 All right, I used to be a Microsoft guy, and then I was declared clinically dead, and then after a miraculous revival and an unexpected recovery, I had a clean slate, I had a second chance of life, and now I'm a Linux and Drupal guy, any question? No, I have some questions, I have some questions, why, you know, how did I end up on my deathbed in Thailand, and was it my fault or was it out of my control, and why was I only able to communicate by wiggling my toes, and what was I communicating, and are there any habits or actions or mindsets that we can take to better ourselves in the face of adversity, and you know, if I could be anything, what would I be and why, and why do my Bluetooth headphones never connect when I need them to? So, I am Dallas Ramson, and I'm grateful to be with you today, this is a story about my recovery, rebuilding my life after an accident on a train in Thailand shattered my skull to pieces, and I had to adapt to fundamental changes in my life, I had to relearn how to walk, I had to relearn how to talk, and this is a story about resilience and about perseverance, and it's a story about letting go, it's a story about smiling again, and it's actually a story that starts here in Sydney 20 years ago, and it's a decision to travel to Thailand was made at the Trails Cafe at the YHA Youth Hostel up by the Harbor Bridge at the Rocks, so 20 years ago, so just a word of caution, this is a story of deeply personal journey, and it's some heavy topics will be talked about, and some medical situations will be involved, and so if you feel uneasy at any point, feel free to leave if you need to. Alright, so 2004 I was a university exchange student at Newcastle University, north of here, and I immediately fell in love with Australia, I love the culture, I love the people, I love the food, and I strategically scheduled my classes so I could have light classes on Monday and Friday so that I could travel as much as I could responsibly, not missing too much school. The guy that I traveled with was also an international student, Andy Bale, he and I traveled a lot in Australia, we decided to travel to Thailand together, fellow Yankee from the US as well. This is the day before we flew in, we flew into Thailand and rode the tuk-tuk around, and then the next day we were catching our 13 hour train ride from Bangkok to Chiang Mai, the very next day, and it was a nice trip, I packed my luggage, I packed my guitar, and I was reading a book, conversing with strangers and that's all I remember, that's all I remember of the trip. About halfway through the journey, I was found unconscious, the upper half of my body was hanging out the train window and my skull was shattered to the point where the bones stuck up like a stegosaurus through my scalp and I was bleeding profusely, and to this day we don't know what exactly happened, there's conflicting stories. The newspaper says that there was a few of us taking photos out the window, but if that's the case then why wasn't anyone else hit. My mom says she was told that a woman standing next to me felt my arm go limp and looked down, saw that I was bleeding and went to get her boyfriend, and it could have been just me, I don't know, I don't know, and it's something I've had to come to deal with and accept that I may never know, and anyway so two, I'm bleeding badly, two university students, two medical students were found and they came in and they did first aid on me, t-shirts and towels were found and to soak up the blood because your scalp can't actually, it doesn't actually congeal, it just pours out and so they were mopping up with the blood with shirts and towels and wrapped around my head to slow the bleeding and to keep my head intact and the reality was this happened in the middle of nowhere Thailand and the train just can't stop, just can't stop and so for 45 minutes this continued until the train could, there was a spot to unload and it was a remote village and so at this remote village there was a first aid station so what they did is I put some Vaseline on my head and they wrapped my head in gauze and that's all they had available at this remote town, the village and so our tour guide Joe was his name, a native Thai person and so he was speaking the language and he was trying to get a helicopter, a medical helicopter to fly in, he was contacting commercial helicopters and he was talking to the Thailand military to get a helicopter flown in and they kept refusing because what happens is with an open head wound the changes in the air pressure are known to cause fatal seizures and so they didn't want the risk of an international tourist dying on their flight and causing an international outcry so no medical helicopters were available. So what was found was a rural, just a basic care hospital, about a 45 minute drive to a different village and so that's how I went there via passenger van, by just a van. So it was my unconscious self, I