183: The Getting Real with Hilary Show with Hilary Burns - Episode 11183: The Getting Real with Hilary Show with Hilary Burns - Episode 11
UK Health Radio Podcast
Hilary Burns talks with author Rebecca (Becky) Galli about her journey through family tragedy, special needs parenting and sudden paralysis. The conversation focuses on practical resilience, honest grief and finding support while living a life that wasn’t chosen.
42:05•11 Jul 2026
Loss, Paralysis and Possibility: Becky Galli Gets Real About Resilience
Episode Overview
- A strong, loving family foundation can help you withstand later losses.
- Reinvesting the love you feel for someone who has died into new relationships or roles can ease grief.
- Taking care of yourself first makes you more able to genuinely support others.
- Examining your resources and choosing carefully who is "in your boat" turns asking for help into a strength.
- Following "parallel paths" – planning for both hopeful and difficult outcomes – keeps you moving through uncertainty.
“"Let your love be larger than the situation, than who's right or wrong."”
What drives someone to seek a life beyond sheer survival after everything has gone wrong? This episode of the UK Health Radio Podcast follows Rebecca (Becky) Galli as she shares how repeated loss reshaped her life, her body and her outlook. You’ll hear Becky talk about her "charmed" early years in a close-knit, loving family and how that foundation helped her stay steady when tragedy struck.
The death of her teenage brother, the move of her parents to a new community and watching them grieve without falling apart all became lessons she didn’t realise she was learning at the time. From there, the story widens into parenting four children, two with significant special needs, miscarriages, and a marriage stretched thin by constant medical crises.
Becky describes the anger, sadness and sheer exhaustion of raising children with epilepsy and autism, and how therapy, spiritual support (even while feeling furious with God) and practical help kept her going. The episode then turns to her paralysis from transverse myelitis, just nine days after her divorce. Becky explains her "parallel paths" approach: holding realistic hope of recovery while also planning for the possibility that she might never walk again.
That meant exercise and supplements on one side, ramps and home adaptations on the other, all underpinned by the idea that motion matters, even when certainty is gone. Throughout, she stresses the importance of examining your resources and knowing "who is in your boat" – the people you can trust with the hard stuff – and the surprising strength in asking for help.
Her father’s advice, "take care of yourselves", and her own message to her daughter about letting love be larger than any situation, give the episode its emotional heart. If you’re facing grief, disability, special needs parenting or just feeling worn down by life, this conversation offers honest company, practical ideas and a reminder that you don’t have to do tough seasons alone.
What might change for you if you let your love – and your support network – be larger than your circumstances?
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