Dyfal donc a dyr y garreg

This was when I fell in love with chemistry. I truly believe that having a good teacher can influence the subjects you enjoy, and in turn, dictate your life choices. All the way through my GCSEs I’d been told that chemistry wasn’t my subject, that I should look to pursue a career in sport or languages.  Never one to back off from a challenge, I worked hard at proving this to be wrong, and when I went to sixth form I decided that I wanted to continue to take it alongside biology, French and maths. I was at a new school and now had a new chemistry teacher with a passion for the subject and who genuinely wanted his students to enjoy the subject as much as he did. I found myself enjoying it more than any of my other choices, even if it was still the hardest..

We travelled up to Glasgow as a team a week before the competition officially started to train, play a few warm up games and get used to village life. In our last training game against India, the day before the opening ceremony, I slipped and something locked in my knee. I got rushed straight back to the athletes’ village for a scan and found out that I had torn the cartilage in my knee and it had flipped and locked. That was it. I was going to have to go home for surgery. So on the morning of the opening ceremony, as the Welsh netballers were just arriving at Glasgow airport, I was waiting in a wheelchair for my flight back to Cardiff, completely and utterly heartbroken. I had worked so hard to get back from injury the previous year and I was going to have to start from scratch and do it all over again.

Finding a new focus

As any sportsperson will tell you, being injured can be a very lonely place. You go from being in that team environment, or competing on a circuit with the same familiar faces, to suddenly being alone. That’s the nature of sport, you’re always going to have someone there fighting to take your place. In total I was out for two years. Those were some of the most mentally tough years I’d ever had to go through. Sport had always been my stress release and after those days in the lab where everything had gone wrong, there was nothing I loved more than going to hit a hockey ball or going for a run. But as I went into my second year of university I was hit with the fact that I wasn’t going to be able to run until at least the new year, and I wasn’t going to be able to play hockey for a long time after that.

That was when I had to put my focus into something else. All I can say is I’m glad I did. Second year chemistry: what a treat! During this time away from hockey I was now able to focus on my studies, meet new people, go to the gym, and spend more time with my family on the weekends, something I’m forever grateful for. I constantly switched between fighting to get back on the pitch and not wanting to go back to hockey at all. While I went through the rehab process there were setbacks which constantly knocked me back and progress was slow. At times it felt like I was taking one step forward and two steps back, however the friends I’d made through my course now became my agony aunts, my motivators and my training partners. They helped keep things in perspective.

Never look back

I went away on placement and continued the rehab, but something wasn’t quite right with my knee and when I went to have a check-up with my consultant we discovered that the initial operation to save the cartilage hadn’t worked and I’d have to go back into surgery to have it removed. In the summer of 2016, two years after the injury, I was back in hospital having the cartilage removed.

I continued to work hard, balancing my work life with my training commitments and two months ago I had the email to say I had been selected for the team going to Gold Coast 2018. I was completely over the moon and rang my dad straight away. I think it’s easy to forget that your parents go through those highs and lows with you, and the happiness I could hear in my dad’s voice confirmed that not giving up had been the right decision. 

Perseverance pays off

On 5 April 2018, I walked onto the hockey pitch at the Gold Coast Hockey Centre alongside some of my best friends to represent Wales in our first match of the Commonwealth Games, against India. Of all the teams it could have been, our first match was against India. We ended up winning that first game 3-2, against a team ranked 16 places higher than us in the world rankings and making Welsh history as we did it. The whole games experience is one that I’ll never forget. When I look back on the two years I had off through injury, I realise that in the grand scheme of things, two years isn’t actually that long. I’ve been back playing for two years now and already achieved more than I thought I could. I’m glad I didn’t give up when I got upset or frustrated. I put things into perspective and realised that every opportunity I got, I would just make the most of and enjoy the process.  

This is an attitude I now take into everything I do. These days there are so many opportunities available to us through work, sport, and in general life, and I think it’s important to make the most of every chance we get. If I had just given up after Glasgow I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to go to Gold Coast and I would always have been wondering “what if”. The hard work was definitely worth it.

Eloise Laity works as a publishing editor on our materials, interfaces and engineering journals. Find out more about Royal Society of Chemistry publishing and our publishing editor roles on our website.