Injury Survivor Stories

Stand To: Grit and Growth

1. Morning Orders: Welcome

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. – Marianne Williamson “Stand to” is a military term that means to get ready for whatever comes next. Usually communicated at first light, when soldiers are waiting for the unknown. I thought it was just army lingo, but it turned out that I needed it more than ever when I woke up from a three-week coma.

Unbeknownst to me, I had fallen off of a 20-foot cliff three weeks earlier. The fall resulted in a broken hip and femur, fractured spine, and a severe traumatic brain injury that nearly ended my life. I first woke up in a dark room, confused and disoriented. I couldn’t talk, couldn’t walk, couldn’t even smile. I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t.

This was the beginning.

This newsletter is for anyone who’s had to fight their way back from, and through, something they never asked for. It’s for anyone who’s been tested beyond their wildest imagination. It’s for survivors, friends, families, veterans, clinicians, and anyone trying to make sense of a new self after everything changed.

Each issue of Stand To will share stories from my recovery, tools that helped me rebuild, and lessons I’ve learned from the point of view of someone on the inside. I will give you the truth of what I’ve been through, how I’ve felt at each stage, raw and vulnerable. From wheelchair to weight room, silence to speeches, despair to discipline. I’m still standing. Tall. And I want you to stand with me.

2. The Fall

All I remember was darkness around me and the sound of sliding rocks beneath me.

Just kidding! That would have been a cool and intense last memory. The truth is, I don’t remember much. Not a slow-motion, cinematic scene that one would see in a movie. Just haziness, then nothing. How could something so routine mess me up this bad? I received implants for my shattered femur and hip, and my fractured spine was left alone to heal itself. However, as broken as I looked with all those tubes, casts, and bindings, my worst injury was invisible: a severe traumatic brain injury that put me into a coma for weeks. The doctors used medical terms to tell me the bleeding in my brain was causing double vision and numbness in my limbs. Diplopia. Paresthesia. I didn’t care about any of that.

All I knew was that when I woke up at around 2 or 3 in the morning, there were annoying beeping sounds all around me, everything was blurry, and I thought I had lost my left arm. My hands were bound in bulky mitts so I wouldn’t yank out any of the tubes going in and out of me. I tried to sit up but I was so weak that I couldn’t move. I had lost the ability to do everything that I took for granted up until then. I had lost my independence, my memory, and my strength. All I was left with was confusion, pain, and a body that no longer listened.

This was the start of my recovery. Not the type of recovery that you see in a montage (cue Rocky music). This would be slow, brutal, and sometimes kind of funny. Up until now, the hardest thing I’ve had to overcome was the final test to become an army reconnaissance patrolman. That was nothing compared to this. This was real. Confucius says “We have two lives, and the second begins when we realize we only have one”. I had no idea at the time, but at twenty-three years old, I began the first day of my second life.

3. Mind & Muscle: “Strength Is Relearning”

Part 1: A Recce Soldier

I’d gone from a reconnaissance soldier: switched on and physically strong, to lying in a hospital bed with a feeding tube. My army friends paid me a visit before they left for training I was meant to be on. I felt useless. I couldn’t move or communicate properly, let alone perform my duties as a soldier. Still, I flipped over on my bed and tried to do push-ups on my knees. I barely did two before I collapsed onto my face.

I still remember the very first “mission” I attempted while I was in the hospital. It was a hot summer day, and my brother was waving an Iced Capp from Tim Hortons in front of me. He wasn’t really, but I wanted a sip more than anything. He didn’t think it was a good idea when I proposed a really smart plan to sneak a sip when the nurse wasn’t looking. Spoiler: the mission was a failure. I choked and coughed. The nurse came in to make sure I was okay before scolding us.

But it wasn’t about the Iced Capp. I wanted anything that could make me feel normal again. Whether it was a word, step, or in this case, a coffee.

A speech language pathologist mouthed simple words to me, and I tried my best to repeat them, but it was as if my vocal cords had forgotten how to form sounds. My brain knew the sentences, but my mouth couldn’t follow.

An electric bed sat me up so I could transfer onto my wheelchair. I was pushed to the parallel bars where I practiced walking with the physio team. I must have collapsed a hundred times. But my first step became two. Then three. I was shaking and sweating with each step but in that moment, I felt like the toughest dude.

Each day of my recovery in the hospital brought about a new objective, and recovery was not linear. I had setbacks. There were some days where pain made me begin to doubt myself. But I reminded myself:

I’m a reconnaissance soldier. I’ve been tested before, and this was just another I had to pass.

Part 2: Boring

Days turned to weeks, then months, and my hard work was starting to pay off. I began to view what happened as a blessing. So many people go about their lives without ever being tested on a grand scale. How glorious was it that I was being given the chance to prove myself at such a young age – to put all that training to test. I was being given the opportunity to prove my worth as a warrior on my battlefield.

