Real-life reads Teen’s Thai hit-and-run horror; Horse-racing stars are the teal deal!
A teen fights to overcome her car-crash-trauma
It was just after 6pm on a warm Saturday evening in Chiang Mai, Thailand, when Kiwi mum-of-three Adele Prince received a call from her daughter Hannah’s mobile phone.
But the voice on the other end wasn't Hannah's – it belonged to a local woman who informed her that the 18-year-old schoolgirl, whose family has lived in Thailand for the past 11 years, had been in an accident.
However, there was nothing to prepare Adele for the gruesome sight that greeted her when she arrived on the scene. The Auckland-born maths teacher, 47, recalls, “Hannah was being lifted into an ambulance and her foot was lying at a horrible angle. It had nearly been severed.”
Cycling home after helping out at a refuge for at-risk youth, Hannah – who has two younger siblings, David, 16, and Bethany, 12 – had been hit by a car that immediately
sped off, leaving her for dead.
The impact was so strong, the teen was catapulted across the road, where police suspect she landed on her feet before crashing to the ground. There were few witnesses and CCTV cameras from local shops revealed only limited footage of the collision, which resulted in the loss of part of her ankle. The driver and the car have never been located.
Over the past arduous three months, the Prince family has undergone emotional, financial and bureaucratic challenges while Hannah underwent three major operations on her injuries – a crushed right ankle, and a shattered right femur and pelvis. Her pelvis was also sliced by what is suspected to have been a car aerial.
“Those first few days were really tough,” tells Hannah's dad, software developer Cambell, 48, who moved the family from New Plymouth to undertake missionary work in 2006. “Between Adele and myself, we were doing 22-hour stints with our daughter. Our lives changed in a split second.”
Soon after being admitted to hospital, Hannah underwent a three-hour operation on her mangled foot, with two further operations over the following days, requiring six units of rare AB positive blood that were donated after a desperate Facebook call-out.
Road to recovery
Despite speaking Thai well, Adele and Cambell say getting information from doctors was often difficult due to cultural barriers. And Hannah, who remembers nothing of the crash, was forced to come to terms with her life-altering injuries.
“I cried a lot in the first few weeks,” admits the teen, who is still wheelchair-bound. “But it was more out of tiredness than pain. I knew I was lucky to be alive.”
The Princes soon settled into a daily routine, working from the hospital on their laptops, with Hannah doing her homework from her hospital bed.
Her damaged ankle will
eventually be reconstructed with skin from her thigh when enough tissue has built up around the bone. Her femur is now held in place with 26 metal screws.
The total cost of the accident to date has been $95,000, which is partly being funded by donations from around the world, including one from the family of a Kiwi woman who died after a similar accident.
“We've been blown away by people's kindness,” tells Cambell, who set up the website princes.co.nz to receive donations. “Our heart sank when we first got the bill because the ambiguous wording of our insurance policy meant that they would only cover the costs of one injury, at a maximum of $18,000, rather than three separate ones.
“We would urge other families living abroad to check carefully when looking at insurance. We both have modest salaries and didn't know how we would cover the excess costs, but our friends, family and strangers have been amazing. We couldn't have got
through this without them.”
After 40 days in hospital, Hannah returned to the family’s two-storey Thai-style home, where her bedroom has been relocated to the ground floor. She undertakes daily physio sessions and dressing changes alongside her schoolwork.
“Every day there is a new normal,” tells Cambell. “Sometimes the progress feels slow, but other days there are big improvements. Last week, she took her first few steps. There are constant milestones. The new goal is for Hannah to be able to attend her graduation on June 1 on crutches.”
After graduating, keen Mandarin speaker Hannah hopes to teach English to missionary children in China for a year before moving back to Aotearoa to attend university.
“I’m really looking forward to going to uni in New Zealand,” she tells. “Even though I haven’t lived there since I was six, it still feels like home.”
Smiling as they discuss the future, the family is taking each day as it comes. “We still have no idea of the long-term damage,” says Adele, “but what we do know is that Hannah is lucky to be alive and we are so thankful every day for that.”