I Shouldn’t Be Alive

THE SCARS ARE STILL THERE FOR THREE WOMEN WHO HAD CLOSE-TO-DEATH EXPERIENCES, HAVING LOOKED DEATH IN THE FACE AND CHEATED IT. THEY COULD CONSIDER THEMSELVES UNFORTUNATE SOULS, BUT INSTEAD, THEY TELL ALISON BEZZINA THEY ARE LUCKY AND GRATEFUL TO BE ALIVE.

Brenda Agius (31) Hairdresser

Brenda Agius doesn’t remember much of that tragic day in 1996, but she’s been carrying a heavy broken heart ever since.

‘It’s been over twelve years now, but the guilt has only just started to subside. I was a typical 18 year old at the time and like most people my age I loved a good time. I had been dating Sandro (25) for a few months and life was good. We were both motorbike enthusiasts and that year we decided to take part in a charity bike ride. I was a pillion whilst Sandro was driving. It was a beautiful day and we were both so happy. We were driving down from Rabat with another two hundred bikes with two people on each bike. Suddenly, as we reached the Mriehel Bypass, something happened. All I remember is some kind of impact, and then waking up to find myself lying face up on the street. People were crowded around me and calling my name. I stood up with blood streaming down my face and despite having suffered an epileptic fit, a broken nose, multiple facial injuries, kidney damage and whiplash, I started to look for my missing teeth. I was frantic. A few seconds later somebody drew our attention to Sandro’s body which had been hurtled across the street. We rushed to him and found him in a very bad state. Despite the ambulance arriving very quickly and despite everyone’s efforts, he died a couple of hours later in hospital. I never got to see him alive again, but I’m glad I went against my doctor’s orders and signed myself out of hospital to see him in the mortuary and to go to the funeral.

I hate the fact that I cannot remember what caused the accident. Some say that just before it happened, Sandro turned his head to speak to me, he lost control slightly and the front wheel hit the centre strip catapulting the both of us towards an electricity pole. He got the full impact of the pole against his face and body, whilst I landed on him and then bounced back onto the street. This is the only version of the facts that I’ve ever heard, so have to live with the thought that he probably ended his life because he tried to speak to me. I also believe that he saved my life by cushioning my impact against the pole with his own body. Some of his friends are clearly of the opinion that I should have been the one who died, and I don’t blame them. Sandro was such a beautiful person, that I too think that way sometimes.

I was young and I did not react very. Instead of staying home where my family, who being all trained nurses, could have taken very good care of me, I rebelled and left the house. I conscientiously hung around Sandro’s group of friends for two whole years because I felt that they were the only ones with whom I could share the pain. At one point I started seeing another guy. He was older than me and I spent seven years with him. I never mentioned Sandro during those years and I had somehow managed to drive that tragic scene to the deepest part of the back of my mind, but once the relationship ended, it all came pouring back to me.

This year, thanks to his brother’s encouragement and a lot of self therapy, I actually considered taking part in the charity bike ride again. I was about to join in but in the last minute, fearing that I might be the cause of another accident I chickened out. Although I am not afraid of motorbikes per se, and I am more a believer of destiny than fear, I still didn’t feel up to joining this year’s ride.So instead of doing what I always do, which is to wallow at home, this year I went to the cemetery. I cleaned Sandro’s tombstone, sat there and and talked to him for hours. At one point I felt him trying to tell me that I was being stupid, to get over it, and to go out and enjoy myself.

I looked death in the face and cheated it. Every morning when I wake up I feel grateful to be alive, and because of my close to death experience I do not take life for granted. Sandro’s loss was a tragic one, but life is precious and we should all try to make the most out of it.

Ashenka Padayachee (26) (Retail, Sales & Procurement Consultant.)

Ashenka’s job has her travelling all over the globe. Last year she came to Malta as a consultant and a year earlier she was in Papua New Guinea- a country well known for head hunting and violent crimes. ‘I thought it would be OK since the company I was working for normally employed bodyguards and security personal for expats, but that year had already started off on a bad note. I was bitten by dogs in January, and I had contracted Malaria in March, and now, the company had not hired security.

A few months after I first arrived, two of my close friends were leaving Papa New Guienea so we had a farewell party for them at one of the clubs in the area. We left for home at about 2am and although this was not the first time that we were driving at this time of the night, as a safety precaution we decided to follow each other in different cars. I was the designated driver so my boyfriend and I got into the car and I started to drive home. Another couple of friends were following us in another car. There were little to no street lights at the time. The place was in complete darkness from 10pm onwards, and there were mostly informal settlements with no electricity. We knew that there had been some attempted hijackings and opportunist crimes in the area.

