Pinned under a garbage truck for 37 minutes, her legs crushed to pulp, she knows death is circling.

“The pain is indescribable, I’m fully conscious and thinking, I’m going to bleed out,” says Stewart, who minutes earlier is out for her regular morning jog and wondering what she might wear to work.

“The truck comes around the corner and the driver fails to see me and keeps going, and then he stops and he stops on top of me – it is horrific.”

But the catastrophic accident, which takes place metres from her home in Sydney’s Bondi Beach, is not the end for Stewart.

Rather, it is the beginning of her new life, a life of constant pain, physical disfigurement, and compromised ability.

It is a life far removed from one the then 23-year-old is expecting, but one for which she is immensely grateful.

Now, almost 25 years later, Stewart – who’s been the Mayor of Noosa and ran for the LNP in last year’s state election – is channelling everything she has learned about disability into her role as CEO of Youngcare.

For the next three years, the 47-year-old, who is three weeks into the job when we meet for lunch at the Norman Hotel in Woolloongabba, will be driving improvements in the care of young disabled people.

The Brisbane-based not-for-profit organisation has delivered 20 age-appropriate residences across Queensland and NSW and offered $12.2m in home-care support grants since its establishment in July 2005 by four mates, David Conry, Nick Bonifant, Matthew Lawson and Simon Lockyer.

Stewart was there at the beginning – as the first volunteer.

“It does feel like I’ve come full circle,” she says.

After the accident in 2000, the Bond University law graduate was no longer able to work full-time, undergoing 37 operations.

Her mother, Noelene Sultmann, never left her only child’s side for three long years, abruptly quitting her teaching job at St Joseph’s primary school in Millmerran, on the Darling Downs.

Her father Bill, then director of Toowoomba Catholic Education Office, stayed behind because somebody needed to pay the bills.

In late 2005, Stewart – who’d juggled exhausting rehabilitation with gaining a masters of law from Sydney University – moved back to Brisbane and to her close-knit school friends from All Hallows’.

Someone told her about Youngcare, and Stewart thought she could add value.

She would eventually leave and become a barrister, with chambers in Brisbane and Maroochydore, before rejoining Youngcare as a board member in 2018.

Today, Stewart walks with a limp and has learned to block out the enduring pain.

“You forget what not living in pain is like – I don’t focus on it, I just can’t,” she says.

What does cut her to the core is her inability to parent the way she would have liked.

Stewart has three children – William, 13, Joseph, 12, and Amelia, 8, with husband Cam Stewart, 60, who has a lucrative seafood importing business based in Noosa and comes home to their Ascot property on weekends.

“The biggest sadness for me is that I can’t be an active parent. I can’t take a bike ride with my children because I have a knee that doesn’t bend, I have two fused ankles,” she says.

“I can’t swim because I’ve had four serious infections in my legs.

“The aesthetics are there too. I woke up on the 18th of August, 2000, with what I thought was my best asset, my legs, and suddenly they were disfigured and disabled forever.

“On the flip side, I am grateful. If you focused on all the things you can’t do you’d be a basket case, I’d be in the corner.

“I can’t turn back the clock but I can control how I deal with it.”

As a political campaigner, Stewart is tough, and despite losing in October to Independent MP Sandy Bolton, she is keen to run again.

The barbs, lies and “argy-bargy of politics” don’t faze her.

Let’s not forget this is a woman who refused to let doctors amputate her legs then went on to defy predictions she would never walk again.

This is a woman who in those early, particularly fragile years rose above insensitive comments by health professionals.

But she remembers them clearly – and the way tears streamed down her mother’s face as they were carelessly uttered.

“One surgeon said, ‘gee, it must be hard to be intimate with someone’, and another accused me of being vain.

“I was having serious ankle surgery and because I was very limited in the type of shoes I could wear, and still am, I asked if that would change after the operation.

“He said, ‘You shouldn’t have your feet anyway so why are you concerned about shoes?’, it was awful.”

Living with decades of disability, Stewart is prepared for questions from busybodies who should know better.

“I’ll get into a cab and the cabbie will ask, ‘what happened to you?’,” she says.

On the day we meet and Stewart is being photographed for this newspaper, one diner calls her over to ask why, what’s her story?

I’m shocked; Stewart is not.

In her 2019 campaign for Noosa mayor and in the four years that followed her unseating of the incumbent, Tony Wellington, she had to deal with a lot.

“There was an active propaganda campaign against me,” she says.

“I withstood allegations of ‘over-tourism’ and wrecking Noosa, they said my husband was a property developer and I was going to build high-rises – all falsehoods – and some people were nasty.

“They were taking photos of my car parked in a handicapped spot, and posting them on online community pages, like I was doing the wrong thing – I have a disability sticker.”

Stewart, who had no previous council experience, credits one of her greatest achievements as bringing Noosa back into South East Queensland Council of Mayors in 2021 after it sensationally withdrew in 2015.

“For an entrance fee of $35,000, we got $3.58m in funding and became part of something bigger, rather than, ‘I’m Noosa, keep me special’,” she says.

In 2022, Stewart was appointed to the Brisbane 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games Organising Committee, a position she would later have to vacate in her tilt at state government.

“I was weighing up a second term as mayor – I loved my role and my community – but I saw so many things that weren’t being addressed at state level,” she says.

“You can’t sit on the sidelines and throw stones, you have to be prepared to get in the ring, and I desperately wanted a change of government.”

Stewart – who pushed past pain, her precious legs walking her to knock on more than 7000 doors – knew a win on October 26 would be difficult.

She was up against the incumbent member, Independent Sandy Bolton, who retained her seat.

“The swing was hard and Labor and the Greens preferenced her,” Stewart says.

“I thought it would be closer than it was; I was devastated on the Sunday and in the weeks that followed, but I took comfort in the fact I could not have worked harder.

“We lost that battle but we won the war, we won government, and I’m proud of being a small part of that.

“During my campaign, we made commitments, including for a pedestrian crossing for our hinterland residents, a $30m upgrade to Beckmans Road (Tewantin bypass) and a $2.5m investment in boating infrastructure – and make no mistake, they will still be delivered for Noosa because of the LNP and not for any other reason.”

Stewart, recently appointed to the board of Stadiums Queensland, isn’t closing the door on politics.

“I still very much want to run again,” she says.

“But for the next three years my heart and my soul is with Youngcare – I’ll give it my all.”