'I Woke up in an Ambulance Stuck in Traffic.' : A Listener's Story of Recovery
The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos
Pushkin Industries
4.7 • 14.8K Ratings
🗓️ 17 July 2023
⏱️ 49 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Rebecca Kaduru was driving home... then woke up in an ambulance. She'd been in involved in an accident and her face was smashed. Living in Uganda, she struggled to receive appropriate care for her injuries - making her healing process dishearteningly slow and painful.
It was then that Rebecca stumbled across an episode of The Happiness Lab about JR Martinez - an army veteran badly burned in Iraq. His story brought her comfort and the confidence to keep on her path to recovery. We hear about Rebecca's ordeal and introduce her to JR.
NEXT TIME: To give you a chance to hear the episode that inspired Rebecca, we'll republish it on The Happiness Lab feed.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Pushkin |
| 0:07.0 | I just remember probably maybe up to about 30 minutes before the accident happened. |
| 0:16.4 | This is Rebecca Kaduru. |
| 0:18.0 | As you'll hear, it's probably a blessing that Rebecca had no recollection of the tragic |
| 0:22.2 | events that unfolded when she and her young family took their familiar drive home on December |
| 0:27.0 | 6, 2018. |
| 0:29.6 | Rebecca's memories of that awful day resume a few hours after she'd been removed from |
| 0:33.8 | the wreckage of her car. |
| 0:35.1 | But in that gap, something terrible had happened to Rebecca, and something very important |
| 0:39.8 | had been taken away. |
| 0:41.3 | I had broken my nose, I had broken my jaw, and I had shattered both my eye socket, the |
| 0:48.1 | external part, and the internal part, and was very fortunate not to have any actual brain |
| 0:54.4 | injury. |
| 0:55.4 | All those severe facial injuries, combined with problems accessing appropriate treatment, |
| 1:00.1 | left Rebecca struggling to rebuild her pre-accident life, and left her steering at a face in the |
| 1:04.3 | mirror she neither recognized nor liked. |
| 1:08.2 | Why am I telling you Rebecca's story? |
| 1:10.0 | Well, during her long and difficult road to recovery, Rebecca discovered the happiness |
| 1:14.4 | lab. |
| 1:15.4 | She devoured the show on her daily walks through the neighborhood, and one day she reached |
| 1:19.5 | an episode that we put out in late 2019. |
| 1:22.2 | It's funny because growing up I always heard, God, he's so cute, he's so this, he's so |
... |
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