Author defies odds

When Robin Napier was 11, she was hit by a speeding car outside her Perth home.

She sustained a serious head injury and a broken jaw, among other injuries and was in a coma for two months.

Doctors told her mother that she might not make it, that they couldn’t do any more medically.

When she came out of the coma, things still looked pretty bleak.

Napier remembers lying in her hospital bed and listening to her mother and the doctor.

‘‘[The doctor] said, she will never walk, talk, work, get married or have children – she’ll be a vegetable in a wheelchair,’’ Napier, who now lives in Paeroa, said.

‘‘That was the best thing my mother has ever let me hear in my lifetime, because all that I knew at 11 before the accident, I had to learn all over again.’’

Napier, now 61, proved all the doctors wrong.

Not only did she learn to talk and walk again, she got married, had two children and now has four grandchildren. She also worked as a typist.

It’s not been easy, though. Napier has difficulty with concentration and memory.

Stress or anxiety often causes severe migraines, leaving her bedridden for several days.

‘‘Medically wise, I shouldn’t have been able to have done it,’’ she said.

‘‘I just feel that because of what I was told, I have achieved so much.

She has written and selfpublished a book, Two Angels, which tells her story.

‘‘When I was told what I couldn’t do and that I’d done it all, I thought, I want to write this book to prove, not to those with the head injury but to those who look after them, that we try so hard,’’ she said.