Sarah Lillian Levis

So much of our life we take for granted and with the optimism of youth expect it to carry on and improve with age, education and experience. But suddenly you are struck by a blinding headache that is a sign that a rare birth defect is making your brain bleed. The surgery to relieve the bleed causes a stroke that effects your left side - you are left handed. Two years later you learn that the section of your brain that bleed has spontaneously sealed itself off. This very seldom happens but it doesn't change what the bleed and resulting stroke left behind.

After intensive stroke rehabilitation, occupational therapy, physiotherapy, life skills, social work services, vocational rehabilitation services and case coordination for return to home you are released from the rehabilitation centre. So now you can continue living your interrupted life. You are 24 years old. Your university education is incomplete, you continue to suffer from seizures, need a cane to help you walk - a step up from the nine months in a wheel chair and a left hand that is almost useless. Or as Sarah describes herself "Me, with a weak side and faulty wiring in my head!"

Sarah Levis went through all this and more that we will ever know as she put her life together again. It wasn't the life she had planned on but it was her's. She completed her degree at Queen's University, lives on her own, writes and works in the education system with young people with intellectual disabilities.

The essays are deceptively simple and profoundly moving. with wonderful touches of humour. The growing up she has done in the past seven years is more than most of us will ever accomplish in a full lifetime. In the book's final essay "Wishes and Choices" Sarah writes "I've always believed that things happen for a reason. Even "bad" things. ... if I had to do everything over again, I wouldn't change a thing. I'd have the surgery, definitely. I'd have the stroke. Definitely. ... Since I'll never know whether different life circumstances would have brought me to what I know now, brought me to this place where I am...perhaps I'll just leave it at this:
I don't need to wish. I have too many
choices to fill my head with wishes."

We all have journeys in our lives and changes to adapt to, I encourage you to read, laugh and learn from Sarah Levis.… (mais)