Everything to Live For: The Inspirational Story of Turia Pitt

by Pitt, Turia

  When I came home I was afraid that everyone would treat me differently, even friends. But to my relief that didn’t happen. My close friends have all been fantastic and I wouldn’t have come as far without them. One of the things that I like about my friends is their sense of humour. When I told Briggs that I was worried about my left wedding ring finger being amputated she said, ‘Well, at least you’ll still be able to give people the bird (make the rude stick finger)!’

  But I have to say that former peripheral friends have dropped off the radar (which is fine) and I did find the attitudes of some people rather unenlightened – for instance I was pretty annoyed when people told me they thought I was sitting at home bored all day. Anyone who really knows me, knows I can never be bored, I always have a million things to do. Then there were other blinkered individuals who pretended that nothing had happened to me and just talked about the parties that they had been to.

  I have been blown away by the support the Ulladulla community has shown for me. This is probably best demonstrated by the Masquerade Ball in Ulladulla that my mates (and in particular Briggs and Nicola) organised in April 2012 to raise funds for my medical and other expenses. They decided to make it a masquerade ball in deference to me having to wear a mask. It was a sell-out for 500 people, and that’s huge for Ulladulla. Michael drove me to the Community Centre, where the ball was in full swing, and I was overwhelmed. I gave a little speech but I was still very frail and tired easily and we left after an hour. I was so grateful for everyone’s efforts; it was this event that gave us the funds to pay for the trip to France.

  One of the more unexpected positives to come out of such a terrible event is the friendship that has developed between me and the others who met for the first time that day. Over the last year Kate and I have become quite close and email each other regularly. I saw Hully and Hal in Sydney shortly after I came out of hospital and we (Michael and me) struck up a rapport with both of them and have continued to stay in touch. In November 2012, Hully, Hal, Kate and her friend Andrew, who had been a volunteer on the day of the fire, and Michael and I rented a house in Ulladulla for a weekend. We hung out together for the first time since the fire and it was fantastic. We were in good spirits and we drank a few beers, ate pizza, played board games and just relaxed. We did speak about the fire and compared scars but we didn’t focus on it. I was so proud of Kate – she seemed to be one hundred per cent independent and I was bit jealous of that, but I was also proud of how far I’d come in my own independence since we saw each other at the inquiry. I think she was proud of me too.

  I had just got my licence back – it had expired while I was in hospital – and I played tour guide and drove them around my beautiful Ulladulla. Michael went fishing on the Sunday and the rest of us just cruised the beaches and I showed them the great surfing places, we had coffee at a local winery and later we visited Michael’s parents. I know they liked meeting everyone they’d heard so much about. We plan to do the 20-kilometre Lake Argyle swim together.

  Driving again was cool. It was funny seeing the looks on people’s faces as I drove around Ulladulla wearing my black face mask in our blue Holden commodore station wagon (Michael sold the little blue Hyundai). In the early months, when I appeared in public and people stared I would be a bit upset – Michael would say they were only looking because I had the best boyfriend. I didn’t mind if it was children looking, that’s natural curiosity, but when adults came up to me in the street and asked what happened I was a bit pissed off, thinking they just wanted to sticky beak. I’m less sensitive now and realise people just wanted to know; their interest wasn’t malicious.

  In a way wearing the mask has been a positive – it has raised the profile of burns injuries and that flows on to the issue of skin and tissue donation. When I’m out in public and people look at me, I know many will recognise me from the publicity: ‘See that girl in the mask – she’s the girl who was caught in that fire.’ Kate was just as badly burnt as me but because she wasn’t burnt on her face, people don’t immediately associate her with the fire in the Kimberley.

  At the beginning of 2013, I felt I was getting to a good stage of my journey. I stopped crying and started laughing again; I’m a bit like Mum and love to laugh, and every time I laughed I could see Michael’s face light up, hearing the old Turia. I didn’t need to medicate my pain any more.

