well, where do i start.. thank you everyone for making this community what it is 
i've been here about a month so thought i had better tell you guys a bit about myself. i'm from australia, i come from a family of drovers (as in 'lets go on a cattle drive, YEEHAW!' for my american friends :p) when i was a little kid all i ever wanted to be was a bull rider! so i did, from about the age of 4 i started my quest to be the best bull rider i could be. and that lasted till i was 19 after leaving school at 17 and so i hit the rodeo circuit full time and had a ball! i would travel and compete for prize money and if i ran out i would just pull into the nearest town and work where ever i could for a couple of weeks then hit the road again needless to say this wasn't exactly the most sustainable lifestyle especially when i started to party a bit. eventually when i was 19 i suffered an injury that really shifted my life. a bull threw me on my back and stomped on my belly and basically turned everything on the right side of my abdomen to mince meat, the worst was my liver which had the middle third turned to mush. somehow the liver managed to seal itself over and hold the blood in till i got to hospital. when i got there (4hours by road) the surgeons just said they didnt know how it sealed itself but my only hope was a liver transplant and that was never gonna happen so they told me i was basicaly gonna die and told mum to call the family and prepare em for the worst. so when the seal on my liver finally broke and i started to bleed out they operated on me and basically just put these foam packs (that had the shape of a liver on the inside) around what was left and let the blood fill it up and set like a jelly mould. the idea was that the liver cells that were left would hopefully regenerate and turn the blood into a new liver, and thats exactly what happened after that they told me i was never gonna do anything active ever again and i should just get on the pension or get a desk job for the rest of my life...... so i decided i was gonna ride bulls again!! i spent the next twelve months figuring out how to eat properly and eventually went the whole vegan/raw food deal and that turned out to be the key. i managed to regain a healthy body weight (i was 75kg before hospital, 43kg two weeks later when i got out) and started training in the gym again. anyway i ended up getting on my first bull almost 12 months after i got injured and won a national title that year, so i was like FUCK YEAH, SUCK IT DOCTORS!!!!! after that i kinda fell out of love with the sport (the reason i loved it so much was because i just adored the animals themselves and it was the only way i could really experience them and their AWESOME power:)) but yeah i'd basically come to the conclusion that any time animals and money come into contact, respect just seems to disapear. so i didnt want to support that industry or any other that involved animals really. anyway back to what initially made me want to share this story, all that happened in 2007.... in a purly unrelatedrelated incident (kinda) when i was about 2 or 3 i drank this really poisonous stuff called formaldahide and was suppose to have died then too. somehow i survived (and so did my parents come to think of it!) and about 6 months ago i made a friend who is a chemical engineer and microbiologist and told him these two stories on different occasions and then one day we were driving along and just out of the blue he says "hmmmm, yeah formaldahide. its really good for preserving things... but not many people know its actually good for polymerising proteins (sticking them together)''
''okay..."
"yeah and it would have stayed in your body too huh?''
"yeah the surgeons said itll always be in me.."
"mmmm, and the body would have gradually brought it out of the tissues and stored it in the liver..... your liver would have been like a leather purse.... and then when the bull smashed it... it would have released all the formaldahide and bound up all the red blood cells and created like a resin."
"so thats what held the blood in?"
" yeah, and then when it burst at the hospital, you would have lost most of the formaldahide when they gave you the new blood to rebuild the liver. "
so what happened was the poison i drank when i was 2 saved my life when the bull hit me at 19.. but getting my liver destroyed when i was 19 has most likely saved me from getting a tumour when im like 70!
so since then i decided i wasnt gonna stress about ANYTHING.. EVER! it was one of those times when life shows you just how perfect everything really is even though it doesnt seem so at the time.
hope you guys like my story, and sorry for rambling
peace
updated by @sambo: 02/14/15 08:34:05AM
