery process online, but the last thing I will mention is the positivity & inspiration all of your comments bring to both of us. Even after a hard day at rehab when we are feeling down, we can post a video and read all of your amazing comments. You would be surprised how just reading a small comment online can lift our spirits so much. Knowing how much support we have from this wonderful online & IndyCar community is incredible. That being said it’s also really hard at the same time. Most of the time we post videos and photos showing us extremely happy, and how well rehab is going. On the flip side, you don’t see how extremely difficult it is at the same time. That’s just the magic of social media right? We just want to showcase how glamorous and perfect our lives are, but in reality everyone has their struggles. That’s why we decided to post a video last week of Rob walking, and towards the end of the video he starts to cry. We want to show everyone that things aren’t always perfect over here, and we are going through some of the biggest challenges of our entire lives. Sometimes reading all those positive comments makes us angry because it seems people can just say “you’re doing great, keep it up you’ll be back in a car in no time!”. It’s almost jealousy that they can write those comments and then just go back to their normal life, and we have to go back to our reality. Most of the time seeing those comments puts smiles on our faces, but other times after a bad day it can be frustrating for that reason. We’ve seen therapists throughout this entire process, and we’ve learned all these emotions are normal. There are just so many emotions running through us all day every day we don’t know how to feel sometimes. For example, when Rob cried in that video he was confused. Just after I stopped filming he told me he didn’t know why he started crying. He said, “I’m not sure if I’m happy I made it to the end, or if I’m upset because it’s so hard to walk”.

We will continue to share this journey online, but it is difficult at times because we are sharing such a personal part of us. We hope you will continue to support us, and understand that social media is not all it is made out to be. We hope you understand that we do struggle each and every day, but we will try to be as transparent as possible throughout this journey.

Thank you again and again for all of your continued support! xx