Chelsea Aquilina is quietly happy as she takes her first shaky steps in three months. Leaning on a bed the five-year-old takes a few sideways steps in one direction and then back again. Her left leg, which is much weaker than her right, is being partly supported by one physiotherapist, and her hips by another.
They may be tiny, shaky steps, but for Chelsea they are momentous strides towards her recovery.
She was not expected to survive when, just before Christmas, she was hit by a ute and suffered severe head injuries.
When she arrived at The Royal Children’s Hospital that night, neurosurgeon Patrick Lo says “she was extremely critical and very close to death”.
Mr Lo adds simply: “She should not be alive, she’s such a star.”
The right side of her brain was bruised and haemorrhaging and she had emergency surgery to relieve the pressure, Mr Lo says. A large clot and a piece of Chelsea’s skull were removed to give her swelling brain more room.
Over the following days Chelsea clung to life by a thread, and doctors warned her distraught family she could have a cardiac arrest at any moment. “If she arrested they weren’t going to resuscitate because there was already too much brain damage,” Mrs Aquilina says. “If they had to resuscitate, it would cause more damage, and it wouldn’t be fair to her.” But the Melton youngster kept rallying.
Mrs Aquilina says altogether her little girl has had eight or nine operations. Mr Lo says: “She’s a fighter, that girl. Her family had a lot to do with it, too. They never gave up.”
Mr Lo says Chelsea will be permanently weak on the left side of her body, but he expects her to start walking again in coming months. “It’s more than likely she’ll start walking bit by bit, but she’ll always have a limp on her left side,” he says. Mentally she may have have memory problems, suffer headaches and epilepsy or seizures, but “we are extremely optimistic about her”.
She is expected to make most of her gains in the first year after the accident, but to keep improving over the next five years.
If her first few months are anything to go by, nothing will hold Chelsea back from a bright future.
Words by Marianne Betts.