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Survival to Sovereignty: Rising, Rebuilding, and Reclaiming the life I choose
Paperback
ISBN13: 9781048302974
Publisher: Leigh Van Baalen
Published: Jun 29 2026
Pages: 180
Weight: 0.47
Height: 0.41 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
What happened didn't define me. What I chose did.
When Leigh van Baalen's son suffers catastrophic burns in a paragliding accident, her world fractures overnight.
One moment she is a high-performing Senior ERP Transformation Leader navigating million-rand corporate system implementations. The next, she is living inside the relentless machinery of Burns ICU, balancing medical terminology, septic shock, skin grafts, dialysis, and impossible choices no mother should ever have to make.
For 413 days, survival becomes the only objective.
But survival comes at a cost.
In this unflinchingly honest memoir, Leigh documents the psychological reality of prolonged trauma: the collapse of identity, the brutal exhaustion of caregiving, the breaking point between love and survival, and the slow reconstruction of a self that no longer fits the world she once knew.
Survival to Sovereignty is not a polished story about overcoming adversity. It is a raw account of what happens when life strips away every illusion of control, and the quiet, ferocious process of rebuilding anyway.
For readers drawn to deeply human stories of resilience, trauma, identity, and transformation, Leigh van Baalen offers something rare:
Not inspiration.
Truth.
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