Positivity: Survival Is a Miracle for Ruth
01.12.2007
THERE is a whiteboard in the kitchen at Ruth Armstrong’s Hastings home.
Across the top reads in marker “weekly schedule so I can achieve my goals”.
Each day is broken up into blocks of time, punctuated with regular slots for rest. Rest is crucial for Ruth. If she doesn’t rest she can get trapped in a cycle of becoming over-excited, over-tired, then bad tempered and confused. She closes her eyes, shutting off from her surroundings so she can focus on her thoughts.
“Some people with a brain injury have inappropriate behaviour and stuff like that,” Ruth says.
“I don’t have that, what I do seem to have, I guess, is a more childlike way of being in the world. Nothing is where it used to be.”
Ruth came off badly in a car crash which has changed her life.
It will be two years ago on December 21 that she took the wheel of the family car and drove to the supermarket from her home in Kereru. Ruth was driving along State Highway 50 just south of Bridge Pa. Another car collided with hers and both vehicles were travelling at least 100kmh.
Ruth was pinned in the vehicle. She was cut out of her wrecked car, while receiving medical care for her extensive injuries.
She was airlifted by helicopter to Hawke’s Bay Hospital. She drifted in and out of a morphine-induced nightmare.
She looked bashed and bruised, says her husband Phil, rough - and not all there.
Her first memory after the crash is looking around the hospital room and taking in her husband, her grown-up children and grandchildren.
“I must have looked pretty awful, I saw the looks on their faces. I was lucky to be alive and I had an awful lot to be grateful for. For them; my husband, my children, their children - the fact I was still here,” Ruth says calmly.
Two busted legs, a shattered arm and a severe head injury kept Ruth hospitalised but she was buzzing.
“It took me about three weeks to get upset about it.”
Rehabilitation tested her optimism. It was tough, re-learning all the things taken for granted, Ruth says.
Walking. Talking.
She describes how a brain injury feels. “It is kind of like a ruined landscape. Somebody has come in and mucked things up.
“It’s like you don’t know how to put things together.”
“I used to go in a straight line, now it takes forever.”
Concentration is key but that’s tiring and fatigue is her enemy. This is the reality of a head injury, the reality of a car crash.
But before you think Ruth struggles, ruing December 21, consider this.
“Amazing, amazing, amazing, things have come out of this,” she says.
The Armstrongs now live in Hastings to be near to her rehab and family and friends.
The desire to first walk to the letterbox, then to the church around the corner has seen her embrace Christianity.
She writes poetry and songs of worship fuelled by the miracle of her survival.
“I couldn’t stop thinking about Jesus. I thought ‘oh no, don’t tell me I am going to become a Christian’,” she says laughing.
“I don’t feel anxious about the big things, and I think that is because of my new faith. Now I have childlike faith. I am very blessed.”
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