  Some things I will never be able to do and some things I can never get back; for instance, due to my damaged skin I can’t regulate my body temperature (one of the main functions of skin) so when it’s cold I’m really cold and when it’s hot, I’m hot. This will never get better but that’s okay because it doesn’t affect the major areas that matter. While I was in hospital, sometimes I would ask Michael to put blankets on me and once he covered me with a total of eight blankets! Then at night I would be burning up and sweating and kick off all my blankets. I would occasionally get so hot that I would ask the nurses to put ice packs on my groin and under my arm pits.

  My future with Michael will be different to the one I envisaged. Although the skin on my stomach was shaved to provide grafts to burnt areas, I can still have children. However I will probably need help with a baby – maybe a nanny for warming bottles and other tricky movements. Michael and I bought an apartment in Mollymook near Ulladulla in March 2013 and I did all the negotiating. Since coming back from France we have had a great time decorating it.

  When I think about what has happened to me I link it to my long-felt desire to ‘make a difference’. Briggs reminded me that when we were teenagers I said I wanted to make a name for myself doing something worthwhile one day; someone who did something that was meaningful to society; in no way did I think this life-changing trauma would be the way I would be known publicly.

  Of course I have asked the question ‘Why me?’ – wouldn’t anyone in my position? But the other side of me has always answered, ‘Why not me?’ I knew I was a good person before this happened to me so I asked myself why I was being tested. What was this agony for? I survived the school bus crash when I was a teenager and I survived the fire; there has to be some meaning in my ability to survive. How could I make something meaningful out of this and validate what happened? I realised that one way would be to help others who need donated skin like I did. I was dumbfounded when I found out that there was no skin available in Australia to help me and that the skin that saved my life had to come from an unknown donor on the other side of the world. I want to raise awareness for skin and tissue donation in Australia in the hope that skin banks will always have enough supplies to help save other lives.

  I hope that telling my story goes some way to helping this aim and to inspire others who have challenging issues in their lives. I’m confident about becoming a motivational speaker; I have become an unofficial ambassador for DonateLife and have started to advocate the need for organ and tissue donation.

  Since I contacted DonateLife I have been involved with a couple of its events; I was invited to the launch of the 2013 DonateLife Week at Kirribilli House in Sydney and again to Canberra later to take part in the DonateLife Walk. In June 2014, I plan to trek the Inca Trail in Peru to raise money for Interplast – a not-for-profit organisation in which Professor Haertsch is a volunteer medical specialist. Interplast provides medical treatment for people in the Asia-Pacific region who are disabled as a result of congenital or acquired medical conditions, such as cleft lip and palate or burn scar contractures. Some of my friends, including Briggs, Nicola, Michael’s sister Shae, my friend Mary Kavanagh from Kununurra and another friend, Shae Clayton, are planning to join me.

  I’ve accepted the way I look now, although it’s not perfect – yet. One day I will look beautiful again; that is, beautiful to me, because the people I love say I am beautiful to them anyway. Surgery will be ongoing and I will probably have surgical corrections for the rest of my life. In the beginning my surgery was based around function. But in the future it will be based around appearance. There will probably be little
things I’m not happy with because I’m a perfectionist. As medical technology for burns improves, there will no doubt be many more things the doctors can do for me. I know it will be a couple of years before I can surf again and a couple of years before I’m confident enough to wear shorts. All of that aesthetic stuff will take time but I’m still young and I have a long life ahead of me and I have more ambitious plans for the future; I want to gain my doctorate in Engineering and go back to work in mining. I also want to become an endurance athlete: I want to run another ultramarathon; I want to compete in an ironman. I am dedicated to raising awareness for skin donation and I would like to see a burns rehabilitation centre, similar to the one in France, set up in Australia. I have so much to do . . . you might say I have gone from the despair of not wanting to live to having everything to live for.

