I’m not sure I’ll ever forget how it felt to hear the surgeon’s words that morning, lying paralysed in an Intensive Care Unit – a million miles from the life I’d imagined for myself at 26 years old. His advice landed like a speeding freight train, threatening to drag me deeper into an already unfolding nightmare. How could I possibly look to the future with any sense of hope or optimism? How could I, when the future I had envisioned – filled with adventure, mountains, and the freedom of movement – had been wiped clean, replaced by an unfamiliar and terrifying void?

There were no promises of physical recovery in his words. No glimmer of reassurance that I would one day return to the life I’d lost on the rockface at World’s End. Scared beyond words, I’ll admit I didn’t appreciate the power of what he was offering me in that moment – his quiet prescription for surviving a life-changing event: learn to look to the opportunities of the future. But when the ground shifts so violently beneath our feet, and we’re confronted with loss and shock, how easy is it to switch our perspective toward the future?

For me, locked in the confines of an ICU for a week, and then transferred to a specialist spinal centre to begin a gruelling rehabilitation regime, that critical perspective shift toward focusing on the future didn’t come easily – or naturally. In my head, there was a powerful, turbulent mix of emotions to contend with: shock, disbelief, outright denial, and anger.

There’s a well-known model in psychology and psychiatry known as the Five Stages of Grief (the Kübler-Ross Model), which explores the emotional journey individuals experience when facing profound loss, terminal illness, or significant life change. The five stages are denial, anger, bargaining (our attempt to postpone or alter the reality of loss), depression, and finally, acceptance – a state in which we begin to understand and adjust to a new reality.

Looking back on my own journey – from the terrifying moment of realisation as I lay on a cliff edge unable to move my legs, to the heartbreak of being told I’d never walk again, and into the early stages of a long and gruelling rehabilitation process – I can see myself moving through each of these stages. Not just once, but repeatedly, as my resilience ebbed and flowed and moments of self-doubt waited around every corner.

But alongside the pain of those early stages – denial and anger in particular – even within the first month of recovery, a quiet sense of gratitude began to emerge and grow stronger each day. At its core, I knew I was lucky: lucky to be alive, and lucky to have a best friend who had quite literally put his own body on the line to save mine. That mattered. It didn’t erase the hurt, the heartbreak, or the fear of the countless unknowns ahead, but it reminded me that I wasn’t alone.

In those moments, I was beginning to bargain with myself – not to undo what had happened, but to reshape its meaning. I was searching for a way to reframe the event, to move from loss toward possibility. All I needed was a spark to complete the mindset and perspective shift that had quietly begun.

That spark came in the form of the Paralympic Games, which coincided, quite beautifully, with the next stage of my rehabilitation at the Midlands Centre for Spinal Injuries (MCSI). There, I faced six weeks immobilised in bed, lying flat on my back, staring at a ceiling and waiting for my body to begin healing. Aside from the visits of friends and family who helped sustain morale, my most meaningful reprieve from the off-white ceiling tiles above my bed was watching athletes from around the world with life-changing injuries and disabilities represent their countries on the greatest stage of all.

Suddenly, I had role models I never knew I needed. I watched them kayak, swim, row, sprint – move in every way imaginable. To me, they looked free, unbound by their disabilities. I consumed every minute of coverage I could, and for the first time, I began to believe there was opportunity ahead of me. Possibility. I was starting to look to the future in a very different way – just as the surgeon had encouraged me to.

Learning to look to the future and heed the advice of the surgeon who operated on me didn’t come easily. At the time, I didn’t believe his words could possibly be true – how could I look forward when all I wanted, more than anything, was to return to the world I’d left behind at World’s End? But with time, that initial disbelief and pessimism have become a powerful reminder that when any of us face profound change, it isn’t realistic to immediately reframe, reset, and embrace the future with hope.

Change is intimidating. The fear of uncertainty and the unknown is real. The challenge is learning how to move through the early stages of denial, anger, and even depression, and to begin negotiating with ourselves through perspective and gratitude. It’s in that process that we slowly emerge into the light again – not unchanged, but with a renewed sense of hope and possibility for the future ahead.