France to the Finish Line: Shona Muckert
Over the weekend, I had the pleasure of speaking with Shona Muckert for The Limb Shift, my podcast dedicated to the lived experience of limb loss and limb difference. We ended up talking for much longer than planned. “I love to chat,” she joked, and I’m so glad we did.
I’m really looking forward to sharing our full discussion later this year, once the podcast officially debuts on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube during October, co-inciding with Amputee Awareness Week in Australia. In the meantime, I wanted to share a glimpse into Shona’s journey and some of the heartfelt wisdom she shared with me.
For Shona Muckert, life at 25 was physically active, and full of adventure. She was “living the dream” in France, working and skiing in the Alps after a stint in Edinburgh, enjoying what she describes as “the time of my life on the ski fields”. But when her beloved granddad grew terminally ill back in Australia, she made the choice to cut her season two weeks short.
“I felt like I wanted to be there, you know, not just for my grandparents, but for my family.”
Just weeks after returning home to be with her family, disaster struck on a road near Murgon, a small town in Queensland. Driving home at night after dropping off a friend, the back wheels of her vehicle caught loose gravel around a bend, sending the car rolling four or five times into a paddock.
Trapped in the wreckage overnight for nearly twelve hours before being spotted by a passerby, Shona suffered severe crush injuries. When she finally reached the hospital and awoke in the ICU, a nurse broke the catastrophic news: both of her legs had to be amputated—her right below the knee, and her left high above the knee. At the time, doctors delivered a grim outlook, warning her, “you probably will never walk again”.
Shona’s spirit kicked in. During her early recovery in the burns ward, when a deflating hospital bed left her stranded without support, she demanded a change. The nurse unit manager gave her a dose of “tough love,” telling her: “Right, if we’re going to change this, then you need to learn to transfer and you need to learn toget up out of that bed.” Shona embraced the challenge.
“I’m clearly very stubborn and pig-headed… I said, ‘Righty o, let’s go with this'”.
Determined not to let her life grind to a halt, Shona returned to work and began driving again just two months after her accident. “I think it was the independence for me,” she explains. “I just wanted to be independent again… I just wasn’t prepared to let it keep me down”.
The internal adjustment was a slow process. “It took three years to sort of fully accept my disabled life,” Shona shares. She wrestled with PTSD, phantom pain, deep thoughts, and public stares, often crying herself to sleep while hiding her struggle from her family. To rebuild her identity, she committed to eight years of counselling with a therapist to navigate grief, relationships, and motherhood.
A pivotal turning point arrived ten years post-accident when Shona discovered Osseointegration—a revolutionary surgery where a titanium implant is inserted directly into the bone. Supported by a massive community fundraising effort in her hometown, she underwent the procedure with surgeon Dr Munjed Al Muderis.
Learning to walk again on a high-tech Genium robotic knee was an intense, joyous rehabilitation process. During two weeks at Eden Rehab, Shona found a supportive community and newfound hope.
“I was in a totally different headspace and oh my gosh, I just laughed. I laughed all the time. Like, I remember saying to someone, ‘I want to stay here longer. This is so much fun.'”
When she cleared a physical obstacle in the gym for the first time, “the whole gym erupted into yahooing and clapping… it was just the best feeling because, you know, they were just all so supportive and it was just fun”.
Beyond her physical rehabilitation, Shona found an outlet in sport, which she credits for keeping her going through her darkest times. After taking up wheelchair basketball and wheelchair tennis, she discovered outrigger canoeing—a passion she has pursued for over 14 years. Her dedication culminated in elite success at the 2016 World Sprint Titles, where she competed as both a V1 paddler and part of an OC6 crew, securing five gold medals.
She has since evolved from a paddler to a steerer, describing the water as a place where she can experience beauty and freedom. Her involvement in the sport has become a way to pay it forward:
“I’ve introduced people to outrigging… it’s just a beautiful sport with lots of different age brackets”.
Shona has also gathered profound life lessons that she hopes will guide others navigating the aftermath of life-altering injuries, like amputation. Central to her advice is the importance of emotional honesty; she strongly urges people to grant themselves grace, noting,
“Allow yourself to feel what you’re feeling in the moment and know that there’s no right or wrong way to feel or act, or know what’s right or what’s wrong”. This emotional work, she explains, is inseparable from the work of building a new life.
She also emphasizes the power of language in shaping how one is perceived and how one perceives oneself. Rather than minimizing her contributions, she has learned to assert her value: “I don’t say I’m just an admin officer. I say I’m an admin officer… because my job is just as important as everybody else’s jobs”.
This extends to her interactions with the public. When faced with the curiosity of children, Shona refuses to deflect. Instead, she chooses transparency:
“I now try to think the only way that these kids are going to learn how to understand and treat people with disabilities… is to actually speak to them and say, ‘Hey, this is what’s happened’… I try to have that positive sort of spin on it now where I’m hoping I’m educating the next generation”.
Ultimately, for Shona, the journey is about cultivating true community and belonging. By surrounding herself with supportive friends and sports teammates who see her simply as Shona, she has found the peace she once sought.
“A lot of my friends, they don’t see me as someone who’s in a wheelchair,” she says warmly. “They see me as Shona, and half the time they forget about the wheelchair”.
Today, more than two decades after her accident, Shona leads a full life, balancing her work at Caloundra Hospital with her responsibilities as a mother to her son, Quinn. She views her experience through a lens of profound gratitude and humour.
“I definitely think I feel that everything in life happens for a reason. Sometimes I haven’t quite worked out what those reasons are. I tell people that I’m still here because I have lots of people to annoy… I don’t need anything grand or fancy… I just love doing what I’m doing.”
For now, she finds joy in the simple things: walking her dog, Millie, paddling on the water, and continuing to navigate her “disabled life” with the same stubborn, humorous, and resilient spirit that has carried her for over two decades.