  SEVENTEEN

  THE RIPPLE EFFECT

  THIRTEEN PEOPLE DIRECTLY FACED THE FIRE IN THE KIMBERLEY on 2 September 2011; but it irrevocably changed the lives of many more. The ripples cast a wide circle. At the core were Turia and Kate, the two young women who nearly lost their lives.

  Turia, the most profoundly injured, tells her story in this book. Her survival is nothing short of a miracle and her brave determination to live a life that is as normal as possible is inspirational.

  Kate spent nearly six months in Melbourne’s Alfred Hospital recovering from extensive burns to most of her body. Like Turia, Kate became infected and because she had very little unburnt skin from which to harvest skin for grafting, the grafting took many months. She has undergone more than thirty operations on her hands, which are clawed due to contracture, and she lost her right index finger. Her doctors wanted to amputate her left leg below the knee but she fought to keep it, though she did lose half her left foot. She also lost most of her ear lobes.

  She has not been able to return to work. When she left hospital she had to wear a special vacuum pack weighing 4 kilograms on her foot for eight months. She was finally fitted for a prosthetic foot in January 2013. Her injuries meant her driver’s licence was cancelled; until she got it back she was isolated and had to rely on others to drive her around as she does not live near public transport. Kate was previously very fit and loved adventure events. Today she can’t even ride a bike because she can’t grip the handlebars and can’t reach the pedals. In 2013 Kate had to make an unenviable choice: to have her hand amputated or to have her fingers fused together permanently. She chose the latter.

  Because of her high media profile following the fire and a misunderstanding, Kate also distressingly become known as ‘the girl with two boyfriends’. When she decided to enter the race, ten months in advance of the event, she was not in a relationship and on the entry form listed her ex-partner and her mother as next of kin to contact in case of an emergency. At the time of the race she was in a new relationship but forgot to change the next-of-kin details. At Kununurra Hospital she knew she was going into an induced coma and wanted to put her new boyfriend’s name as contact but couldn’t remember his mobile number – understandable in the circumstances.

  Dr Brandee Waite contacted the people named on Kate’s form. The ex-partner went to the hospital with Kate’s mother to anxiously await Kate’s arrival from Darwin. Two days later, Kate’s new partner read about what happened to her in the newspaper and immediately went to the hospital. (Kate had been going to stay on in Western Australia after the race and do some sightseeing with her friends Andrew Baker and Hal, so he wasn’t worried that he hadn’t heard from her.) When he arrived at the hospital it was a little confronting for the two men. Kate was in a coma and not able to explain the mix-up.

  But a hospital is a hotbed of gossip and word that she had two boyfriends went viral; more than eighteen months later she was still being stopped by people asking: ‘Aren’t you the girl with the two boyfriends?’ Her new partner was very supportive and did whatever he could when Kate left hospital but after a couple of months, Kate felt she could no longer sustain the relationship. She wanted to get on with the business of adjusting to her much altered life.

  Michael Hull – now affectionately called ‘Hully’ by the rest of the group – was flown to Royal Perth Hospital. He had a combination of first-, second- and third-degree burns: he suffered burns on both legs from ankle to knee, plus his fingers and ears as well as his arms to the elbow. He underwent skin grafts and wore pressure garments on his arms and legs for many months. He has a long permanent scar on his right leg, where he cut himself while running through the fire.

  Hully had ongoing pain and continued to receive rehabilitation in Sydney for nine months after the Kimberley disaster. To focus on something other than his injuries, he began to train for other adventurous events. In April 2012 he did a seven-day trek to the North Pole, dragging a heavy sled; in September the same year he competed in a marathon in the Flinders Ranges in Victoria with Hal. In 2013 he competed in an Iron Man triathlon in New Zealand; the Marathon des Sables, a 250-kilometre ultramarathon in Morocco; and walked the Kokoda Trail with friends.

  Martin Van der Merwe suffered thirty-five per cent burns on both calves to mid-thigh and substantial burns to his right hand. He returned to Ghana after three weeks in Royal Perth Hospital. He has recovered well and is running again and playing squash, cycling and swimming. But not a day goes by when he doesn’t think about Turia and Kate and how such young lives could be so tragically affected.