As I took a narrow turn off to get us back onto the main road, a massive boulder rolled onto the road. I swerved to avoid it and hit the embankment. Luckily the other couple were not following us too closely and managed not to hit us. Suddenly men came out of nowhere and started running towards us. Initially I thought they had come out to help us but then they started shaking the car violently. I started screaming and shouting at them until a rock came crashing through the windscreen and another through the driver’s window. Before I knew what was going on my boyfriend (David) was being dragged out of the car and after a while so was I. They took our wallets, watches, phones and anything they could get hold of. We were surrounded by at least 15 men who kept shouting and pointing knives and guns at us. In the meantime, with bullets being shot at them, our friends, who were in the other car, managed to drive off to get the police.

Once they had taken everything we had, they ran off into the darkness and into the settlement below the road. David and I ran back to the car and tried to reverse out but the car would not move. Suddenly someone was grabbing me by the hair. They were back. They said “you didn’t give us enough money, so we take the girl.” That’s when I started to fight back until one of them pulled me out of the car and started to drag me across the road by the hair. I was kicking and screaming and like crazy. Another man tried to hold my legs together and they started to carry me towards the settlement. At this point I couldn’t see what was happening to David but I did not stop screaming and calling out for help. Even though I was alert and fighting it was all a blur. I was praying that they would just kill me because I had heard horror stories of women being gang raped by more than 40 men and then killed.

Thankfully by the grace of god, some of the locals from the village heard me and came out and started stoning the men who eventually let me go. Someone picked me up and took me back to the car where we found David in a lot of pain. He had been stabbed in the chest. The locals then helped us get back into the car, they pushed it of the embankment and we managed to drive back to my friend’s house. The only expat bodyguard available on the night (who was drunk) drove us back to the office. Since the hospitals in Papa New Guinea are off limits for expats, David’s stab wound had to be cleaned and stitched at the office without anaesthetic.

The next day, a UN representative came to counsel us. He told us that a week earlier a nun had been travelling in the same area and in a similar ambush she was raped by 45 men and killed two days later. David and I wanted to leave the next day, but X-rays showed that he had a collapsed lung and therefore could not fly for four weeks – the longest four weeks of my life. I was a complete recluse. I did not leave my apartment at all. I worked from home to round up my work and just waited desperately for the time to leave.

After our attack the company flew in five bodyguards to increase the security. Two of them went back to where the attack took place and they managed to find some of the locals who had helped us and thanked them on our behalf. They also found 6 of the 15 men who had attacked us…and let’s just say the Papa New Guinea Police have a shoot to kill policy. I do not care about what happened to them, but my feeling is that they are no longer around and will not be hurting anyone else.

The experience was a sobering one. I never thought I would actually pray to be killed, but I did. Nowadays when I think that life is hard I think of what happened in Papa New Guinea, and then I am very thankful to still be alive. David and I are extremely grateful to those men who helped us. If it was not for them we wouldn’t be here today.

We later found out that the company had not hired security for us for budgetary reasons. I still cannot believe that they had taken an “ignorance is bliss” approach to such an important factor. Essentially they had simply put a price tag on lives!’

Marisa Grech (40) is a business woman. She has survived not one, but two, close to death experiences. Her friends and family feel that it is her fun loving bubbly character that gets her into trouble, but according to her, it is the same positive character as well as her faith in prayer that helped her survive every time.

“My partner, as well as my family and friends, were fundamental to my survival,” adds Marisa, as she forlornly recalls her two grave accidents.

‘I was thirteen when I started dating John*. He was cool, owned a motorbike and despite the five year age difference, we spent years together. When I turned 16, I went to a party with him. Since my parents had gone out for the night, I took advantage of the situation and left the party at 2am. We had both drunk a few drinks and when I got to the car I put down the passenger seat to sleep as he drove me home. At one point he must have nodded off on the steering wheel. We hit the pavement and smashed into a tree. We were not wearing seatbelts and on impact I leaped off the seat, smashed the windscreen with my face, broke the dashboard with my tummy, and landed back on the passenger seat. I lost consciousness on the spot and I don’t personally recall any of this. All I know is that I woke up in a hospital five days later.

When my parents arrived to the hospital, they saw my boyfriend covered in blood, but they soon realised that he was not injured at all so the blood had to be mine. They waited desperately for news. This happened in the 1980s when most Maltese doctors were either out on strike or had left Malta so they were worried sick about who was going to operate on me. Thankfully a Maltese surgeon had just returned from abroad. He supervised the operation during which they had to remove my spleen, and stitch up my tattered face.

Once the operation was over, my parents were told that whether I survive or not depends entirely on my will to live. They were devastated, but a few minutes later the doctors went back out and told them that I had made an extraordinary recovery and that I was being taken off the danger list.

Five days later I woke up in a hospital room. I was on my own, with pipes and wires coming out of every part of my body. I had no idea what had happened to me. My mother had removed all the mirrors and anyone who wanted to visit me had to get permission from my parents. Later that week, a hospital volunteer came to my room and she seemed horrified at the sight of me. That’s when I started asking if something was wrong with my face, but all they told me was that I had a few scratches and bruises.

