Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Influencer podcast.

Today's episode is pretty remarkable because we have someone on the show who I have had the joy of getting to know over this last year and someone who is such

an inspiration not only to me but to hundreds of thousands of people on social

media and beyond. I am talking about Ruthie Lindsay. I got to do this

interview with Ruthie actually last summer and I have held on to this

conversation because she has a new book that is now out called There I am.

And I wanted to wait for you guys to really hear her story when this was coming out because her book is a

memoir and it is one that will change your heart, her story, everything that she's been through, how she's gotten

to the other side of it.

It is truly an inspiration.

So when Ruthie was 17, she was hit by an ambulance outside of a gas station in her home in Louisiana, which is where she's from.

From being hit by an ambulance, she broke her neck, she punctured her lungs, and she ruptured her spleen.

And doctors had to perform a spinal cord fusion using a wire, and then miraculously she walked out of the hospital within a month.

But a few years later she was newly married and she started settling into adulthood

and just literally a simple turn of her head to the

left it left her body riddled in chronic pain and she talks about it today, but it was like the shooting pain just by turning her head and

The doctors didn't know what was going on

They were kind of perplexed they just prescribed her to a bunch of painkillers which she then became addicted to

She was then depressed from all of the narcotics that she was on she was bedridden for almost a year, and after dozens of visits

to specialists and to surgeons, they finally discovered that the wire that was holding her

neck together from being hit by the ambulance

had been piercing her brainstem.

...