Everything is in your hands. You are the creator of everything

We always tell about strong spirits, but this time there will be a story about a girl with a bright soul! You know, when you meet a person, and he has not only a smile on his face, but his soul smiles, such a person is all positive and sunny despite the hardships experienced!

Our heroine, Yulia, was in a car accident at the age of 23, after which her leg was amputated.

The accident and the memories

Yulia:

In August, there was an accident. That day my boyfriend Zhenia and I were riding our motorcycle to the lake for a vacation along a route we had traveled a hundred times before. We stopped at a gas station, refueled and started driving. The speed was correspondingly small. But then a car cuts us off and hits us hard. I flew out at speed and flew straight into a concrete electric pole.

Usually these poles have a metal guard behind which the cables are hidden. But there, all the cables were out, even though safety regulations require them to be hidden. And my left foot gets into this open hole. If it hadn’t been for that pole, maybe in my case the outcome would have been a little better.

I was conscious for a long time. I did not feel any pain. A young guy, a gas station attendant, ran up to me and gave me first aid – he put a tourniquet on my leg. It was dark in my eyes, so for a long time I thought that everything happened at night. A month later I was told that it happened at 6:00 pm, when it is still light in August.

Then the police came. I remember that they asked for my phone number, my home address – all my details. And the first thing I asked them was: “How’s Zhenia? The guy I was traveling with.”

Zhenia died in the hospital. I found out about it there.

I was taken to the hospital. First, there were numerous long surgeries, then they took me to the intensive care department. My entire body was traumatized, except for the upper part of my spine. I was very lucky that my spine was not injured, otherwise I would probably have had to lie there for the rest of my life.

I had a concussion and a lot of abrasions on my head, even though I was wearing a helmet. But both my helmet and my shoes came off. They say that when your shoes come off, you are unlikely to survive.

There was a very large abrasion on my right arm, it looked like a burn, I had it covered up later with a tattoo of poppies.

The left arm from wrist to elbow was all broken. There was also a lot of internal damage. The liver was all lacerated. My surgeon said, “I have never seen such liver lacerations on a living person, but on dead people, yes.” And I said to him: “That’s great! That’s a career boost for you, a new skill set. Now you can’t say that people don’t live with such injuries”.

My right leg was broken, my knee was shattered, but it was put back together, but my left leg could not be saved – it was amputated. While I was taken to the hospital, I lost almost all my blood. The doctors said that if the leg had been the only injury, then maybe they could have get it together more, but here it was not a question of saving the leg, but of saving my life.

Support

I wasn’t in a coma. A day or two later I opened my eyes in the intensive care department. I remember a few moments from the intensive care department, including the harshest words of my life, when the doctors came in and dryly said: “Yulia, you no longer have a leg, and you no longer have a friend”. They turned around and left.

For two months in the hospital, I didn’t even sit up, I could only lie there. What helped was that the doctors were always positive. They would come in and joke: “Why are you lying there, get up” and so on.

Friends have been supportive the whole time. They set up a fundraising group. That’s where most of the people found out about what had happened. When I started to move my fingers more or less, I posted news about myself in this group: “I’m going to have an operation tomorrow”, or “I can already move my little finger”.

My parents were always surprised: “Yulia, you have so many friends?”. Although, probably, most of the people who came were strangers whom I saw for the first time in my life. They came with cakes, toys, posters.

I’ve never had any depression on this background at all. Never even thought about it. Yes, a psychologist came to see me in the hospital who worked with patients like me there.

But she told me that I didn’t need her help, because I was doing well enough, and we talked about distant topics. From the very beginning, I had somehow developed the right perception of the situation.

At the hospital I realized that as long as you are healthy – you have no problems in life at all. Everything is in your hands. You are the creator of everything.

You live – that is the most important thing, and everything else is so insignificant. Nothing matters if you are alive and in more or less good health. Then you can roll mountains. Everything else and problems like: boyfriend/girlfriend left you, you have no place to live, you were fired from your job – it doesn’t matter at all, it’s just your perception of troubles. If life continued, then further everything depends only on you and your willpower. And it is important in which direction you direct your thoughts.

Prosthesis

I was in the hospital for over two months. Then I spent six months in a wheelchair. That was very bothering for me. I categorically did not want to use it for a long time. And we do not have the appropriate infrastructure. So I started walking on crutches.

