Zest for life helps Lime scooter rider after crash
Just weeks after a terrible collision few thought she could walk away from, Renee Whitehouse is dancing.
“I did an hour-long ballet workout this morning — I tend to do ballet barre, pilates, yoga, something like that.”
Grave fears were held for the 26-year-old Californian student after she was hit by a truck in the early hours of January 18 while riding a Lime scooter home through Dunedin after visiting the supermarket.
She was rushed to nearby Dunedin Hospital with serious head injuries and put in intensive care.
“I know I am really, really lucky but I am very impatient. I want to get better,” Whitehouse said yesterday, sitting on her bed in Dunedin Hospital.
She recalls having worked a bartending shift that evening, then visiting the supermarket before taking an e-scooter home, with her grocery bag over the side.
“I know I was riding in the bike lane . . . but I didn’t have a helmet,” she said.
“Somehow I remember getting into bed that night and sleeping and then, I don’t know whether it was a dream or my brain trying to trick me and protect me from something, but I remember nurses telling me to move my arms around. I was thinking we were playing a card game and I thought, ‘This is weird’ and that was the first part of consciousness that I can remember.”
She said she didn’t know how badly she was hurt at first.
“I kept trying to get up but I was told, ‘You have to keep lying down, you have tubes all over you, you can't’.”
Whitehouse said too many people and too much loud noise can tire her out. But otherwise she has made astonishing progress.
She still has at least one more operation to go, to reattach part of her shattered skull, but has already resumed work on the masters of archaeology thesis she came from the United States to Dunedin to study.
In the meantime, Whitehouse has received a bill from Lime for $39.10 — the cost of her abruptly ended journey.
Her mother, Jackie Whitehouse, said when she heard about the crash she had tried not to think about what might confront her when she arrived at her daughter’s bedside from Seattle.
“I didn’t think she was going to be in good shape, but she was better than I expected.”