By Ara Jansen
Dr Olivia Ong would probably have been a very different doctor if she hadn’t become a patient.
In 2008, a car accident outside the hospital where she was working left the rehabilitation specialist trainee with a catastrophic spinal cord injury. While it’s not an experience she would wish on anyone, decades later she can admit it has probably been the making of her.
Back on My Feet is Olivia’s memoir of her journey from doctor to 28-year-old patient and the rebirth of a different kind of doctor.
Against the odds and what the first doctors declared, during three painful years of rehabilitation Olivia regained the ability to walk and returned to medicine.
Decades later, she specialises in rehabilitation and pain management and has particular empathy for what her patients are experiencing. Based in Melbourne, the physician entrepreneur is known as the Heart-Centred Doctor.
Leveraging her experiences of resilience and burnout, she’s also a life and business coach for doctors, and a speaker and media commentator who shares the tips and tools which changed her life.
“I partially wrote this book as a love letter to my younger self and to the people who stood by me all the way,” says Olivia.
One of those people is her husband John, who she describes as a quiet man who doesn’t talk much. Actions speak louder than words and he very much embodies that, being her biggest support.
The couple met at church and celebrated their 20th wedding anniversary this year. His constancy and their shared faith helped Olivia through many dark nights during recovery.
“Faith is a real thing for me. In the early days of growing up it’s probably more knowledge and an intellectual understanding of who God is. Until you have been through a terrible thing, then you really have to lean in and figure out what faith is to you.
“Faith is in the unseen and believing in small things and then the big things that come later.”
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The radical awakening and imposed exploration of self-compassion showed Olivia that while doctors know plenty, they are not always great at connecting with or listening to patients.
Being a patient taught her that hearing and understanding someone’s story and circumstances are just as important as their physical issue. She believes the characteristics you want in a doctor are competence, compassion, being comfortable with vulnerability and being an active listener.
Oliva had wanted to write Back on My Feet for a long time, but waiting has allowed for the perspective which might not have been present had her younger self written it closer to the accident.
“I’ve been interested in writing this book for a long time, but really life got in the way. After my rehab I wanted to concentrate on establishing my spinal practice and then waited until my two kids were older.
“I really wanted to share a message for patients with persistent pain that recovery is often misunderstood and it’s often more complex, like in my case. It not only involved the physical, but accepting the grief and my new identity.
“Going from a doctor to a patient was a huge challenge, but I adapted. I hope this book helps someone feel less alone and gives them permission to be more human.
“It would have been too depressing to have written this book in the early days of my recovery. There was a lot of grief that came up in the beginning, in the early stages of my injury, and I didn’t really know what this kind of grief was. I grieved my mobility. I grieved my independence.
“In healthcare we have this illusion that we’re all a little untouchable. I’ve learned that despair, grief and gratitude can co-exist. Writing this book helped me honour that grief.”
That writing was both therapeutic and re-traumatising as Olivia also went through old photos and had conversations with people to jog her memory of her recovery.
“I remember everything. Writing the book forced me to re-engage with the moment of my accident; I remember the smell and the trees. I had clinically processed it and at the same time not fully processed the experience.
“I think there was some shame around that. Healing is never linear. Writing helped me transform that into a narrative and give trauma some kind of structure and helped me integrate it into my personality. The whole exercise gave me the space to do that.”
Olivia and John have two children aged five and 10. They are not closer in age because Olivia made a hard choice which faces many women in medicine – exams for further qualifications or children.
She figured out how to do both – have one child, then work towards her exams and have a second child after she passed them.
One of the aspects of her healing which helped Olivia immeasurably was having a team who believed in her and her desire to walk again. She picked a new rehab team when her original doctor told her she would just have to get used to life in a wheelchair.
She now walks with two canes and spent two years at San Diego’s Project Walk where she learnt to walk again, inspired she says by American optimism.
Back on My Feet is out now through ABC Books.
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