The Luckiest Unlucky Girl: Lessons From a Life I Never Chose
- Anya
- Apr 29, 2025
- 11 min read
Updated: Apr 30, 2025
A story of surviving heart surgery, chronic pain, and the bittersweet art of loving life anyway.
Some lives are chosen. Others are survived into. Mine was never the life I would have picked, but it became the life that shaped me. From the operating table to the endless nights of pain, I learned that gratitude and sorrow are not enemies, but neighbours. This is the story of how I found a way to live with both grief and wonder stitched into my bones.
My partner and I were sitting in the kitchen the other day.
Somehow we got nostalgic and started talking about past events in our lives.
He asked me something about the heart surgery I went through when I was 19. My mind travelled down memory lane, and I told him, once more, the tale of what happened.
The rare heart defect discovered out of nowhere, flipping my life upside down in a single moment. One day, I was seemingly healthy, immersed in my world; the next, I was forced to leave it all behind.
Surviving an operation with a 50% chance of waking up to life, waking up with cables inside my chest, keeping me alive. The ICU, filled with the desperate cries and screams of others fighting for their lives in the middle of the night, in similar situations as myself.
A moment frozen in time, unlike anything I had ever imagined. (It’s a good enough "story" to tell several times😉.) Afterwards, he looked at me with a faraway look for a bit and then said: "Imagine if your story was made into a manuscript for a movie. Really, imagine it. It has all the drama of a good movie — the happy teen who loses her health in an instant, faces potential death, and is operated on by a doctor whose resume will soar if he can save her life — because only infants had been operated on with this heart defect at the time, not adults, in DK.
Adults didn’t survive long enough to be operated on and/or the defect was discovered post-mortem.
Family drama around the chaos, friends abandoning her when she needs them most.
Theeen some years later, a bicycle accident leaves her bedridden for a year with traumatic brain injury, with an inflamed head, chronic pain, and whiplash that will take years and all her savings to try and fix...
People wouldn’t believe your story if it was made into a film. They’d believe the first part about the heart, but not both. It would be too dramatic wouldn’t it?"
…but it's a true story.
It's my tale to live — and now to tell.
I suspect there are more of us out there who have gone through not just one life-defining moment of hell, but several.
But not all of us end up sharing our story.
And so, many of us sit in silence, feeling like freaks for being different, hearing words like:
"How unlucky can a person get?"
or
"You're the most unlucky girl I've ever met. Poor you."
I'll tell you something radical that most people won't understand, nor agree with:
I feel like the luckiest girl alive.
Not physically, but in all other areas of life.
And yes, I know: if the physical body isn’t well enough to keep you going, then all other areas suffer.
That is true. I feel it.
Yet.
Yet there is something magical in overcoming struggle and living to tell the tale.
In being faced with so much limitation you can barely breathe — and even though you want the restriction and difficulty to end already, it doesn't just because you wish it to.
No matter how much you will it to be gone, it still remains.
It decides to stay for the unforeseeable future.
This here...
Living another day, to fight yet another day,
when faced with this amount of limitation and loss of control over almost every aspect of life for who knows how long...
This is something that truly shows how much power humans are capable of finding inside themselves.
To see life through the eyes of someone who knows that death is just around the corner,
that things can be taken away from you in a split second —
It’s not an easy thing.
But there is something here.
Something that makes life that much more tender and worth living, even if it wasn’t the life you dreamed of.
So here’s a question to contemplate:
Would you rather go through life without any struggle at all,
simply enjoy it, never thinking about death, about less fortunate beings, about the swift passing of time?
Or would you rather have friction,
the kind that makes you appreciate life that much more, because you understand the value it has — because you see how fast it slips through your fingers,
because you understand how precious it is to even breathe?
In theory, we would all choose option 2.
Because it sounds heroic.
In practice?
Most of us would choose number 1.
Because we will not willingly choose struggle and friction.
Our entire body and mind shy away from it, like a plant shies away from heavy metal music.
We have to be pushed to square one.
To our rock bottom.
Before we finally make the decision to claim our life as our own.
To be willing to live life, with the ups and the downs, wholly, and not see the downs as punishments, but as something that brings more meaning, more flavour, to being alive.
Some of us are simply pushed a little more, a little more often than others.
