My name is Carmen and I am 32 years old.

Originally I am from Glarnerland, but I have lived in the Zurich Oberland since my childhood. 

Even as a child, I loved to do a lot of sports, bake and cook, and get together with my friends as often as I could.

I loved being outdoors in nature. Especially snowboarding became my great passion. I also loved hiking and travelling with all my heart. 

Since I was very good at science subjects in high school, but I also always wanted to deal with people, I decided to become a doctor. 

I had completed my first two residency years. I had liked it very much up to that point.

On my first day of vacation, however, I had a snowboarding accident, breaking a vertebra in a complicated way.

For the next 6 weeks I was bedridden.

I was aware that this could damage my psyche, because my life consisted of sports, work and maintaining social contacts. Everything was gone in one fell swoop.

But I decided that I would stay positive and try to make the best of this time. I watched a lot of documentaries and listened to numerous audio books. 

I could only slowly increase my work as a doctor again, as I suffered from persistent back pain.

Even things like playing games, going to the movies, watching TV with friends were unfortunately no longer associated only with joy.

Spontaneous activities were cancelled, I had to structure my days enormously to cope with the pain. But I kept on fighting.

When I stagnated at 80% working capacity I started bouldering. 3 months later I was free of complaints, could work "normally" again (only standing) and could pursue my hobbies again to a satisfactory extent. 

For 2 months I was fine. But then I unfortunately had a second accident. I slipped from about 80cm while bouldering because I was not concentrated.

When I landed, it cracked loudly and I had hellish pain in my left foot. But I didn't want to believe it and go through the whole odyssey again, so I tried to continue working for a month with the greatest pain. But then I had to capitulate.

I suffered from severe pain despite taking 12 painkillers a day. The MRI showed a pronounced bone bruise in 3 foot bones. 

Since I could barely walk and was reaching my limits in the outpatient setting, I went into rehabilitation.

I was very happy to leave because after the second accident I couldn't manage to stay positive.

I became severely depressed, turned away from all social contacts and isolated myself, could no longer motivate myself to do anything and only wanted to sleep.

I thought a lot about suicide. Those were the darkest hours of my life.

I tell this because it is very close to my heart that people can talk more openly about mental health problems and not feel ashamed.

It can happen to anyone.

One often has the feeling of being completely alone. But that is far from being the case.

Many are affected, but so many remain silent. Out of fear, shame, lack of strength, hopelessness or countless other reasons.

I hope that the de-tabooing will go ahead and I would like to contribute to it. 

The rehabilitation stabilized me psychologically and I found a very good outpatient team that continues to take care of me.

Physically, the rehab helped in that I was able to do regular strengthening exercises again. However, the pain was still there all the time.

So I could not resume my work as a doctor so quickly. This was clear to me and caused me great anxiety. 

Back home, I then thought about what I should do so that I wouldn't fall back into severe depression mode.

I remember that after the first accident I once sorted all my pictures on the laptop and I enjoyed looking at many things.

So I looked at those again and focused on the things that brought me joy and would definitely be possible again at that time or in the future.

Above all, I wanted to focus on non-sporting activities, which was not easy for me, as I used to enjoy cycling 50km a day, jogging 20km, hiking for 10 hours or snowboarding all day. 

I realized that I am actually also very creative and had clearly neglected this in recent years.

I used to bake and cook an enormous amount and occasionally paint and draw. I also noticed many crochet pictures of my sisters.

Since I was still mostly bedridden, I decided to start crocheting and felt great joy in doing so.

As I became more mobile, I also resumed cooking, baking, sewing, drawing and painting to a limited extent.

Athletically, I focused mainly on strengthening exercises, stretching and fascia training.

Moreover, I kept all this because I wanted I could always remember if I ever got depressed again. 

As the folders filled up and my friends said I needed to publish this because my stuff was so great, I got help and my website was born. 

I hope you will enjoy it as well. 

Should your life also be hit by strokes of fate, I can only recommend that you become aware of what brings you joy and is within the realm of possibility.

Never give up and look ahead. Beautiful things can come out of adversity. 

With love

Carmen