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A broken life and a balancing act that could have gone wrong Amputee Albert Lee spoke to Kymberly Martin about his lessons in survival but his body was not. “I am healing but only able to get around in a wheelchair and needing to go to rehab.” University friends brought lecture notes to keep him up to speed, and with the help of his parents, and university friends who pushed him to classes, finished his degree, graduating with his peers that he began with. But there were more hurdles ahead. “Fourth year was clinic, impossible to do sitting in a wheelchair, so I had to learn to walk, forced to do what was necessary to keep up with friends. Between university and rehabilitation, I had the prosthesis fitted. Your mind forces you to get through the hard parts and there is no time to spend sitting and dwelling. Things needed to be done and achieved.
H
ow would you like a working schedule to include flying to Armidale to the Yazidi refugee eye clinic. Visiting an aboriginal community in Griffith. Driving to the Villawood detention centre in Sydney and then taking a trip to Long Bay Jail working with prisoners, as well as running his optometry practice? For optometrist Albert Lee it’s all in a month’s work. But the incredible part is he does all this and more without legs, following a train accident 40 years ago. “I was disabled at a crucial time in my life when you suddenly come to the
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June/July 2022
realisation that at 20 things can go either way. You question the meaning of life and make decisions. I was about to start the third year of a four-year optometry degree at the University of New South Wales, when I fell off a train late at night, woke up in hospital and told I had lost both legs. “What did that mean… I was in and out of consciousness …. you have everything and you lose everything all in one hit.” Lee spent seven weeks in hospital, at the beginning of a 28-week university term when his mind was in the present,
“When I reflect on this as I am talking to you, I think of people who have nothing to do when they are in the midst of their healing journey, allowing their life to drag on instead of getting on with their lives. I figured what had to be done, and that was get well, go the next step, which was finish my degree, get a job and try not let the roadblocks pull me back or slow me down. I was lucky opportunities came my way and I took them. But you need to fail a few times and then you get better. “This was pretty much the genesis of who I was at the age of 20. This is the time you have to find who you are and what you are, who you like and don’t like, and know what you want to do and not want to do. “When I had my accident, I thought ‘it’s all-over red rover’ but here I am nearly 60. It comes down to what you can achieve, find your purpose, your direction. If, like me, having an unfortunate circumstance occur and