Eventually they started removing the pipes and wires, and then they came to remove the stitches from my face. As they removed each stitch I counted – 5, 6, 7, 20, 40, 60!!! I had to stop counting at 60. That’s when I realised the gravity of the situation and I demanded a mirror. The nurses tried to resist my request but I threatened that I would run away if they didn’t take me to a mirror but they insisted on washing my hair first. That’s when all the dried up blood that was stuck to my skull started flowing into the water basin. I sat there in awe, watching them change the water over and over again. I was paralysed with fear. The accident must have been worse than I thought.

They finally took me to the common bathrooms where there were several mirrors on the wall. As soon as looked at my face I fainted. I looked like a wild animal. I had stitches everywhere, I was grotesquely swollen; parts of my face where stuck to each other, I looked like I had two noses, and my eyelids were stuck to my cheeks. They took me back to my room and I cried my eyes out.

I started feeling really guilty for what I had put my parents through. My mother had lost tons of weight and my father would stand in front of my bed and without uttering a word. They kept reassuring me that they would do whatever it takes to make me better. Although they would not cry in front of me, their eyes were always red and swollen.

I wanted to be brave for them, so I decided that I had to get used to how I looked and to live with it, but at the age of 16, that’s a hard pill to swallow. I used to have to psyche myself up before going to the bathroom and eventually I resorted to using only small mirrors in which I could only see parts of my face and not the whole of it.

I spent about three weeks in hospital but when I went home I started suffering from severe headaches. We asked for medical advice and we were assured that the headaches were a normal consequence of the impact. But my mother soon realised that I wasn’t acting normal. She would be speaking to me and I’d blank out for a few seconds, or I would absolutely forget what she had said or asked me. I used to be in so much pain that I used to cry in my sleep. Eventually they took me to a neurosurgeon and it turned out that they had missed a haematoma in my brain that was now pressing against the nerves of my brain and my left eye. I needed brain surgery.

I didn’t want to see anyone before the operation. I was scared and I didn’t want them to see me like that. I had to have my hair shaved and at the age of 16, having a 40 year old guy shave half of my head was very traumatic. First he cut it with scissors, then he used a shaving machine, and then went over it with a blade. Thinking that there was no one around, I cried my eyes out freely, but as soon as the door opened I saw my father standing there. He had obviously heard me crying and I wanted to disappear.

When I came out of the theatre I found my favourite nurse waiting for me. It was a long recovery. My head was so heavy it took me a week to get myself to sit down. They had drilled into my skull and sucked out the accumulated blood. I had to learn how to sit up, how to stand and how to walk all over again. Eventually I became scared of leaving the hospital. I knew what it would be like outside. I knew that people were going to stare at my face and ask questions, whilst in hospital it was not an issue. I felt protected. It took 10 years and several additional surgeries to get my face back.

But that wasn’t enough!

20 years later I was with a couple of friends walking towards our car in a public car park. We were walking together when one of them advised me to go on the pavement to avoid the cars that usually come up with great speed. I went through a doorway and found myself in pitch darkness. I thought there would be some stairs but suddenly I fell down a narrow shaft that was three stories deep. As I was falling I saw my whole life passing in front of my eyes, I saw myself grow up, my family, my friends and my dreams. I started to pray. I honestly thought I was going to die or to be paralysed for the rest of my life. My right leg was the first to hit the ground. A huge shock went through my body and up to my head. The pain was excruciating and I wanted to scream but nothing came out. My friends had only just realised that I was missing but they couldn’t figure out where I had gone. Finally one of them heard my faint screams and scrambled down the shaft holding on with his feet and bare hands. It was pitch dark and very narrow but thankfully another friend threw down a small torch to help us navigate out of there. We were lucky that he did not land on me. Security guards managed to get us out from another exit and at that point I had not yet realised how gravely injured I was. They drove me home but later that night my leg had swollen up to four times its size. To cut a long story short I had broken it in at least 7 different places but this time they could not operate as the risk of infection was high they might have ended up having to amputate my leg. I spent years walking with a limb, crutches and a walking stick. Eventually I was put on ridiculous doses of morphine to control the pain.

Six years later, I’m still partially disabled, and I have to attend weekly painful physiotherapy sessions. But I have fought back, I swim almost every day and I’ve regained a good chunk of my life back. Doctors always said that I have a very strong will to live and a strong body that fights trauma. I feel very lucky to have survived two major accidents. There are people who do not make through one let alone two. I believe that I have become a better person because of what happened and there’s a message I would like to pass on here – no matter what one’s situation is, giving up should never be an option. Have faith. Nothing is impossible!

*name has been changed for privacy

First published in Pink Magazine February 2010 – click here for the original feature