AFTER THE FALL:
When hang-gliding champion Helen Ross Lee suffered a traumatic brain injury after a crash, she had to learn to walk, talk, eat and write again. She shares her story of courage, resilience and love with Alley Pascoe.
hang-gliding champion Helen Ross Lee overcame a catastrophic accident
“Not being earthbound is quite extraordinary. It feels like total freedom,” says Helen Ross Lee, describing the transcendent experience of soaring through the air while hang-gliding. Helen was first introduced to the sport in 1984 when she ventured down to the hang-gliding launch site in Newcastle’s Merewether. At the age of 23, she fell in love with flying – and with her first husband – on the same day.
“Flying a hang-glider felt as natural to me as writing with my left hand,” says Helen, who is indeed left-handed. At the start of her hanggliding love affair, she spent months soaring back and forth along the Merewether cliffs, before moving to the Murray River with her new husband. There she honed her hang-gliding skills at Mount Elliot, while trying to raise her profile in the sport and find sponsorship deals.
In 1991, Helen travelled to Austria to compete in the Women’s World Hang-Gliding Championships. Later that year, she became the first person to launch a hang-glider from Australia’s second-highest peak, Mount Townsend (2209 metres) in the Snowy Mountains.
The next year she competed in the Australian Open championships, where she won the women’s title. For four consecutive years, she was ranked among the top 10 female hang-glider pilots in the world.
“Helen was well known through the hang-gliding community for her passion and dedication to flying,” says Brett Coupland, the Chief Operations Officer at the Sports Aviation Federation of Australia. “She played a pivotal role in encouraging women to spread their wings and progress their flying abilities through hang-gliding.”
After cementing her place as one of our most successful female
hang-gliding pilots, Helen left the sport when she started a family with her second husband, giving birth to her daughter Gretel in 1997 and son Stewart in 1999. For the next 10 years, she threw herself into motherhood and her career as a nurse in Queensland’s Currumbin Valley. But as her children got older and her marriage dissolved, she developed an itch to return to her first love: hang-gliding.
In early 2008, Helen took her first flight in over a decade along the cliffs of Byron Bay. After finding her feet – or rather, wings – at Tamborine Mountain, she travelled to a crosscountry flying competition in Dalby, Queensland, in March that year.
There’s a photo of Helen taken just before she set off on a practice flight at Dalby. In it, she’s standing under the A-frame of her hangglider, looking selfassured and calm. Moments later, she would be crumpled under the weight of the hang-glider, unconscious and fighting for life. Helen has no recollection of the accident or the subsequent 37 days in intensive care.
“My last memory is lying prone in my harness pushing the bar as the glider lifted into the air,” she says. “I didn’t even have a chance to feel fear.”
From witness accounts and accident reports, Helen has pieced together what happened that day. She was towed into the air by an ultra-light aircraft, but when her glider reached a height of five metres it went into what’s called a left-hand lockout, turning very sharply. The ultra-light pilot noticed this and released the tow rope to give Helen a chance to recover from the failed launch. She didn’t recover. Instead, she crashed into the ground beneath her, hitting the hard Dalby dirt face-first. Helen’s delicate features were buried in the ground when the first person to reach her checked for a pulse. It didn’t look like she was breathing, so they started CPR and called an ambulance.
Helen was rushed to the local hospital, where she was stabilised, then sent to Brisbane in a helicopter. Her right cerebral artery had been sheared and she was diagnosed with an acute traumatic brain injury. Death was the most likely outcome. Two weeks later, Helen remained alive but unconscious, and when a blood clot lodged in her bronchus, she suffered a cardiac arrest.
“It was a near-death experience, but I don’t remember anything about it,” she says. “Technically I may have died, but only for a short while, and only in as much as my heart stopped, but my brain hadn’t died.
I was still hanging in there.”
Helen’s family was told that when she did eventually regain consciousness, she would struggle to walk, talk, eat and take care of herself.
The first day Helen remembers with clarity is the day she was transferred from intensive care to the brain injury rehabilitation unit, more than a month after the accident. She was sitting, slumped over in a wheelchair, watching her mother fold her clothes, when she heard a familiar voice from the doorway.
“I knew something really bizarre was going on,” she recalls. “It was like a bad dream. I felt trapped in my own body. My arms and legs wouldn’t work properly and my mouth was dry. I didn’t know where I was. When I heard the voice, it evoked such strong memories within me. I couldn’t
see the man’s face because my vision was blurry. But I knew him. His voice felt like home.”
The voice belonged to Wayne Lee, Helen’s former boyfriend and fellow hang-glider. They’d met in 1994 at the annual Canungra Hang-Gliding Classic championship when Helen had boldly walked up to Wayne in the main street and said, “Hey, would you like to have an affair with me?”
“I was pretty flabbergasted [at the proposition]. I learnt from the very beginning that Helen doesn’t do anything half-arsed,” says Wayne, sitting beside her in a cosy cafe overlooking the Bellingen Valley, where the couple now live. When Wayne found out about Helen’s accident more than a decade after they split, he was devastated and started visiting her in hospital.
“Wayne would lie beside me in my hospital bed and we’d talk for hours,” Helen remembers. “He used to load me into a wheelchair and take me out to dinner at the shopping centre because I got sick of hospital food. We got up to a lot of mischief.”
During the gruelling early days of Helen’s recovery, Wayne was a bright light in the darkness.
“It took a few weeks for my new reality to set in. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t move. I was incontinent. I was reduced to being like a baby – a very confused baby,” she says, adding that it was especially hard for her children to see her in a hospital bed, immobile and often drooling. “It was the kids who motivated me the most to try to regain my cognitive capacity.
