The miracle survivor who doctors believed would be the seventh Bourke St rampage victim
TEENAGER Erin Shi remembers nothing of the Bourke St rampage which killed six others and nearly claimed her life too. Doctors never expected her to survive — let alone walk or talk again — and she’s now a sign of hope from one of Melbourne’s bleakest days.
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IT WAS almost impossible to imagine anyone surviving such a catastrophic blow to the head, but the young patient was still breathing.
She was bloodied, moaning and alive, but only just. Her family was warned that if she lived, she might never walk or talk again.
The fatalities as a result of a deadly rampage through the CBD already numbered six, and for the longest time everyone feared the teenager would become the seventh.
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Yet, as each day passed, optimism grew that here lay a miracle survivor.
Few Melburnians will forget where they were on January 20, 2017. Except Erin Shi.
The last thing the 18-year-old remembers was shopping for a handbag and jeans with a friend in the city.
Only months later she discovered how close she had come to death after typing four words into Google: her name and “Bourke St”.
Headlines and pictures depicted carnage: Dimitrious Gargasoulas allegedly mowing down dozens of pedestrians on the busy retail strip.
The youngest life taken was that of a three-month-old baby.
It was only then that Erin saw the first photograph of herself, lying on the pavement, her face twisted in anguish and dripping blood.
The same haunting image would wake her mother Jiana Zheng in the middle of the night. Her daughter was screaming in pain, desperately calling her mum.
That fateful Friday afternoon Jiana, a barista, didn’t hear her phone ringing over the grinding of the cafe’s coffee machine.
“Erin’s best friend rang me and said: ‘Jiana, where are you? You need to come to a hospital; Erin has been hit by a car’.”
She assumed her daughter had been in a car and involved in a collision with another vehicle.
Colleagues soon explained what had occurred in the city centre. A car had allegedly killed and maimed dozens of innocent pedestrians.
“I started shaking,” Jiana says, her body trembling again as she recalls that day.
“My boss said: ‘Go’.”
When Jiana arrived at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, she tried to walk into the emergency department.
“I couldn’t, I was shaking, and I fell to the ground.”
Once inside, Jiana would wait for many hours before being asked to identify her daughter.
“I knew from far away it was her,” she says.
“They had cleaned her up so her hair was nice and tidy and she just looked like she was sleeping, but her whole body had tubes everywhere. I just felt so scared.”
Doctors explained Erin had broken her left arm, several ribs, and part of her spine, but their biggest worry was the brain injury so severe it had almost killed her instantly.
“They explained how serious her head injury was and said there was no hope for her life, none at all,” Jiana says.
“I felt so empty.”
All the doctors could do was to give the teenager their strongest drugs and put her into the deepest sleep to give her brain the best possible chance to heal.
“After five days, doctors told me that someone with Erin’s injuries would usually be dead by now,” Jiana says.
“But she was still hanging in there, which was a miracle. From there I had hope.”
Jiana and her husband Stephen Shi spent 14-hour days in hospital talking to their only child about such mundane topics as the weather.
On her 19th birthday her mum baked a cake.
After 25 days, Erin was brought out of her induced coma, her survival still desperately uncertain.
“When she woke up she had no reaction at all, she couldn’t talk or recognise me,” Jiana says, crying as she recalls that day.
“In my heart I was so scared and fearful that this was how my daughter would remain for the rest of her life.”
A few days later Erin shed a single tear.
For Jiana, it was a poignant glimmer of hope that her beautiful daughter was still in there, somewhere.
With that realisation, she became so overcome by emotion she needed psychological support.
WAKING UP WAS ONLY THE BEGINNING
EVEN though Erin was now awake, she still couldn’t speak and was uncharacteristically agitated and angry.
As the days passed, she began to calm down and say a few words, but was still suffering amnesia.
By the time Erin was discharged to Epworth Hospital to begin her rehabilitation program, she knew her injuries were caused by an impact with a car.
A technology ban stopped her from finding out more details before she was mentally ready.
“I was in a ward for brain injuries, but I only had a broken arm at the time,” Erin says.
“Every time I went out of my room I would see the brain injury sign and I would ask the nurses: ‘Why am I here?’ They would tell me that I had a knock to my head.”
When Erin’s medical team felt she was ready, she was permitted to use the internet again — and she wanted to know what on earth had happened to her.
“The last thing I remember from that day was shopping with a friend in the city — and then I woke up in hospital,” she says.
“I was shocked when I Googled my name and ‘Bourke St’, that was enough for everything to come up.
“It took a few months to piece it together. I used YouTube, Google and even went back to Bourke St to try to understand. But I remember nothing, nothing at all.”
She knows she was near the Commonwealth Bank on the corner of Elizabeth and Bourke streets when she was hit.
To this day she does not know the gruesome details.
RECOVERY HAS TAKEN A YEAR OF ERIN’S LIFE
A YEAR on, the family is still struggling with emotional and physical trauma.
Jiana has nightmares, is frightened of the city and driving, and hasn’t returned to work.
It’s changed Erin too.
While her mental recovery was faster and more complete than anyone anticipated, she still suffers fatigue and memory loss. And her left arm was so badly broken it was in a cast for eight months, forcing her to rely on her non-dominant arm for everyday tasks like dressing herself.
“I couldn’t drive for almost a year and had to resit my test,” Erin says.
She spent almost three months in hospital, and rehabilitation has taken more than a year with her regular physiotherapy sessions only finishing two weeks ago.
“I lost almost a year of my life,” she says.
She’s also lost her carefree attitude.
“For my friends and I, it has really matured us a lot because we have seen so much, we care more about life now.”
She is determined to be positive and harness her new-found maturity and perspective on life.
“My psychologist said that even 10 years on, people who have survived traumatic events still suffer problems so that scares me, but I try to take each day as it comes.”
Visiting the Parkville hospital where for so long she teetered between death and disability has been cathartic.
“I almost died, but I was brought here and they saved my life,” Erin says.
For the medical staff, there is instant recognition when they see the mother and daughter; their smiles are wide and their eyes wet.
“I’m getting shivers down my spine,” intensive care specialist Dr Kieron Gorman says when he sees Erin.
ICU nurse Kelly Blyth spent two hours gently cleaning and brushing the blood and grit out of her Erin’s hair.
She joins the chorus of staff who remark “how good it is to see Erin, like this”: smiling, talking and walking her way around the ward.
“She’s back studying at university,” ICU nurse manager Michelle Spence tells the staff with pride and purpose.
For these professionals, this young patient is a reminder that there’s hope hiding in even the bleakest of days.
For Erin, the Royal Melbourne’s intensive care unit is more than a sanctuary reserved for the very sickest; she says it’s the maker of miracles.
Erin Shi told her story to the Sunday Herald Sun to give back to the hospital that saved her life.
Please donate to the Royal Melbourne Hospital Intensive Care Unit Appeal
Phone 9342 7111 or go to: thermh.org.au/erin
Target: $100,000
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