was Andy and the two university students, the medical students and myself. Let's see what other notes here, sorry there's a lot of details. So at this rural hospital, again they didn't have sufficient medical equipment to tend to my open wound but I had lost so much blood at this point that I did get a blood transfusion at this remote hospital and it was becoming more and more apparent to people taking care of me that I just was not going to make it at this hospital and again requests for helicopters were denied and so there was only one viable option and that was to take me via the same passenger van, the van unmedically equipped, back a six hour drive to Bangkok and so here we go, so now we are, I guess I was supposed to be going, oops, sorry I missed, I did the Google Meet, anyway here we go, hello. So the arrival, I did, when the van arrived to Bangkok the hospital that I was supposed to go to couldn't be found just because it's, I mean I can understand why it couldn't be found, it's a very big city, it's a very undocumented city and they dropped me off at Boomerangrad and so from the moment of impact to arrival of Boomerangrad Hospital there was 32 hours without any major medical fixes to my skull and just for context 32 hours is if we think about when this conference started at 9 a.m. yesterday from 9 a.m. till now is about 28 hours so for 32 hours I was pretty much bleeding uncontrollably and upon arrival I was declared dead and I was not in a good state and the doctors didn't want to work on me because I was in such, I was in a horrific horrific state and there was one doctor that wanted to work that was compelled to try and that's because he had studied, local Thai doctor, he had studied at the University of Wisconsin which is where I was a student and he felt compelled to try to help me and so he told my dad later that he gave me some of the most powerful drugs available and he worked on me for two hours but he was going to just give up and go to his other responsibilities and then all of a sudden he came back to life and that's why he told my dad. So at this point I'm no longer clinically dead, I'm in a coma, I'm in a coma and I'm bad but I'm also battling some serious, serious medical conditions. One is I had contracted that whatever it's called, the Pseudomonas aeruginosa meningitis which is extremely, extremely rare bacteria that comes from invasive surgeries such as blood transfusions and it's so fatal it has what's called a guarded prognosis and it's a medical term but the, so anyways I was fighting that, it's antibacterial, sorry antibiotic resistant, it's really hard to fight. I was also leaking, continuously leaking spinal fluid or brain fluid out my ears and nose, it's common in head trauma and brain swelling I was also one of the bigger battles I was going through. If you sprained your wrist or your foot, you know like you know that it swells and you put ice and it reduces the swelling. The brain because of the skull it doesn't have a luxury to expand and so what happens is that pressure builds up and it keeps re-injuring the brain and it's kind of a recursion of death and it's very, it's very, very, very critical, very critical. I also had pneumonia my right lung I was having trouble breathing so I had to put some tubes down my throat to clear the airway. A few days later I woke up from my coma and by this point my family had made it over to Bangkok, they had to get emergency passports and it was not easy for my family but when I woke up from my coma the very first fuzzy memory I have is looking to my left having no idea what, I just had no idea what was happening and I looked to my left and I see them, my family crying and jumping and being happy and it's like I just, you know I thought they were, I didn't know what was going on but I waved to them and but my very first clear memory was that I really, really, really had to pee and the, again so I looked down, I was totally not aware what was happening but I see these hoses, you know these tubes in my arm, wires on my fingers, I'm going to have to go to the bathroom right, like I'm not going to pee in a stranger's bed so I just start taking them out and then I go to stand, I try to stand and I try to stand and just an indescribable dizziness like just a, just like imagine like going on a merry go round and just being thrown off that merry go round and my legs are weak and I slammed into the ground and but I had to go to the bathroom and so I started crawling and taking the IVs with me. When I was finished with the bathroom my dad had come in and helped me the rest of the way but when I was finished I went to wash my hands and I saw myself, I saw myself in the mirror for the first time and two realizations, two realizations. One is I saw myself in a hospital robe and I knew that I was the one in the hospital, I knew that this, it became clear to me that this situation was I was in the hospital and the second