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AN ANNUAL mother-daughter Bali adventure turned into a nightmare for Eltham’s Rhiannon Tracey, who is left wondering if she will ever walk again. The 21-year-old broke her neck and three vertebrae after inadvertently diving into the shallows of a hotel pool two months ago. Rhiannon is confined to a wheel chair and is recovering at the Royal Talbot Rehabilitation Centre in Kew. But despite regaining the use of her arms and right leg – but not in her fingers – doctors cannot guarantee she will walk again. “I just can’t believe it,” Rhiannon said. “Just last month I was the life of the party and now I am like this.” Rhiannon was in the last days of the holiday with her mother Sharon and best friend Rebecca when she misjudged the depth of the pool and smacked her head at the bottom. She recounted the horror of being paralysed and lying face down in the water while those near the pool thought she was joking around. That was the first of two times where she thought she would die that night. “I couldn’t move, I thought I was going to drown here in the pool,” she said. Later as she lay in the intensive care unit in hospital, Bali’s biggest recorded earthquake struck – measuring 7.2 on the Richter scale – sending everyone in the hospital rushing out of the building. The earthquake caused the local surgeon to arrive hours late for the life-saving operation to repair her spinal chord. Her insurance company brought her back to Melbourne in an air ambulance. Rhiannon hoped her …
