Overview

What happened didn't define me. What I chose did. When Leigh van Baalen's son suffers catastrophic burns in a paragliding accident, her world fractures overnight. One moment she is a high-performing Senior ERP Transformation Leader navigating million-rand corporate system implementations. The next, she is living inside the relentless machinery of Burns ICU, balancing medical terminology, septic shock, skin grafts, dialysis, and impossible choices no mother should ever have to make. For 413 days, survival becomes the only objective. But survival comes at a cost. In this unflinchingly honest memoir, Leigh documents the psychological reality of prolonged trauma: the collapse of identity, the brutal exhaustion of caregiving, the breaking point between love and survival, and the slow reconstruction of a self that no longer fits the world she once knew. Survival to Sovereignty is not a polished story about overcoming adversity. It is a raw account of what happens when life strips away every illusion of control, and the quiet, ferocious process of rebuilding anyway. For readers drawn to deeply human stories of resilience, trauma, identity, and transformation, Leigh van Baalen offers something rare: Not inspiration. Truth.

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9781048302974

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Reviews

""I thought I would judge the breaking point. Instead, I understood it. Chapter 6 broke me, it was written with such honesty and emotional depth."" - ARC Reader ""Anyone who has lived through prolonged caregiving, trauma, or exhaustion will understand it. I wanted to come knock on your door and give you a hug. The book resonated with me very deeply. - ARC Reader and caregiver to a spouse with late-stage Alzheimer's ""Raw, devastating, and beautifully written. You took 413 days and distilled them into 150 pages. I couldn't put it down."" - ARC Reader ""This isn't just a memoir about survival. It's an unfiltered look at what prolonged trauma actually does to a person."" - ARC Reader

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