realization was I saw this bearded, this bearded stranger with deep dark sunk purple bruised eyes and I had a shocking scar that ran the entire length of my head down my face. I had crusty lips and shaved head and I realized that that was me and I hated it, I hated myself, I hated myself and that's my first memory. Alright a few days later like I said my family was here and I had intended to read this whole letter but the sake of time I can't but I wanted to demonstrate the fear and the uncertainty and the hope and just the encouragement that was going on but so in this letter my sister she's telling the world about how I had opened my eyes for the first time and I could follow voices, I couldn't see anything but I could follow their voices and she talks about how I could respond to people holding my hand and holding their hand tightly if I thought they were going to be leaving and she talks about how the doctor was telling us that it's going to be 18 months before they can even determine what the cause, what's the impact of my life is going to be 18 months so that's what that letter was supposed to be. Now I didn't do, I didn't recover by myself, my story went viral at the time, chain emails were a thing, remember you copied everyone in your address book and you sent that out and they did the same thing, everyone did their address book and also at the same this is the year that Facebook was launched and so this story spread across Facebook like crazy and friends blogging sites were put up and people were blogging and messaging and hundreds and hundreds of cars and strangers and friends and flowers and messages all came from across the planet, people I just didn't even know and I didn't even know this for 20 years until I told my mom that I was giving this talk and she was like oh I have all these cards. So for the first time, for the first time a couple of months ago I was reading through this, I was just absolutely in tears, I just can't believe this is the amount of support. Now one of the people that I want to talk about is Evelyn Potter, she was a friend of my grandparents, she had a second home in Vietnam and so she flew over to help my parents and look after me. So I bruised my frontal cortex and that's in control of your personality and what happened is it became extremely, actively suicidal, I was suicidal all the time and I had to be watched and I was also very aggressive so they handcuffed me to the bed so I couldn't move and quite atrocious and I didn't have any filter in my words, I just wasn't myself and so when I became too vulgar for my family and they left, Evelyn would look after me and she would distract me by doing jumping jacks and man I hate, it just became so annoyed. So I called her grandma jumping jacks just as a way to discourage her from doing jumping jacks but she embraced that role with love and compassion and she signs her letters still today with grandma jumping jacks, really fascinating person. This accident, the impact happened on the end of November, we're now into the week of Christmas or December 25th and the December 25th this year was on a Saturday and on Thursday, the Thursday before it, my family was being told because of the brain swelling and because of the leaking of the spinal fluid, I couldn't fly, I couldn't leave, I couldn't leave to go back to the hospital in Chicago, to Chicago and then a different hospital. So that was Thursday but my family was being told, hey, make plans, prepare to stay well into the new year and we have a very risky surgery scheduled on Monday, the Monday after Christmas to do a craniectomy which is what they cut the skull open or in a science you can't go too deep because it will damage the brain, you can't cut too short because you won't cut enough. That was scheduled on Monday. Now Thursday night and into Friday, somehow just a miracle happened and I recovered well enough to fly and they rushed over a medical doctor from Toronto, Canada and he was going to look after me and shepherd my family back to Chicago and it's about, I mean it's a day's trip, including layovers, probably about 26 hours flight and so we left, we left on the morning of the 25th and it was that day when we were in the air, that's when the giant tsunami, the largest earthquake that Asia has ever experienced, causing the Boxing Day tsunami which has caused the biggest natural disaster of the 21st century, so we left within hours and I don't know, I mean they say there's nine lives, right, down three or four right now, so now we get to the recovery and it was becoming more apparent, my new reality, my new reality, my life and I couldn't smell and I can't hear out my left ear probably ever because it's brain damage, it's not your, it's not your drum damage, it's brain damage and I had massive peripheral blind spots in my eyes and my eyes were always constantly swollen, I would have seizures, but the biggest recovery I guess from my perspective