Antigone de Lacharriere was getting ready for her then-11-year-old daughter Artemis’ primary school graduation when she received the horror phone call.
“One of my son’s friends said there’d been an accident,” mother-of-three Antigone tells Woman’s Day. “I had asked to speak to him, but I was told, ‘You must come now!’”
Knowing her 14-year-old son Artaban de Lacharriere had been surfing, she assumed he’d got in trouble in the water and frantically drove to the beach, not knowing if he was dead or alive.
“As I got closer, I saw a helicopter, and the road was blocked,” recalls Antigone, 49, who is French but lives in Sydney. “I couldn’t get close to the beach. I saw a stretcher coming, but I still didn’t know anything at all.”
Her husband Alexandre, 50, arrived, but Artaban’s friends were all crying and so distressed that nobody could explain what had happened.
Horrifically, they’d seen their friend fall around 15 metres onto solid rock after the sandstone he was walking on collapsed.
“I found out later that so many people contributed to saving my son’s life,” says Antigone. “His friend Finn was the first one to see him, and he knew to scoop blood from his mouth so he could breathe. He was so calm, and that saved Artaban’s brain.” Doctors determined that Artaban de Lacharriere was too unwell to transfer by air, so they coordinated a road transfer to the hospital.
“About 50 doctors met him because he had so many different types of injury,” says Antigone. “When I saw him for the first time, he looked perfect. Not even a tooth was broken.”
But Artaban had suffered injuries from head to toe, which made his chance of survival a minuscule 5%. Requiring 62 bags of blood in 24 hours, he needed seven major operations. There was damage to all his major organs, he’d broken 16 ribs, his hip, a knee, an elbow and a heel, and he needed part of his skull removed to reduce the swelling on his brain.
“The doctors weren’t giving anything away,” says Antigone. “All night, I signed consent forms and, at one point, I did think I was signing to donate his organs.”
Twelve hours later, hospital staff allowed Artaban’s family to see him, but they found him covered in tubes and with a fever caused by infection, so the visit offered little comfort.
Over the coming weeks, Antigone tried to keep the family optimistic and to keep life as normal as possible for Artaban’s brother Aladine, now 16, and Artemis de Lacharriere, 13.
She says, “He had seven more surgeries and spent five weeks in a coma, which the doctors said he might never wake up from. Doctors told her that if he woke up, he would suffer heavy brain damage. An MRI showed he wasn’t paralysed, but the doctors warned he might never talk. That was the hardest part because he’s very bright.”
As much of the world was counting the days to Christmas, Antigone prayed for her son coming back to her. On Christmas Eve, she and Alexandre had just left church, where they’d been praying for a miracle. Then they got a call that their son had woken up.
Rushing to his bedside, Artaban spoke his first words in English and then in his second language, French. “I’m very cold,” he said. “My world came back to normal and I knew then he’d be fine,” Antigone tells. “It felt like a miracle.”
Just 10 days later, Artaban was out of ICU and he left hospital on 16 February. Artaban, 15, says, “That time around the accident is just all blurry. I look at photos of me from hospital and can’t believe it was me. I’m not 100% yet, but I’m much better.”
Antigone adds, “It was slow at first, but he fought to stay alive. And in many ways, he’s better today than he was before.
“He’s so focused and so determined, and he wants to give back. He always wanted to be a doctor, but now he wants it more than ever.” Artaban de Lacharriere has learned that “bad things can happen when you least expect them”.
He smiles and says, “I treat every day now as a gift. My friends who were with me that day feel the same. And they’ve pushed me even harder to want to be a doctor. You have to learn to live in the present and take pleasure in it.”
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