Lisa Cox was living a life just like so many others her age. She was 24, climbing the corporate ladder in the advertising world, she’d travelled the globe, moved to Melbourne, when she unexpectedly suffered a brain haemorrhage.
She spent the next three weeks in a coma, two months on life support, and over the course of a year in hospital had pneumonia, two heart attacks, seizures, open-heart surgery, had to have one leg and all of her toes and nine fingertips amputated, a total hip replacement and died twice.
Her family was told they’d likely have to turn off her life support but something incredible happened. Lisa’s brain started to recharge, regenerating every single cell in her body. The mammoth toll this all took on her body has impacted her speech and memory, left her 25% blind and epileptic with osteoarthritis in almost every joint. She had to relearn to do everything; feed herself, dress herself, speak, write, all of the things we take for granted every day.
But, despite all of this, Lisa refused to let life defeat her. Instead, she saw it an opportunity to start over, to rebuild her life from the ground up, a chance to use her story to inspire others to dig deep when life throws you lemons, to live life on your own terms.
She’s now a public speaker, author, disability advocate, model and all round one of the most inspiring humans I’ve ever met.
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