.”
A book she’d read three years prior by an American volcanologist Stanley Williams, who had himself survived an eruption, sprang to mind as the volcano erupted, she says.
“It’s not like I’d read it the week before or anything silly like that, so it was strange to have it emerge in that moment so clear and so profoundly helpful in those 90-odd seconds that this was all unfolding.
White Island guide recounts fatal eruption Nine To Noon
“To hear Stanley Williams’ words about what to do in a pyroclastic surge, it was just the most bizarre sort of situation to have all that come back to me.”
She’s since re-read the book and credits it with helping her decision-making that day.
Waghorn urged her group of tourists to run, take shelter, and then injured and in pain herself, she got them to the wharf where they had a chance of rescue back to the mainland.
Waghorn’s life-threatening burns saw her put in an induced coma and undergo multiple surgeries. It was a drawn-out physical recovery, but it was the mental struggles that followed which proved the most overwhelming challenge of her recovery, she says.
Kelsey Waghorn learning to feed herself in hospital.
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She tells her story in the memoir, Surviving White Island and Everything That Came After.
Her recovery post-eruption was slow and painful, she had multiple graft surgeries and suffered nerve damage, but as she began to physically heal, she wasn’t prepared for the psychological damage that began to emerge.
She was getting psychiatric care in hospital, and after discharge, and so assumed she had the mental aspect of her recovery under control, she says.
Things reached a low point for Waghorn towards the end of 2021.
“It just got to the point where it was like okay, nothing’s working here, I need to find something else to do because everything’s falling apart, relationships are falling apart, I hated myself, I was at the lowest point I’ve ever been and it was a shock to me that all this was happening and it was just, yeah, unbelievable.”
But through further counseling and her own research, a greater understanding of the impact trauma has on the brain helped her heal, she says.
“There’s nothing more reassuring than being told that what you’re going through is normal when for a year or more you think that you’re abnormal and this is not normal and you’re not getting better.”
It was freeing to hear her mental problems were unremarkable for someone who had experienced what she had, she says.
“I dropped a spoon and bawled my eyes out, and it was like everything was a threat and so learning that my brain and my nervous system was just stuck there because that fight had kept me alive multiple times, in hospital, during the eruption and the things that had happened before it.
“Learning that that’s exactly what had happened and all I had to do was just teach my brain okay, that’s not what we do all the time, we just have to do it like this and you can bring that back out when it’s actually viable.”
Kelsey Waghorn and her beloved rescue dog, River.
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She now treats every birthday as a bonus she says, and it’s driven her to embrace life fully.
“I obviously wish that the eruption had never happened, but what I’ve made of my life now, I wouldn’t change for the world.”
She has reconnected with her love of adventure, making a trip to the Antarctic in 2023 among other adventures.
“It’s nice to have that zest for life back and want to really push and explore and do heaps and see stuff and just do all these amazing things.
“People are like, you should probably take a rest day and I’m like, no, I want to go do all these really amazing things because I can and I’m here to do it and I’m able to do it and I fought really hard to be in this position, so I’m not going to take that for granted.”
White Island guide recounts fatal eruption Nine To Noon