is I couldn't even live with those things right, but the nurse, the medical team kept asking me to walk and I would refuse, I just wasn't in the mood to walk, I thought I needed to rest my brain, I was mentally exhausted, I was physically exhausted and I just had psychological, I just couldn't, I couldn't, I couldn't walk, I couldn't walk and I didn't know at the time, but if walking is a very complex motor activity that involves a lot of different parts of your brain, if you actually don't use that due to atrophy, your brain loses, it forgets how to walk and I didn't know that, I didn't know that, so anyway, so I kept saying no, no, you know, to the medical team and finally they had an intervention, they got my friends and my family and they, you know, they came and grandma would come in, mom come in, dad come in, brother, sister, I don't say no, I say no and the, then my roommate Tyler came in and he, you know, he looked me, he just looked me straight in the eye and he said, he said six words that were the most, the clearest words that I can remember from my whole recovery and he said, he said get up and walk, damn it and I did and I did and it was the hardest thing I've ever had to do and, but I had profound, had profound clarity in that moment where, I don't know what happened, I suddenly clicked, I realized that I could, I could remain a victim of my circumstances and take the, take the easy, take the easy route of not walking, just, you know, having, having, you know, hospital food delivered to me and, you know, like staying a wheelchair and, you know, like I could, I could do that or, or I could, I could actively choose to, to be relentless with progress and take the hard route of, of, of making a recovery and, and that's the route I chose and it was not easy, but those first couple of steps turned into, you know, days and, and weeks and months of, of, of physiotherapy, speech therapy, occupational therapy and I recovered quicker than most people imagined, but I, but I, I attributed it to, to my mindset, lessons in resilience and went back to uni, finished my software engineering degree and I just, I had a, I wanted to make up for lost time and so I took on, I took on another degree of business and marketing, graduated and I didn't want to take a traditional career route, I just, I just, I didn't feel, I didn't feel like I wanted that, so I took, I took the, the most physically demanding, most dangerous job that I could and that was a wire, what's called an oil field wire line engineer and we're basically in charge of taking special nuclear type equipment and putting into the earth, you know, thousands of, of meters into the earth, there's explosions and anyway, I almost, I almost had, I almost caused a, almost caused a environmental disaster and it really woke me up again and not as like I, I'm putting myself in danger, I'm putting the environment in danger, I'm putting other people in danger and I left that job and at that time there was a hurricane coming through Houston, Texas. I was, I was based on Mexico, Texas border and after some, after some soul searching, I went to help rebuild the city of Houston, Texas and while I was there, I got, you know, face to face with victims of natural disaster and I was compelled, I was compelled to build an online community where storm victims could be, could be connected to people that were willing to donate their time or donate their sofa or donate their silverware, right, I wanted them to build that community so this is a document on my LinkedIn, I'm only going to Google search, software for an online community and three came up, right and probably know what they are, Drupal, Joomla and WordPress. Because of my software engineering background, I studied the code base over a weekend, studied the code base of every single one of them and by far Drupal had the best code base and that's why, that's why I went with Drupal. Now over time, I got, you know, as I say, come for the code, stay for the community, right, like I got, I got more, I got more involved in Drupal, but so anyways, I discovered, I discovered Drupal in Houston. Life had me, it moved me back to Denver, Colorado and I felt compelled to give back. I felt, I felt like it was just a need to prove that the humanity was good and that we need, I love it, feel the power of that train. The, how are we doing on time? I need to fly through this, sorry guys. The, anyway, I was, I learned Drupal by teaching myself. I wanted to create a website, a digital experience. I was planning to walk 2,000 miles, Forest Gump style from Denver, Colorado, up to Toronto, to Ramston Park in Toronto, Canada and I was going to build just a digital experience where people could see where my journey was and they could donate or they wanted to walk with me for a certain couple kilometers or miles of good and they could join me. So that's how I started learning Drupal and that was in 2000, 2008 and since