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'It's a miracle I'm alive'
09/01/2008 08:02 - (SA)
Magdel Fourie, Beeld
Pretoria - "It's a miracle that I'm alive," is the reaction of student Ryan Holmes who was in a coma after being shot in the head during a hijacking.
Seldom have truer words been spoken than those by Ryan, a Tukkies student who lives at Midrand.
When he came out of the coma after being shot in the head in the hijacking early last September, he asked his mother, Dale, what had happened to him.
The bullet pierced the frontal lobe of his brain that night and lodged directly behind his eye.
He went into a coma and doctors did not expect him to live.
Home for Christmas
But, against all expectations, Ryan opened his eyes by mid-October.
He is recuperating at Muelmed Hospital in Pretoria and it looks as if he'll be able to go home by the end of February.
Ryan spent Christmas Day and New Year's Day at home.
Dale told Beeld on Tuesday while she held Ryan's pale hand, he did not remember the hijacking.
He was with his girlfriend, Tanja Lendowsky, 19, in his car in the driveway of her home in Vorna Valley, Midrand, when three attackers hijacked them.
Dale said: "When he came out of the coma, he asked me where he'd been shot. I told him he'd been shot in the head. He said it was a miracle for him still to be alive."
Determined to recover
Because of the damage to his brain he is nearly blind in one eye and needs daily exercise to coax his muscles into working in unison, as if from scratch.
Dale also said Ryan rarely smiled these days.
"It's just quiet. We're waiting for it to return.
"Actually, it's as if everything fell out of the drawers of the wardrobe in his brain, and it all must just be restored to its place again," said Dale.
Then she leans forward and asks her son to repeat what he told her the other day.
And he answers softly: "With my powerful intellect, I can do anything. I WILL recover."
- Beeld
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