About seven months ago, I had a little slip that turned out to to have big and long lasting consequences: I broke my wrist in over a dozen places and had to have it surgically pieced back together in a four hour procedure involving a fist-full of metal.
I was only about three months into my role at Hume Brophy when I found myself emailing our CEO, Conall McDevitt, to let him know I’d had an accident whilst on holiday in Greece and thought treatment might cause my return to work to be delayed by a few days.
What I didn’t know then was that my road to recovery would be a long one involving months of indescribable pain, opiate clouded days, and innumerable visits to doctors, physiotherapists, acupuncturists, and a slight misadventure involving an Oriental “doctor” with a jar of leeches.
I have to admit that, alongside the fear that I’d never move my hand again, I was worried about my job. I hadn’t been Hume Brophy long enough to even meet everyone by that stage, much less make much of an impact. But I soon realised I needn’t worry about the latter as, each day, colleagues made my hellish ordeal a bit more bareable by picking up the slack, offering sympathetic words, and proactively reaching out to see how I was doing.
Six months on, I’ve recently recovered some movement of my hand and wrist, with little improvements in mobility apparent with each progressive week. It’s still unclear to what extent I will ultimately recover but what is certain is that, whatever path that road might take, my colleagues have got my back.
I can’t quantify what that has meant to me over the past seven months, but it is something that makes me so thankful that I joined a firm that genuinely looks after it’s people, even when the unexpected happens, and am surrounded daily by colleagues who genuinely care.
Whilst I don’t recommend that new joiners follow my footsteps to test this out for themselves, I certainly do believe they’ll discover that Hume Brophy is a special place to build a career and we’re advertising 8 open roles (with more to come) due to accelerating growth…