A woman has awoken from a coma after being played a message from her son in hospital.
Single mum Danielle 34, had fallen into the coma following a horrific car crash.
"The weather was so awful that you could barely see the car in front,' Danielle, from Andover, Hampshire, remembers. "I was running about 25 minutes early for my appointment, so I thought I'd pull over at the next service station and wait it out."
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"I knew I'd hit water because I saw the reflection of my car on the water, but it was too late," says Danielle, her voice quaking as she recalls the accident. "I thought, "Oh God, this is really, really bad," and the car flipped into the air."
The car rolled seven times across the motorway. Danielle did her best to brace herself by pushing her arm up against the roof of the car as her body was swung from side-to-side.
Image: Medavia
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"It all happened so quickly, but there was time for so much to run through my mind. It was all Ethan, just Ethan..." Danielle added.
"I just kept thinking, "What's he going to do? Who's going to look after him? Who's going to tell him?" I held on so tightly to the roof because I had someone to hold on for."
She'd broken her back and beck and inhaled so much broken glass her throat was left pierced in places. Danielle was then given strong drugs that put her out of consciousness and spent the next 16 days in a coma, as doctors worked on saving her life.
An attempt to rebuild her arm with metal poles during a 36-hour surgery when awry when she developed septicaemia, which then lead to an amputation.
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"My mum and dad were preparing Ethan for the worst, because my brain had swelled so much and doctors weren't sure if I'd make it," Danielle said. "He kept asking, "Nanny, is mummy going to die?" and she'd just cry and say, "Darling, I don't know."'
Image: Medavia
In a desperate bid to awake Danielle, her parents recorded a message from Ethan: "Hi Mummy, it's me. I'm with Nanny and I'm safe. You just do what the doctors say so you can get better and you can wake up soon. I love you, Mummy."
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Danielle's mother played the recording routinely by her daughter's bedside, as well as telling her all the things Ethan had been doing at school.
Finally, Danielle woke up.
"Mum and dad were crying by my side, but I couldn't talk because of the tubes in my throat, and the lacerations from swallowing glass," she says. "I kept trying to say sorry, but I didn't really know what I was apologising for."
Words by Josh Teal
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Featured image credit: Medavia
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