I wasn’t just rebuilding strength. I was rewriting my story. There are many things in life that we must leave to chance, but becoming who I was meant to be was my choice. Who I was destined to be. Since my injury, I’ve worked tirelessly on both my body and mind, reaching levels of strength and endurance that I couldn’t have imagined in that hospital bed. Each physical and mental milestone I’ve reached reminded me that my recovery journey wasn’t about reaching where I was pre-injury, but about who I could become. I kept a photo of myself while I was in the hospital – wheelchair, eyepatch, and all. I know that Dawei would be so proud of me today. For not giving up when things got hard. For showing up early to the gym when I didn’t feel like it. For trusting in the process, but most importantly, trusting in myself.

A lot of people, including myself, recognize how lucky I am to be here writing this. But luck only got me so far. I’m here because for the last seven years, I’ve been relentless. Every single day, I put in the work, even when it felt like nothing was changing. Recovery isn’t a montage. It’s doing the boring stuff no one sees.

A friend once told me my workouts were boring. That made me want it more.

The truth? I thrive in the boring. Where most people quit is where I love hanging out.

There is no secret to recovery. No mindset hack. No magic pill. You have to put your head down and work. You have to want to be faster, smarter, stronger than who you were before more than anything else. Yes, it’ll be hard and boring. But if it were easy and fun, everyone would do it. Success looks different for everyone, but if you’re not willing to commit to an uncomfortable, invisible, boring effort…you’ll stay where you are.

4. Tools of Recovery

Structure (morning rituals, rehab schedules)

One of the most important things that this journey has taught me was just how much safety I feel in structure. While I’ve always been one to plan, it took acquiring a traumatic brain injury to solidify this habit. Ever since, I’ve been religious with my routine. I’m not talking about hardcore army stuff, but just little daily anchors. Wake up at around the same time, make my bed, grind my coffee. Move my body. I already have diminished brainpower compared to regular folk. By having set tasks that I don’t even have to think about, it saves me energy to worry about harder, more important things. Make your routine, you. The point is, structure creates space for healing.

Create structure in your life. Stick to a schedule as best you can, and try not to surprise yourself. Of course, things might turn out fine in the end (they usually do) and you would go about your tasks successfully as usual, but you’re setting yourself up for failure. Instead, plan ahead and set yourself up for success.

Discipline (saying yes to discomfort, again and again is self love)

You’re going to have many days on end where you see no progress. Those days will turn to weeks to months. Even backwards progress. It’s most important in these moments to listen to yourself, trust the process, and hold fast to your convictions. You must embrace and fall in love with delayed gratification. Eliminate all the noise and distraction around you, and trust that you’re doing the right thing. Trust that even if you haven’t begun to see results, what you’re doing now is making you into the person you want to be. It’s been said before that motivation will only take you so far. There are many days where I feel no motivation. I sit on a bench in the gym for 10 minutes, nervous to lift. Anxious whether my body could perform to the mental standards that I held it to. Could I move that weight? Could I make that time? I love that feeling. It was humbling, because those are the moments where discipline takes over. I find it helpful to write out my workout before I step foot in the gym, so that there’s no extra thinking involved on my part. My only job is to show up and do the thing. Committing myself to this for the past 7 years, I know that I’m who I am today because of my discipline.

Focus on yourself (don’t worry about others’ success or failures)

They say “comparison is the thief of joy”. I personally can attest to this. As I rewind in my life, I have resumes and job postings saved from October 2018. This was when I was still broken in the hospital. What was I thinking? I was frantically trying to catch up to my friends who had graduated college with me and were entering the workforce, whether it be taking on corporate life, or furthering their military careers, trying out for more advanced teams and qualifications. I look back and think: I was exactly where I was supposed to be. And today, that fact remains.

I spent so much of my time being anxious about where I was, where I was going, and how that measured up compared to my friends. And for what? I’m doing alright, I am successful in my own way. Sure, I might not have a fancy corporate job, or not have started a successful business, but I did something different, and grand to me. I did something nobody else ever did, which was fall off a cliff, nearly lose my life, lose many important bodily functions, and still bounce back to where I am today. If you focus on yourself, you’ll realize that you are exactly where you are supposed to be.

5. Final Orders: Stand To

Like many of you have probably realized, my recovery isn’t over. I’ve completed the chapter, but haven’t closed the book.

In many ways, that was only part one.

Traumatic brain injury doesn’t just break bones or disrupt nerves. It reshapes how you view yourself in the world. But each morning, I remind myself it’s a new day, and to prepare for whatever comes next.

Stand to.

This newsletter is my way of sharing that process openly. The good days, the bad days, the boring days, the frustrations, and the wins. If you’re recovering from injury, supporting someone who is, or simply trying to rebuild yourself after anything, my hope is that these stories and tools help in someway.

The journey is hard but we’re in it together.

See you in the next issue.

~ Dawei