And here, I want to say:
Why see that as an exclusively bad thing? An unlucky thing?
Maybe it's all the years that have passed that are making me say this.
I’m sure it is.
The perspective that nearly ten years of chronic pain brings.
I'm still in pain.
It’s still there — burrowed in my head, in my lower back, in my menstrual cycle.
But it's mellowed.
Remedies have helped, treatments have supported, and time has eroded some of the pain.
And so I sit here, typing away with my cold little fingers at 22:28 (unable to sleep as my mind churns, trying to figure out the meaning of it all), wanting to express that maybe...
…maybe all of it isn't such a bad thing.
As I talk about in my short videos on SoMe sometimes, it’s a bittersweet feeling this thought evokes in me.
The thought that maybe it’s not all that bad.
Maybe it’s exactly what was meant to happen.
Maybe everything is playing out exactly as it should, for me to be able to see and appreciate life as it is.
Not as I wish it to be.
Not as I hope it would be.
But as it is.
But it’s still bittersweet.
My longing for a life without physical pain is so strong I cannot let it go.
My body wants respite from limitation and loss of control.
My mind longs for the peace that comes when the body isn’t in pain.
Yet the gratitude in my heart for all of this?
It’s overwhelming.
It’s like a wave that washes over me,
a warm, balmy Southeast Asian ocean wave,
that cleans my heart again and again and reminds me:
It’s these hellish experiences that have brought me this far.
To this point in time, where I can appreciate being here, and be okay with what is, as it is.
I don’t have to race.
I don’t have to chase.
I don’t have to prove myself.
I’m exactly as I should be, right here.
It’s a precious experience, to be okay with oneself on a deep level, no matter the circumstances in the body or mind.
It brings a relief that no outer, momentary peace can give.
It brings inner power.
And yet, with all the fine experiences and the profound gratitude for the lessons I’ve been served, I’m still not at the point where I can say:
"Even if I could, I wouldn't take away the experience the bicycle accident gave me."
I'm not there yet.
I’m not sure I ever will be.
The hurt is too deep.
I’ve seen too much now.
I've touched the dark void… and I cannot unsee it, cannot forget.
Maybe I’m not supposed to.
Maybe it’s part of the ingredient for being appreciative of life.
It feels like I'm meant to carry this burden,
this knowing, of what life can really have in store for the body if it chooses to give you a lesson.
It’s a burden that’s a privilege in one hand, a heavy stone in the other.
It’s a paradox.
Ambivalence wrapped into one.
So no, I cannot say I am only grateful now.
I say this because, after the heart surgery, there came a time, many years later (approx 14 years), when I’d think about that traumatic event and it’s aftermath, and the only thing left in my heart was gratitude.
I was surprised.
The hurt had faded.
I can still go back in time, rehash the stories, and feel the pain as if it were yesterday,
but it's as if the pain no longer resides in my body.
Time and healing have washed away the sorrow of that experience.
Even though the after-effects of that invasion on the most precious part of me still linger, gratitude remains at the forefront.
The bike accident and the ensuing 9+ years of pain, memory loss and limitation?
Not as straightforward.
I’ve spent years contemplating why that is, on and off.
One was acute pain.
The other started acute with a smash on asphalt.
It then became chronic the minute I came back from the Abyss of the 40 minute black-out I was flung into (although I wouldn’t know that yet, back then).
It hit me why acute pain, like the heart surgery, was “easier” to process over time than chronic pain.
Acute pain comes suddenly, and then it leaves, day by day, each day improving, until you’re hopefully strong again.
Yes, the acute part is hell, but time is on your side.
It doesn’t eat up much of your life.
And if you’re insightful, you learn to face the trauma and shock right away, so they don’t settle in and haunt you forever.
You face it, let the shock go, and, hopefully, end up grateful for the entire ordeal.
But chronic pain…
Chronic pain is different.
It’s a silent torture machine.
It doesn’t have the sudden, life-threatening shocks that acute pain does.
Its power lies in time.
It eats away at your most precious currency: time.
It doesn’t gobble it all up at once like acute pain can potentially do —
it rather nibbles at the edges, taking just enough from you to keep you alive, but enough to leave you a pale shadow of who you once were.
Like a scarecrow masquerading as a living breathing human.
