‘I’M DOING IT FOR MUM’ ‘I BECAME A PROFESSIONAL LIFTER BY ACCIDENT’
Marjorie Burleigh was keeping vigil by her critically ill daughter Erica’s bedside when doctors at Hobart Private Hospital warned her to prepare for the worst.
What 17-year-old Erica initially thought was the flu had turned out to be something far more sinister.
“They gave me a lumbar puncture when I was in a coma, and it came back that it was meningitis. The doctors told my parents I probably wouldn’t survive,” Erica, from Kingston, Tas, tells New Idea.
Meningococcal meningitis is a rare but deadly bacterial infection which can lead to brain damage, paralysis and even death.
Not wanting to leave her only daughter, Marjorie slept on a stretcher next to Erica’s bed, willing her to get better.
Three days later, the talented netballer who dreamt of being a nurse, awoke from her coma. Erica heard her mother’s voice, but all she could see were shadows.
“They thought it would go away when the swelling went down in my brain. But, the meningitis had killed a significant amount of optic nerves.” Erica, now 39, was left with just one per cent vision in her right eye and 10 to 20 per cent vision in her left. “When I first went home, Mum had to help me get dressed and pick out my clothes,” says Erica, who had to quit her job, sell her car and give up her driver’s licence. “I was trying to eat my dinner one night and I couldn’t get my fork onto the sausage because I couldn’t see it … I remember sitting there, crying at the table. It was too much.”
Legally blind, Erica feared she’d never live a normal life. But Marjorie refused to allow her to succumb to self-doubt.
“Mum told me there’s always ways around doing things. She was always telling me to get up and keep going.”
Erica found ways to work with her disability, which enabled her to maintain her independence. With her mum’s support, Erica found the confidence to join a gym and she also began doing boot camp. Soon after, she began running.
However, Erica’s life was turned upside down once again when her much-loved mum was diagnosed with early-onset dementia. Sadly, Marjorie died five years ago, aged 57.
If anyone told Ebony Gorincu she would end up representing her country in weightlifting a decade ago, she would have laughed in their face.
Ebony, 32, was an international-level sprinter and hurdler in her teenage years before she joined the Australian bobsledding team at 21.
It wasn’t until she returned from the Winter Olympics in Sochi in 2014 that Ebony decided to start lifting weights to improve her push technique for bobsleigh.
“I went to the gym to get some help with my weightlifting technique,” Ebony, from Brisbane, says. “Then I thought ‘why don’t I give this a go?’ I was pretty excited to go back to an individual sport again because that is what I’d done for years as an athlete. It started off easy and you make beginner gains and improvement, but two or three years in it becomes really hard because your gains and improvements stagnate.”
Ebony hopes to smash her personal best of 94kg in the snatch, 118kg in clean and jerk, and a total of 209kg at the Commonwealth Games.
“Anytime you get to put on the green and gold to compete is an awesome experience,” she adds.