Sitting at his dining table, surrounded by loving family, Danual Rutledge is getting ready to enjoy a peaceful Christmas — very different to the one he and his family were bracing for months ago.
In July, the Yeppoon local's life was turned upside down when he saw a doctor for sinus issues, only to discover he had a brain tumour.
The family was dealt a further blow when he suffered a rare stroke in his brain stem after the surgery and entered a coma.
"It was pretty scary," he said.
"The one thing that I was more worried about than anything was leaving Leisa [his wife] and the kids by themselves."
He said early on he could remember being told by a nurse to "go to his happy place'.
"It must have come after a bad night," he explained.
"[My happy place] was at the beach, we backed the ute up, and there was no one else as far as you could see, and we were cooking sangas and having a swim."
His wife Leisa Rutledge said relocating the family to Brisbane for treatment, organising schooling and trying to support Danual was an extremely stressful time.
At the beginning of the ordeal, she was told by medical staff to bring family into see Danual, to possibly say their goodbyes.
"They had said, 'If he does wake up, we're not sure what that will look like', and that I needed to think about what type of facility I would want to send him to when we got home," Leisa said.
Road to recovery
Defying the odds, after five weeks being in a coma scale of three, Danual did wake up.
He is now home in central Queensland with his wife and their three teenage children, talking softly and walking with assistance.
"Before we left [the neurosurgeon] said to Dan, 'You're a complete miracle'," Leisa said.
But his road to recovery has been far from easy.
"He started off with blinking his eyes, then he started writing a letter on my hand to [spell out words], then he started writing on the white board," Leisa said.
Danual recalled writing one clear message on the board to his neurosurgeon at the time.
"I wrote, 'Am I ever going to eat or talk again?' Because I couldn't do anything," he said.
"She said, 'Yes, it's just going to take time', and it gave me confidence."
He spent months in sessions with speech, physio and occupational therapists.
A big milestone was ticking off his goal, to make his wife and high school sweetheart a cup of tea by himself.
With a fond smile, Leisa remembers it was a special moment.
"It was lovely, it was a great tea," she said.
Adjusting to 'normal' life
The family was extremely grateful to be able to walk through their front door together and spend Christmas at home.
But Danual conceded there were still hurdles ahead.
"Before, anything Leisa wanted fixed I could do it … now I feel like I can't do much at all, it's really hard," he said.
"But at the same time, I love being home."
The struggle of adjusting to life after any traumatic event is common for a lot of people, according to Jane Shakespeare-Finch, a professor at QUT's School of Psychology and Counselling.
"The key thing about trauma is that it overwhelms your assumptions about the world and your place in it being a safe place," she said.
"So part of the recovery from that is thinking about those assumptions and reconstructing new beliefs with this experience that you've had."
Support network key
Professor Shakespeare-Finch said it was important to create a good support network.
"Getting back to some sort of routine, if that still suits you, can be really helpful," she said.
"But really it's about drawing on the relationships that you have, that sustain people through negotiating the incredibly difficult time."
Danual credits that support network — Leisa, the kids, his extended family and friends — with getting him through.
"It was hard, there were times where I started to get really down, thinking I'm never going to be any good … but Leisa kept pushing me the whole time," he said.
Though he has goals of one day being able to drive, run, work and play golf again, for now he is very happy to be home.
"I've come a long way, and I've got a long way to go … I'll never be the same, but I'll keep trying to get back to where I was, because that's all I can do," he said.