  Hal was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and symptoms of reactive depression. Like Hully, he came to the conclusion that the best way forward was to compete again. Two months after the ill-fated Kimberley run he competed in the nine-day Adventure Racing World Championships in Tasmania. In 2012 he did a marathon in the Flinders Ranges with Hully and has competed in two forty-eight-hour adventure races, two ultramarathons of 100 kilometres and another nine-day race in the Flinders Ranges.

  Shaun too was profoundly affected by the events of that day in which he thought his father had died. He believes he is a better person now but would not have chosen what happened as a way of learning one of life’s lessons. He values his time with his family more than ever, conscious that he could never know when it might be the last time. After his experience with RtP, Shaun is less trusting of adventure event organisers: he is selective about the events he enters, thoroughly checking out the background of the organiser first. He is disappointed that the event company is still able to operate – apparently not held to account for any of the shortcomings identified by the inquiry in its report.

  The negative effects didn’t stop with those who lived through the fire on the ridge; many others were caught up in this tragic, preventable event. The founder of the company, Mary Gadams, herself received second-degree burns to her fingers and the backs of her arms and legs. After being initially treated in Kununurra Hospital she flew back to her home in Hong Kong.

  Then there were those who escaped the fire, three of whom saw Turia and Kate engulfed by flames, and some who went to extraordinary efforts to get help. Many competitors were also caught up in the drama and aftermath.

  Some of those people have been so traumatised that even today they find it difficult to talk about what happened. The three Newcrest miners, all tough men, went to ground after the initial publicity, deeply affected by what they had seen – and the images they continue to live with. They were hailed as heroes by those they helped after the fire; but that’s not the way they saw themselves. They have all moved out of the region and don’t speak to the media.

  Volunteer Lon Croot lives with the image of the fire overcoming competitors and the sounds of the screams. He also lives with the frustrating knowledge that his concerns about the fires burning out course markers on certain parts of the route in the days before the race were not taken seriously by RtP organisers, even though he was a local; at the subsequent inquiry, when asked if there had been adequate risk identification, Lon recounted events from a few days before the race: ‘They said to me that some of the ribbons had been b
urnt off and they had to go back and re-tie the ribbons along the track. I said . . . “Are you worried about that?” . . . If the wind picks up, I was a little concerned . . . but I was at the bottom of the ladder. I do not think the fires were taken into account enough as a danger.’ One of the questions he was asked during the hearing was if there was any briefing about what to do if there was a fire. He told the committee: ‘There was definitely no briefing . . .’1

  Ellis Caffin and Heather Scott, who so narrowly escaped the fire, did everything in their power to raise the alarm only to be trapped in an ongoing nightmare. When they finally reached checkpoint two and found it was burnt out, they set off for checkpoint three; they tried to hail a lift and discovered outback hospitality selective.

  Cars in the outback are few and far between. A couple stopped and, although Ellis begged for help, explaining the situation, he and Heather were refused a lift; the drivers were not going their way. Ellis and Heather may have looked hot and dishevelled: they were desperate to get help; they had run out of water during their 6-kilometre trek back to checkpoint two and were grateful they managed to find some in a creek. Another man, in a ute, told them he was a landowner and said the fire was a controlled burn deliberately lit to prevent bigger fires during the dry season.

  At last two campers in a third vehicle cheerily told them to hop in. As they were driving they came across a large group of people waiting by the side of the road. Ellis and Heather discovered that most were competitors who had been behind them and had all heeded Ellis’s call from the valley to turn around. RacingthePlanet staff had tried to evacuate everyone from checkpoint two at 2 pm but did not have enough transport; eventually everyone was moved to the main road with the help of a passing local resident in a troop carrier; they were left with some water and one race official and told to wait while staff headed off inland towards where they thought the competitors may have been trapped. Someone would pick them up later. It was by then 7 pm.