then, Drupal and I have kind of, you know, been taking, moved to Korea, moved to Boston, joined Aquia for a bit and now it also supported me in my, on moving back to New Zealand. All right, so let's, let's talk lessons of resilience. How are we doing on time? Five-ish, okay guys, sorry. So, why do we need to be resilient in the first place? Let's extract that from my, my story. Well, basically, I believe, you know, resilience is going to be crucial for us thriving in the future. Biology says, you know, it's not the strongest that survive, it's not the most, it's not the, it's not the smartest that survive but it's the most adaptable to the environment. That's the species that survives. Now, there's a couple, couple laws that are happening, right? Law of accelerator returns or related Moore's law, which means technology moves, the change of technology moves exponentially. And so it takes a long time for it to start but when it goes, it goes up. And I, you know, I think if we want to be successful in the future, we have to be resilient because change is going to, is, is happening around us right now. You know, Drupal's experience it was CK5, you know, the new symphony stuff. I mean, I don't yet change. Lessons of resilience. Okay, so I came up with four. These are, you know, develop your growth mindset. Make sure you have a support network and be willing to adapt to change and make sure to take care of yourself. Now, the interesting thing when I was putting this talk together, I actually realized that a lot of these lessons that I was applying to myself in my recovery actually pretty much almost one-on-one map up with the values of Drupal. Like, I just, I just couldn't believe this when I found this. And originally I was on the fence when I would include the slide, but I did the, and, and I was even more blown away when, when I was just, you know, attending some of these talks and these, these, these values of Drupal and these values of resilience kept appearing in talks. So this one we have a, you know, a gloriously labeled talk. I don't know if I've ever seen a longer talk label. So congratulations. But it, but it's exactly what it's, you know, it was great. Nice talk Griffin and Nathan. Dries, right, he gave that, he gave that example of, you know, when Jeremy Andrews and, you know, the slash dot effect and it totally crashed down the Drupal site. You know, Dries could have gave up. He could, but he had a growth mindset like, no, let's make this happen. All right. So adapt to change, right? The, in my story it's clear that I had to adapt to change. I couldn't hear. I had to really not walk. These questions will help you develop resilience, you know, what's, what's a change you're currently facing and how can you positively adapt to it? And, you know, how can you stay open and flexible when unexpected changes occur? Develop a growth mindset. You see this quite a bit. What does it actually mean? Well, it means, in my opinion, it means you believe, you trust in yourself that you can get better and you can improve yourself and you can improve the situation if you dedicate yourself to making it happen. And it's, it's, it's, it's choosing your attitude to be optimistic. So make sure that you, you know, try to be aware of your, your motions. And, you know, what did you learn from a recent setback or failure? How can you view a challenge as an opportunity to grow and, and how can you approach a new challenge with curiosity? That's pretty cool. How can you, how can you approach it with curiosity rather than with fear? And then build a support network. Please, please, this is, this is in, this is kind of important, right? Make sure that you establish your mentors, reach out to friends and family, you know, and connect with them. And there's a song's written about this, a lean on me, you know, like there's some, there's some wisdom in that song. The, you know, who can you turn to? Make sure you, make sure you know who you can turn to. And how can you can, how can you contribute? Maintaining this, make sure you maintain your support network because it, like a plant, it'll, it'll, it'll go away if you don't water it. Importantly, I think manage, you know, make sure to take care of yourselves. That's your mental health. That's your physical health. That's, you know, figure out what it is you like to do, have your hobbies, right? I know COVID's really changed up a lot of people's habits. And, you know, if you used to play the guitar, revisit that and, you know, make sure you have a healthy balance of working life. Okay, so that kind of, kind of wraps up this, this talk takeaways are, you know, from my experience, I've learned that we need to be, you know, have a growth mindset. We need to maintain a support network, adapt to change and take care of ourselves and those map to Drupal. You know, we face a lot of changes in our community. So let's, let's, let's get up and let's walk. Thank you guys.