Adam Smith’s ordinary routine came to a sudden halt on a drive home on the New South Wales Central Coast, when what felt like a minor illness quickly escalated into a fight for his life:
“As I was driving home, I felt the shakes, a fever coming on, and I thought this is actually going to be worse than I thought.”
He went home, prepared a freezer load of ice blocks, set up a blanket on the lounge, and passed out—marking “pretty much the last thing I remember” before sepsis tore through his body.
Unknown to him, he spent the next 24 hours in extreme delirium before friends found him on the floor. He was rushed to Wyong Hospital and then transferred to Royal Prince Alfred Hospital (RPA) in Sydney, where doctors placed him on an ECMO heart-lung bypass machine as his organs failed:
“My heart and lungs stop working. My kidneys shut down… my skin started to die. I ended up bloated like a balloon… My skin went purple… where the tissue became necrotic.”
After surviving a month-long coma, Adan awoke to a devastating reality. Due to tissue necrosis, surgeons had to wait for the “line of demarcation” before amputating both of his hands and both of his legs.
The initial shock of losing all four limbs triggered deep grief. He grieved his hobbies, his physical job in youth community work, and his independence:
“Like no hands, no photography anymore… No more gym, no more boxing. Good luck to going back in the ocean again.”
However, a dark mental image of his future forced a pivotal mindset shift. He pictured himself sitting in a unit alone, miserable and angry at the world:
“I just thought whatever I have to do to not be that, I’ll do that… I thought, ‘nah, stuff it. I want to be part of life. Still do.'”
This decision marked the start of a profound physical and mental transformation. Rather than waiting for full recovery, Adan began reinventing his approach to daily life while still in hospital. He started strapping resistance bands to his hospital bed frame to rebuild his strength, and soon took wheelchair taxis to his local gym:
“We just went around the gym and found any sort of straps we could find… I’d have to strap cables up to the ends of my stumps and do one side at a time… I was so overjoyed to be back, it felt like getting a little piece of myself back again.”
Reclaiming his social life required equal resourcefulness. Guided by a supportive doctor who secured him a power wheelchair, Adam began exploring Newtown pubs. When he couldn’t hold cutlery, he and a friend improvised:
“I said, ‘let’s duct tape this sucker into my hand.’ So we did that. So every time I’d go to the pub, they’d just bring the duct tape out for me.”
Encounters with strangers helped reframe his mindset. When a local bouncer noticed Adam rushing back to the hospital out of fear and self-consciousness, the bouncer challenged his anxieties directly:
“He goes, ‘who cares, mate?’ … What that conversation did is (take) the sting out of that for me… When I hear myself say ‘what if’ negatively, I pull myself up and I go, ‘okay, what if that does happen? What’s the worst thing that’s going to happen?'”
That shifted mindset allowed him to travel solo to South Australia to surprise his terminally ill father for one final visit, overcoming every logistical hurdle along the way.
After seven months in hospital, Adam returned home to rebuild his life from the ground up. He collaborated with specialists to design heavy-rated clamps for his prosthetics, enabling him to lift dumbbells and bench press again.
To tackle photography—a passion he thought he had lost—he switched from film to digital camera gear, quickly figuring out how to operate it without hands.
He even worked with a carpenter to build a custom timber station at the foot of his bed so he could don and doff his prosthetic legs independently:
“Sometimes if you really want something and you really want to do it… don’t think about it too much. Get have a crack at it, and once you start, you’ll probably find it’s actually easier than you thought.”
Adam’s transformation extended into a new career path. Unable to return to his physically demanding role with at-risk youth, he began public speaking at schools, health conferences, and corporate events.
Drawing inspiration from pop culture icons like Rocky, he uses his platform to inspire others facing sudden trauma and to raise awareness about sepsis:
“It ain’t over till it’s over. There’s still life in (me)… The world’s going to move on. I can either be a part of it in whatever capacity I can, or I can just sit back in my sadness… I want to be part of life.”
