Twelve days before Christmas my 10-year-old son Liam was hit by a bus. Bang! Like that. Our lives changed in an instant.
Even four years on it is still like a slow-motion scene from a horror movie.
It was a Monday and I was running late to get him to his end-of-year Christmas concert where he was to play drums in the school band. I didn't have time to feed him a proper meal so I gave him a snack and we raced across the road to school. I went to the hall but he turned around and snuck home because (guilt moment here) he was still hungry. I heard a huge crash – but ignored it.
My friend Cassie came to get me: "Liam's been hit by a bus," she said, as she put her arms around me and led me to the scene. There he was, sprawled out bloodied and face down on the asphalt, sobbing.
Our neighbour Patrick, who'd been out on the footpath having a cigarette when he saw the accident happen, jumped into the traffic to stop an oncoming car from hitting him after the bus. He was with him when I arrived. Another woman was there, too, examining him. "Are you the mother?" she asked me in Dutch accent. I nodded. "He can move his fingers and his toes, he will be OK. But you need to get down on the road and reassure him."
Suddenly people were everywhere. The police, parents, school kids; all thinking they were coming to a Christmas concert not this chaos. As I mustered all the strength I could to lay down on Coogee Bay Road next to my sobbing son. There was blood everywhere.
"Mum, mum, am I going to die?" he screamed in pain. "No sweetheart everything is going to be OK," I lied, not knowing if it would be. I got up off the ground only when the ambulance arrived and they carefully picked him up onto the stretcher. It was a harrowing few minutes' ride to Sydney Children's Hospital.
A group of student doctors surrounded him on arrival and ripped off his bloodied school uniform. Painkillers, drips and mayhem ensued for what seemed like minutes but was actually hours. They checked his vital signs, X-rayed him for broken bones and then prepped him to go through the MRI machine to see if there was any brain damage. My husband, who'd died of a brain tumour just before Liam had turned 3, had MRIs every six months. As they led Liam off to what he called "the giant doughnut machine" (the painkillers had kicked in) a tear trickled down my face. There's nothing like the yearning for the person you created your child with, when your baby is in mortal danger.
The principal of the school, along with seven or eight parents, remained with me the whole night. In fine show-biz tradition the school concert had gone on. I asked the principal how it went. "I don't know, I've been here with you," she said. I had no recollection; I was on auto-pilot.
That night we spent the first of four nights in Sydney Children's Hospital in a room with two gravely ill children: Lizzie from Wagga Wagga and Connor from Kincumber. The next morning friends visited: one delivered his drumsticks and sheet music, which were found in the gutter the next day. My friend Cassie, a teacher at the hospital, made a Christmas tree from an old magazine with my dazed and drowsy boy. It remains our favourite Christmas decoration.
The hospital social worker visited and told us the bus driver had wanted to speak to us because he felt so bad. She had told him I was a widow. "I don't care if she's a weirdo, I'll still talk to her," a joke that still makes me laugh today.
Friends visited and asked:"What's worse, school or being hit by a bus?" "School," he deadpanned through a nearly broken jaw. Mates from his class got to visit the Starlight room with him. We were enveloped by kindness: the Waratahs put on a barbecue for Christmas, Sydney FC gave him tickets to the soccer, Adam Goodes met him at a local cafe for a pep talk.
He walked out of hospital having been hit by a bus, only having swallowed some baby teeth and a lot of pride. He is a road safety zealot these days. He jokes "smoking saved my life" because if our neighbour hadn't been having a cigarette maybe he would have been run over by the oncoming car.
Now, every year we pack up toys for the Sydney Children's Hospital and wonder about Lizzie and Connor and revel in how fortunate we were.
I knew he was changed forever by the accident when I read his note to Santa that year that I still treasure. "I'd like a PlayStation for Christmas," it read. "But what I'd really like more is for you to visit the kids at Sydney Children's Hospital. They are a lot unluckier than I am."
Helen Pitt is a Fairfax Media journalist.
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