Anna Swan is unconscious, lying on the roadside at the bottom of a steep hill overlooking Lake Trasimeno in central Italy. Blood seeps onto the cobblestones from gashes on her left side. Her forehead bleeds profusely. The 29-year-old has crashed her electric bike into the stone wall circling most of Passignano Sul Trasimeno, a medieval village the locals just call Passignano, and she isn’t wearing a helmet. Her skin is grey.
Anna’s story is one of resilience – about overcoming disaster and surviving challenges that could crush a lesser spirit. Not only did she survive, and learn to walk and speak again, but she managed to teach her brain to cope with the crippling pain that comes from nerve damage caused by the accident. The shy, least confident family member turned out to be the toughest of the lot.
Mark Echo, the son of Assyrian Catholic Syrian migrants, grew up in Sydney’s western suburbs and rarely ventured east. He feared Anna would be put off by his background: not his religion, but because he was a westie, Anna from the posh east. “I had clammy hands when I told her I grew up in Blacktown,” he says. “She was like, ‘Yeah, okay, whatever.’ It was looming over my head for about 12 months. But we got on so well, I was like, ‘This is what love should be. This is how couples should be.
Norman put Mark in his car and the paramedics hurried Georgia into the front seat of the ambulance. “They put Anna into the back of the van and took off like a bat out of hell,” Georgia says. “It was like Italian driving on steroids. We were just ripping down this highway. That was the first time I took stock of what was happening. I turned around to the big space where she was and I swear her head was expanding.
Norman spoke to the Italian doctors with the translating help of a local friend and briefed the family. Anna had a traumatic brain injury, leaving it unable to function properly. She had multiple skull fractures, a fractured jaw and a broken eye socket. Unable to breathe on her own, she’d been put on a ventilator. Norman knew that if his daughter survived, it was likely her brain would be damaged, perhaps permanently.
As Anna slowly emerged from sedation she became irritable, which Zampolini explains is a normal byproduct of a brain injury. “She would pinch and punch my arms and they were covered in bruises, that was really distressing,” recalls her mother Lee. at Royal Rehab hospital in Ryde, where Mark helped Anna relearn to walk and swim. She regained control of her bowels and learnt to speak again, albeit slowly and tentatively. On the day before Australia Day, 2017 – six months after she’d crashed into that stone wall on the other side of the world – Anna Swan, her husband by her side and a frame in her hands, walked out of hospital.The challenges were huge for both of them.
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