Its real power is over your mind, because it burrows so deeply into your body that you start to think the pain is you.
When that happens, the memories of a healthy you start to fade, and a new life begins,
a life you never chose, one you never wished for.
It’s a life where chronic pain controls all the pieces on the chessboard – except one.
It doesn’t leave you with just one piece out of mercy;
it simply doesn’t have access to it.
And it knows that.
So it does everything it can to distract you from that last piece.
It will make you think so much about pain, about limitations, about everything that’s been lost, that you forget you still have control of that final piece – the piece that lives in your heart.
Chronic pain will do anything to make you forget that.
It will make you change your identity, until pain becomes your new name.
This is the power of chronic pain.
The fog it creates is so insidious, so all-consuming, that you barely have space for an independent thought.
To any astrology lovers out there,
I liken acute pain to Uranus, and chronic pain to Neptune and Pluto as a duo.
The first is sudden, shocking, earth-shattering — but it passes “quite swiftly”.
The aftereffects can be a mess, yes, but there’s potential to get back on your feet and rebuild with some measure of speed, if you survive the initial onslaught.
The latter...The latter is a fog seeping in unseen.
Suddenly it’s there … and you realize you can’t see clearly.
You can’t see your path forward.
As you fumble blindly in the fog, Pluto then comes from behind and stabs you in the back, again and again, enough for you to survive, but leaves you a broken mess.
Yes, it sounds morbid, I know.
I’m simply trying to articulate what chronic pain actually feels like.
If I can do that, I can more easily see it when it plays out in my life.
I can spot it in the fog, find my weapons in time to guard against the attacks.
(the attacks here being a metaphor for setback after setback, limitation after limitation, pain day in and day out, identifying with the pain/illness/disease/diagnosis etc, etc, etc.)
The quicker I understand the difference,
the quicker I am able to identify when the most sinister effects of chronic pain are playing out.
I started on a bit of a morbid tone...
I hopefully end on a sweet one ;)
For all the talk of how awful pain is, especially chronic pain,
I still cannot shake the bittersweet melancholy and softness it also inspires.
I get to throw more should’ves out of my life, faster than most people my age,
preventing wastage of time and energy, our most precious currencies.
I get to choose life consciously, even though many days, my body is simply so exhausted,
it just wants to bury itself under the covers and never get up.
I get to feel the preciousness of what support really means -
when people you love and care for band together to truly help each other.
I can’t deny the beauty in that.
Even when in pain.
I have shed many tears thinking about this.
When you carry pain for long enough,
when you walk through the endless corridors of loss and limitation,
you find something most people never will.
You find the unyielding part of yourself.
The part that no longer belongs to this world of easy victories and short-lived pleasures.
The part that isn't waiting for life to begin again "when the pain is gone."
The part that says:
"I am here.
I am alive.
Even now."
This realization changes you. You become quieter inside.
Not because you have nothing to say,
but because there’s a weight in you now.
A silent pull toward what's real, true and lasting.
It strips away the nonsense.
It strips away the shallow games, the endless chasing of empty things that we find so much of in today's world.
It strips you to your bones and shows you what you’re made of.
And when you realize what you’re made of,
you can never go back to who you were before.
You can never fit neatly into the tidy, pain-free lives of those who haven’t been touched by fire.
You can love them, goodness how you love them.
But you know you are walking a different path now.
You’ve seen too much.
You’ve felt too much.
You know too deeply what it means to be human and what the price is to live with all that you are, regardless of your circumstances.
A life not built on winning, but on being present.
A strength not built on resistance and pushing, but on acceptance.
A love not built on fantasy, but on the achingly real presence of each moment.
And when you live from there, from that honest, unspectacular place...
life itself becomes enough.
There is something magnificent about being here.
Something deeply dignified about refusing to let the fire in your chest die out, no matter how heavy the rain is, no matter how much the cold winds try to snuff it out of existence.
The darkness lives just next to the light.
Death lives right next to life.
Pain lives right next to joy.
In rare moments,
it’s as if they join hands and become one,
and in those moments,
it’s as if I see life for what it is, for the first time.
And I cannot help but smile,
pain or no pain.
What does this balance of pain and joy look like in your life?
How can we embrace both sides of the coin?
Feel free to share your experiences.
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