Doctor in a wheelchair: How a spinal injury changed Olivia Ong’s life
- Olivia Ong, a Singapore-raised doctor, was paralysed in a 2008 car accident but regained partial mobility through rehabilitation.
- Her memoir, Back On My Feet, explores self-compassion and overcoming high-achiever pressures.
- The Melbourne-based doctor advocates for nervous system regulation in chronic pain treatment and promotes kindness to oneself.
AI generated
SINGAPORE – A car accident in 2008 left Olivia Ong with a back broken in half, months before she would have started a posting in spinal rehabilitation medicine in Australia.
The Singapore-raised doctor’s goals changed from helping others regain physical function to practising medicine in a wheelchair and eventually learning to walk with aids.
She is now a pain physician and specialist in rehabilitation medicine in Melbourne and has just released a memoir, Back On My Feet. Published by HarperCollins in Australia in February, the book will be released in Singapore on Aug 13 and retails at $35.95 before GST.
On a video call from Melbourne, Ong, 46, says the book is a thank you to the people who helped her get back on her feet, physically and emotionally. “It’s a love letter to the people who stood by me when I literally couldn’t stand on my own,” she says.
They include her husband, who works in business systems development, her family and friends, her doctors and physiotherapists and other allied healthcare professionals.
She also wrote the book as a love letter to her younger self, whose sense of self-worth was tied to how far she could push herself academically and at work.
“My parents never pressured me to do medicine. It was self-inflicted,” she says with a laugh. Her parents are Singapore permanent residents from Indonesia, and Ong was also a Singapore PR from 1987, later becoming an Australian citizen in 2009.
She says that at school in Singapore and during medical training in Australia, it was expected for students like her to aim high, overwork and not show any vulnerability.
“It was not easy to love myself or be kind to myself because that’s not the environment I grew up in,” she says. “When I was in primary school, the teachers were always shaming us and comparing us with one another. It was not great.”
From doctor to patient
As a child, Ong was enthralled by the anatomical models at the Singapore Science Centre, and by hospital drama ER (1994 to 2009). Her decision to aim for a medical career was cemented after shadowing a doctor who was a family friend, and volunteering at old folks’ homes in Singapore.
After completing her A levels at Raffles Junior College, she started medical school in Melbourne and decided to be a neurosurgeon. She met her Malaysia-born husband John in 2005 at her local church and they married in 2006.
A year later, she switched her focus to rehabilitation medicine because she liked the holistic approach taken to improve a patient’s quality of life.
In September 2008, Ong went to the Royal Talbot Rehabilitation Centre for a tutorial, months ahead of starting a stint there in neurorehabilitation. A patient lost control of his car in the carpark there and slammed into Ong and her friend, who were both standing near a safety embankment.
Ong bore the worst of the accident. She had a burst fracture of the L2 vertebra in her spine and a dislocation between the L1 and L2 vertebrae.
In lay terms, her back was broken in half and her spinal cord was compressed, affecting the nerves to the legs.
She had to have emergency surgery to stabilise the spine. A few weeks later, she entered the rehab ward at the Talbot as a patient, instead of a doctor.
Doctor in a wheelchair
She spent some three months in rehabilitation at the hospital, learning to move around in a wheelchair, and to move herself on and off the wheelchair.
She became able to take some steps with assistance. Both legs were fitted with braces for support, but it was still easier to get around on the wheelchair. After returning home, she continued physiotherapy and hydrotherapy to build strength and mobility.
She returned to work in August 2009, starting with a post in rehabilitation services at Caulfield Hospital.
“I was driven by the desire or the obsession to prove to my colleagues that I could still do the job as a rehab doctor,” she says. “Even though I’m in a wheelchair, I’ve still got a brain.”
Despite an understanding boss and welcoming colleagues, her existence challenged unspoken norms about what a doctor should look like.
Hospital corridors, doorways and lifts were often a tight squeeze. In a wheelchair, Ong found it awkward to join groups of standing colleagues casually chatting in the break room.
She heard about the now-defunct Project Walk in San Diego, which had a different approach to rehabilitation for people with spinal injuries.
In Australia, her physiotherapy was based on accommodating her physical condition, but Project Walk aimed to restore function through intensive, activity-based therapy. It was more challenging in many ways, including by discouraging the use of braces.
Ong and her husband flew to the United States in 2010 for three months, and she returned every year until 2013. She progressed from being able to stand independently to being able to walk short distances with crutches and no braces. She built muscle strength in the gym and also a regimen of clinical pilates.
She now walks with two walking sticks and wears an ankle brace on her right foot to compensate for droop.
She continues to do hydrotherapy, clinical pilates and work with a trainer formerly from Project Walk.
While she does not suffer nerve pain, she does feel discomfort and back pain from muscular imbalance or weakness.
When travelling, or planning a long day out, she now happily settles into a wheelchair.
“If you read the book, you know I hated the wheelchair. But almost 20 years later, I’m older and I love it now,” she says. “It helps me conserve my energy and I can enjoy shopping because my hands are free to touch things and carry things. I don’t want to be walking around and unable to carry anything.”
The one downside is that when she is in a wheelchair, people tend to address their remarks to her husband rather than her. “At the airport, they’ll keep talking to him and just ignore me,” she says.
Life as an incomplete paraplegic
Ong is a walking paraplegic, unlike the late American actor Christopher Reeve, whose spinal cord injury led to him being paralysed and needing a ventilator to breathe.
“People think that paraplegics are chained to the wheelchair forever, but there’s a grey area of people with incomplete spinal cord injuries,” she says. “I classify us as incomplete paraplegics because identity-wise, we don’t feel complete.”
Ong can feel the urge to urinate or empty her bowels, but needs a catheter to help with urination. She has also been on laxatives since the accident to help soften her stools.
She walks with a “significant limp”, though that does not stop her from travelling, attending concerts – she is a big fan of the K-pop boy band BTS – and working full time. She spends two days a week in private practice and two days a week at hospitals.
From her own experience, she knows that patients with chronic pain need relief from the agony first, before working on helpful habits such as cognitive behavioural therapy.
They come in angry, distressed or so numb that they are unable to articulate their symptoms. Their nervous system is dysregulated, which can lead to other problems such as sleeplessness.
“They come in with a variety of medical conditions. I tell my patients we need to tackle one thing at a time, that’s how I can best help them,” she says. “You have to calm the nervous system first and then they can work on other things.”
Developing self-compassion
Nervous system regulation is her current interest and she has her own business advising doctors with burnout under her brand The Heart Centered Doctor.
Healthcare workers, especial