Eight-year-old Tommy is a country kid through and through. Growing up on a sheep and potato farm in Western Victoria, he loves helping out, especially unloading trucks with his Grandpa and being in the tractor with Dad. .
While Tommy’s mum, Katherine, was checking lambing ewes with two of his siblings, Tommy had a run-in with a piece of machinery in the shed. “I’ll never forget getting that call,” Katherine recalls. “He remembered my mobile number even with nine broken bones in his feet, he’s just amazing.”

Tommy was taken to the local hospital in Ballarat, but confusingly, initial X-rays didn’t show any breaks. But as his feet swelled rapidly, the doctor still suspected something serious. A CT scan confirmed multiple fractures, and The Royal Children’s Hospital (RCH) wanted to see him straight away.
With no ambulance available, Katherine’s aunt, luckily an experienced paediatric emergency nurse, drove them to Melbourne. “They couldn’t give him strong pain relief because we couldn’t monitor him in the car,” Katherine says. “So they gave him Panadol and Nurofen, put his feet in half casts, and we drove through the night.”

They arrived at the RCH just after midnight. The orthopaedic team assessed Tommy and admitted him to Platypus Ward, where he would spend nearly three weeks.

Tommy’s injuries were complex. “The first 48 hours were critical,” Katherine explains. “They monitored his toes every hour to make sure blood was still flowing.” His first surgery came on Sunday, when the plastics team cleaned the wound on his right foot. Over the following weeks, Tommy underwent several procedures, including a skin graft and intricate repairs to the talus bone in his left foot, a bone Tommy’s surgeons described as “crushed like an eggshell.”

Despite the pain and swelling, Tommy stayed upbeat. He loved watching fireworks from his window during the Melbourne Royal Show and tracking passing planes on his iPad. “Nurse Emma even stayed back after her shift to watch fireworks with him,” Katherine says. “It was beautiful.”

Katherine promised him, “Tommy mate, next year when your feet are feeling better, we’re going to come back and go to the Show, and you can go on those rides instead of watching out the window.” Tommy’s response melted her heart: “Can we come back and stay at this hospital when we go there?”

Going home was daunting. Their 150-year-old farmhouse certainly wasn’t wheelchair-friendly, so Katherine and Tommy stayed in worker accommodation for several weeks. But Tommy wasted no time getting back to farm life, feeding farm animals from his wheelchair and even watching a bore being drilled in the paddock.

His determination shone through.

When he had his casts off, the doctors had said that “kids are often anxious about putting their feet down after these kinds of injuries, but Tommy said to me, ‘Mum, can I stand up?’ Then, ‘Can I try taking a step?’ and in a matter of seconds, less than 36 hours after his casts came off, he was walking in his orthotics,” Katherine says.

Tommy never complained or said he wished the accident hadn’t happened. “He never said, ‘I can’t do it because of my feet.’ He just had a crack at everything,” Katherine says. From riding a modified bike his dad constructed to competing in every event at his school athletics carnival (200 metres, long jump, shot put and more) Tommy tackled it all with a grin.

Fifteen months on, Tommy has shed his knee-length orthotics and now uses only a small insert in one shoe. He’s excited for the next stage: moving to a soft orthotic that will let him bend his left foot. “He’s still doing everything he wants to do,” Katherine says proudly. “He’s strong, motivated and never lets anything hold him back.”

Not wanting to put too much pressure on him as the fifth generation on the farm, Katherine and his dad, Ben, are leaving it up to Tommy if he’d like to follow in the family business, but based on this recent homework, we think it’s pretty likely.