When Tomorrow Comes

Leigh Sales on finding strength amid disaster.

- Rachelle Unreich

EVERY NIGHT, when I anchor the ABC’s current affairs program 7.30, it’s likely that at least one person on the show will be sharing the story of the worst day of their life. Disasters, accidents, unexpected tragedies — these things are the mainstays of the news. Reporting them has been my job for 25 years, and the effect of it has been to make me somewhat anxious: When will it be my turn? Why would this happen to them and not to me? Why wasn’t I the person in the Lindt cafe on the day of a terrorist attack or on a ride at Dreamworld the day it malfunctioned?

In 2014, a series of events began to unfold in my personal life that made me even more fearful that my number was up. When my second child was born in February of that year, things went horribly wrong. I had a uterine rupture, meaning that my uterus tore and haemorrhaged into my abdominal cavity. My baby was deprived of oxygen and born via an emergency caesarean with me under general anaesthetic, and I woke up in a high-dependency unit, three blood transfusions and emergency surgery later, with tubes coming out everywhere and the baby nowhere to be seen. He was in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. We barely survived that, and then six weeks later, we were back in hospital when the baby contracted viral meningitis. Straight after that, my two-year-old started displaying signs of health problems, prompting years of medical interventions. Then, in the midst of it all, my marriage of 20 years fell apart.