The hip prosthesis appeared quite late. Generally, in Europe and America it is practiced to wear prostheses from the hospital, so that a person does not have time to get used to walking. But in our country, you have to first visit all the government agencies, stand in all the queues, and collect all the documents to get one.

Anyway, the prosthesis appeared only eight months later. It took a long time to get used to it and it hurt.

Even just to get a good footing, it takes time. In fact, the femur is just covered with skin and with every step it is pressed down – it hurts a lot. You don’t get used to this discomfort, and even now every step is painful.

This is my third or fourth prosthetic. My big dream is the Genium X3 bionic knee, but it costs a whopping $62500 dollars. This knee allows you to live a life as close as possible to the one you had before, to walk freely the way you used to walk. You can even go mountaineering or surfing if you have a healthy other leg.

I, for example, used to be a professional track and field athlete – sprinting, running short distances and missed university in the winter for snowboarding trips. I sorely miss that. You used to run 100 meters in 12+ seconds, and then one moment bang – and you have to re-learn how to walk. My right leg still can’t bend more than 90 degrees.

Public reaction

People stare, yes. But I stare back and, as a rule, a person becomes shy and lowers their eyes.

I used to walk around in pants or long skirts all the time, and people would ask me why I was limping. Now I don’t limit myself in clothes. However, until I had a cover (prosthesis cover plate), I didn’t wear skirts much. The only thing is that the prosthesis must not get wet, so I don’t wear a swimsuit to the sea.

Of course, there are times when shallow people come up and ask: “What’s up with your leg?”. This is the same as going up and asking a person, “Why are you so fat?”. But for some reason people think they can walk up to a stranger and ask such a tactless question. It is often asked by cab drivers who just like to talk.

Own business

I have been making ceramics for five years now, and it is a passion that never leaves me. I can be in the studio all day, come home and flip through the ceramicists’ pages, read, talk about ceramics – and I don’t get bored of it.

After starting my new life, I realized that I probably couldn’t do photography anymore, because I loved active photography, reportage. Everything else: staged, studio photos were not interesting to me. So I started to think about what I wanted to do. Before the accident, I had studied the art of tattooing, but that idea had to be abandoned too.

There have been many stories intertwined with ceramics at different times in my life, and my creative puzzle came together in such a way that I started doing it. At first I attended a few general workshops. Then my husband is a videographer, once had to shoot a video for the neighbors. A potter came to visit them and taught the children how to mold clay. I asked to go with him – and it was the first time I had ever touched a potter’s wheel. At that point, my daughter was already two years old and we were molding clay together for the first time. That’s how it all started. This is how my own brand Lisova Ceramica was born.

Now 70% of Lisova Ceramica products are exported. The main sales channel is eatsy and instagram. I have sent my products wherever I go: to Norway, South Korea, Australia, Canada, Africa, the USA, Singapore and New Zealand, and more than once to Alaska, so a part of me travels all over the world.

How life has changed

Personally, I live a completely normal life. In addition, my life is richer and more varied than many other people’s. Exactly one year after the accident, I was already walking around with a baby under my heart and dancing at my wedding, and when my daughter was three months old, we went to the sea with her.

Even when I was moving around in a wheelchair, I attended a concert of my favorite band Thirty Seconds to Mars when they came to Kiev for the first time. Last year I repeated this experience, but with a prosthesis and dancing.

No one in my environment pays any attention to the fact that I have a prosthetic leg. Sometimes I want to say: “I can’t, think”, or I remind them, like, “don’t forget”. I say this in extreme cases, even as a joke.

I took part in the social project “Beauty opens hearts” – its goal is to remind our society that outwardly and inwardly we are all absolutely different and therefore beautiful. The mission of the project is to help people accept and love themselves and show tolerance to their neighbors.

What’s in the plans

I plan to spend more time on the creative part of my work, to experiment. I plan to spend more time on my family and spiritual self-development. I also plan to travel more often and see the ocean.

Now Yulia calls herself a 100% happy person: “There is nothing that makes me unhappy”.

Since everything is in your hands, when you say, “I am unhappy,” it means you like to be unhappy. You have two choices.

I also had two options: I could go into depression, be sad, and say how terrible everything was, how cruel and unfair the world was. But I had a straightforward position: I am happy to be alive. After all, as long as you live on earth, that’s the most important thing. Nothing is more valuable than your life – everything else is secondary.