Woman feels pain in eye and is taken to hospital for surgery (Exclusive)

Alicia Beveridge never considered herself a spiritual person. That’s starting to change.

The 41-year-old Australian was at the peak of his physical health. She has been working as a fitness instructor for the past 15 years and seven years ago helped launch a franchise of fitness studio Bally’s in her home country. But she was also stuck in a bit of a rut, going through what she calls a “really bad breakup” and wondering if she still loved her job.

“I was so lost,” she told PEOPLE in an interview. “But when you work in the fitness industry, you always have to have the attitude that you’re going to be OK.”

After noticing unusual symptoms a few weeks ago, Beveridge went to the hospital with low expectations. Then, on her seventh anniversary at Bally’s, she had to undergo life-changing brain surgery to remove a cavernoma (a leaking blood vessel in her brain) to save her life. Now she thinks it was fate.

Seven weeks after major surgery, Beveridge, who has been sharing her life with her nearly 15,000 followers on Instagram, sat down with PEOPLE for a wide-ranging interview about the surgery, how she slowly began to get back on her feet during her recovery, and the new perspective she gained on life as a result of the experience.

Beveridge’s initial symptoms were nothing unusual.

It started with a headache, so mild that she couldn’t even compare it to a migraine, but it lasted about two weeks. Afterwards, her vision in her right eye became slightly distorted, but she thought this was just an “accidental eye infection.” She was seen by an eye doctor and told to wear an eye patch before going to the hospital for another test.

But the next day at the hospital, doctors concluded that both symptoms were related to brain growth, which was putting pressure on the optic nerve and filling the brain with blood. She needed immediate surgery.

“I couldn’t accept what they told me,” Beveridge tells PEOPLE. “I kept trying to defend myself by showing pictures of myself on Instagram, like, ‘I just did 200km hip thrusts at the gym two days ago.'”

When she woke up from surgery, everything had changed. Once a woman who could lead multiple intense training classes a week, Beveridge could no longer see, walk or even speak.

During her first few days recovering in the ICU, she needed help with almost every basic task, including showering and washing her hair. “I felt like I was in this body, but it wasn’t my body,” she says.

She began to feel incredibly isolated. When her friends came to visit her in the hospital, she felt envious and even a little angry that they had all the mental abilities they had while relearning how to form basic words.

“I was like, ‘I want you to stick in my head for five minutes and see how weird this is,'” she said candidly. “And I was so scared that I was going to stay there. I was terrified that I would never be the same again. Being dependent was so foreign to me, because I’m fiercely independent.”

Over the course of several days in the ICU and then two-and-a-half weeks in the hospital’s neurology ward, Beveridge saw one specialist after another in an effort to regain his speech and vision. Social workers also visited her and they gave her some tough love so she could finally start accepting life after surgery.

“They were like, ‘Unless you start surrendering, this is going to be really hard,'” she recalls. “It’s your past. It’s past, but you have to accept where you are, because if you don’t, you’re going to fight this and you’re not going to be able to move forward.”

Very slowly, she began to make progress. She has started forming sentences again, but still occasionally stumbles over the words. She eventually started taking 20-minute walks multiple times a day. And although she has regained her sight, even if accepted, she will not be able to fully regain peripheral vision in one eye.

Even after she was discharged from hospital and continued her recovery at home, adjusting to a sedentary lifestyle was incredibly difficult.

“I’ve always been a hustler, a doer, a doer. I’ve never really been a person who just lays around,” she says. “So it was really hard for me to just accept and surrender and be patient.”

But as she settled into her new reality, Beveridge said she began to see things a little differently. “It’s like everything I had to learn, something was trying to teach me.”

For example, Beveridge says that before the surgery, she had always defined her identity as a “Barry girl,” but previously she was unable to understand that that had been “taken away.” It forced her to consider larger existential questions: “Who am I?”

“I loved Bally’s, but I stayed there because I felt comfortable,” she continues. “After I became a master instructor, I thought, ‘Okay, I’ll stay here for now,’ rather than starting a new chapter and starting at the foot of a new mountain.”

In the end, Beveridge said she is grateful for the experience that allowed her to expand her horizons, despite all the hardships she had to go through along the way.

“It’s not dramatic, but I feel like I’ve been given a little bit of a second chance,” she says. “I was taken to a state of absolute terror, but I came back and looked at life a little differently. For example, I want to be more mindful, instead of spending my life not thinking about what I want to organize or what I want to do.”

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I’m still thinking about the next chapter.

“Neurosurgeons often tell all their patients not to make drastic decisions, but it’s natural to want to do so after brain surgery,” she says. Instead, she embraces the unknown. “I try to tolerate total uncertainty.”

But she knows she wants to use her platform to advocate for other head injury survivors. A few weeks after her surgery, she shaved her head completely to raise money for Synapse Australia, an organization that provides resources for people with neurological conditions. (A GoFundMe she started has raised more than $12,000.)

“I think it’s drastic. Maybe I shouldn’t have done it,” she laughed about her hair. “But before this happened, I was probably more superficial. But now I don’t care.”