They depended on me, and even though their father provided for them and looked after them, they still needed their mum.”
Yet Helen’s kids found solace in their mum’s courage. “We were just glad that she was still alive,” Gretel and Stewart say now. “Mum had always been there for us and we believed her when she said she always would be.”
Eight months after regaining consciousness, Helen and Wayne were sitting in the hospital garden together when she proposed to him. Wayne immediately agreed, telling Helen he had loved her ever since they’d met. They planned their wedding for March 11, 2010, the twoyear anniversary of Helen’s accident. Instead of remembering the day with sorrow, they wanted to look back on it with gratitude for reuniting them.
“I still have gaps in my memory [from my time in hospital], but I remember Wayne,” she says. “I felt so reassured having him there, because I knew that he would understand even if no one else did.”
When Helen left hospital after 10 months of rehabilitation, the prognosis was not promising. It was unknown if her cognitive capacity would improve, and it was unlikely she would live an independent life. Helen’s mum and sister became her legal guardians, with control over her affairs and finances, and Wayne became her full-time carer.
Together, living in Helen’s Gold Coast home, they approached her recovery like soldiers on a mission. They did exercise routines, attended physiotherapy, acupuncture and specialist appointments, researched brain-improving programs and read every book written on neuroplasticity. They spent hundreds of dollars a week on vitamins, and thousands on hyperbaric oxygen therapy. They also spent countless hours fighting to take back control of Helen’s affairs after she was placed under the jurisdiction of the Public Trustee.
The hard work began to pay off. Helen went from having a dozen falls a week and being unable to sit upright, talk coherently or see straight, to living a relatively independent life and writing a 249-page memoir. She started penning her book, The Rising Phoenix: A True Story of Survival, in 2013 and released it to praise from the neuroscience community.
“The book is an astonishing document of self-determination and will become a model text not only for the many hundreds of thousands of brain-damaged people in the world and their families, but also as a document for the scientific research of brain recovery,” says Professor Niels Birbaumer, a psychologist and neurobiologist.
To call her recovery a miracle would be to discredit Helen’s dogged drive. But it is extraordinary. “Of course, it was all daunting. But I was always ready to face the challenge,” she says of the daily struggles and the punishing rehabilitation she took on. “I used to say, ‘Set up the hoops, boys. You want me to jump through them? I’ll jump.’ As soon as I completed one challenge, I was on to the next.”
A framed, hand-written note sits on Helen’s bedside table. Three words are scribbled on the note in neat, childlike cursive: ‘Helen luvs Wayne.’ She wrote those three words while in hospital in 2008. It would take her another four years to learn to legibly print words, but the sentiment still stands. At the heart of Helen’s extraordinary journey is a love story.
“Wayne would lie beside me in my hospital bed and we’d talk for hours.”
Like all married couples, Helen and Wayne have faced trials, and they’ve truly put their “in sickness and in health” vows to the test.
“Wayne has only ever desired to live a stress-free life. Being married to a victim of a traumatic brain injury isn’t really conducive to a ‘stress-free life’, though,” says Helen.
One night each week, Wayne would stay at his own property in Beechmont while Helen’s kids stayed with her on the Gold Coast. It was during one of these breaks that she faced her darkest hour. In early 2015, after unsuccessfully trying to re-register as a nurse so she could teach online and while still labouring over her manuscript, Helen felt desperate. The mental toll of the accident had been just as brutal as the physical, she says, and “one morning while no one else was home, I was caught in a moment of self-pity”.
Helen took an overdose of whatever tablets she could find (except for Panadol). “I didn’t want to die really,” she insists. “I just wasn’t coping. It was a cry for help.”
When Wayne arrived home, Helen told him what she’d done, riddled with regret and shame. He took her to the hospital where she was monitored for some hours and given a stern lecture by the doctor. Reflecting on her desperation six years later, Helen says she’s glad she didn’t die that day – for herself, Wayne and her kids, who are both adults now. Gretel, 23, is a nurse like her mum, and Stewart, 21, is studying engineering. “I’m proud they’re happy,” she says.
Helen’s recovery has been driven by her eternal optimism. “For me, hope is a fundamental part of life,” she says. “I don’t see problems; I just see goals. I’m naturally an optimist, whereas Wayne is a pessimist.”
“I’m a realist,” interjects Wayne. With Helen’s hope and Wayne’s practicality, they make a powerful couple. Thirteen years after her accident, Helen considers herself the same high achiever she’s always been, but admits she still struggles with the effects of her traumatic brain injury. She uses a walking stick and frame. Her vision still isn’t what it used to be, and her speech is slow and measured. As we talk, it’s as though her mouth can’t quite keep up with the sentences forming in her mind. “My voice really
“For me, hope is a fundamental part of life.”
does bother me. I get frustrated that I can’t speak as clearly as I used to. What really annoys me is that I can’t sing or hold a tune at all,” she says.
“I don’t think she ever could,” stirs Wayne.
The loss of her karaoke skills aside, Helen says she wouldn’t change her life one bit.
“At the time of my accident, I was impatient, ambitious, anxious and driven. Now, I’m calm, wise, patient and enduring. More than anything, I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to help and encourage people with my story,” she says, her voice steady and her eyes steely with determination.
The Phoenix Rising: A True Story of Survival by Helen Ross Lee is available at thephoenixrising.com.au. If this story triggers concerns, you can call Lifeline on 13 11 14 or Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636.