It was the last day of the school holidays and Helen Parmentier was busy packing at her beach house when she suddenly noticed six missed calls on her phone.
As she listened to the increasingly fraught voice of the girlfriend of her eldest son Marcel, her heart began thumping. “No-one ever wants to get that telephone call to say there’s been an accident on the mountain,” Helen tells Woman’s Day. “And no-one wants to hear that their son has been seriously hurt.”
On the anxious drive to South Auckland’s Middlemore Hospital, where Marcel was due to arrive by air ambulance from Mount Ruapehu any moment, mum-of-four Helen and her husband John tried to digest the news.
While on a snowboarding break, Marcel, 21, and a group of his friends had walked to the volcano’s summit. They were zig-zagging back down again when four of the party, one after another, skidded over some ice and plummeted off a precipice.
As Helen, an osteopath, sat waiting in the emergency department for the helicopter to arrive, she knew from the messages relayed between the pilot and the hospital medics that Marcel’s injuries were extremely serious.
“Then I heard the helicopter land on the roof. The doors banged open and everyone came flying through,” she recalls. “But he was alive and that was an overwhelming relief. It could have been so much worse.”
After a series of operations and weeks of rehabilitation, Marcel was discharged from the Spinal Rehab Unit in December 2014. Paralysed from the waist down with no feeling in his legs, he quickly set about facing his new life with “remarkable courage”.
Inspired by her son’s indomitable spirit during his recovery, Helen would save her tears for the 30-minute drive to and from the unit. “I bawled my eyes out every time I went home, then pulled myself together again for the family,” she says. “I tried to stay really positive for Marcel. He didn’t need a parent falling apart in front of him.”
Despite being told he would never walk again, Helen, 48, saw her son have only two brief meltdowns. “The first was after he’d been told he was a paraplegic. We hugged and I said, ‘You can still live a full and beautiful life. We’ll get through this.’”
The other was a moment of “pure frustration” as Marcel struggled to adapt to life in a wheelchair. Eighteen months on from the accident, the 23-year-old former builder has forged a new career as an architectural draughtsman.
He’s purchased a house south of Auckland with his girlfriend Becky Bodley, 29, drives with hand controls and enjoys the company of Max, an assistance dog paid for by a community fundraising campaign. Determined not to miss out on time with his friends, he even uses a drone to follow them when they go dirt-biking.
Helen and Marcel are confident the wheelchair is temporary.
“He’s an inspiration to me every day,” says Helen, who is also mum to Antonia, 21, Sebastian, 17, and Verity, nine. “We laugh that he could never rob a bank – it’s a slow process getting in and out of the car, and stacking his wheelchair!
“Marcel has such a positive attitude that all I can think is, ‘Wow.’ He uses humour to get through a lot of situations. Once, we were on the last flight from Christchurch to Dunedin and the airline left his wheelchair in Christchurch.
“It was an awful moment because he suddenly realised how dependent he was on his equipment. A lovely man at the airport said, ‘Can we offer you a snack?’ He just laughed and said, ‘A piggyback would be more useful!’”
Helen says Marcel is convinced that a cure for spinal cord injuries will be found in his lifetime. “And I’m pretty sure he’s right,” she tells. “There seems to be a worldwide race on to find a cure. Marcel says, ‘It’s a temporary inconvenience, Mum. Don’t worry about me.’”
Today, Helen is preparing for the moment that Marcel’s hope becomes a reality. And she’s doing it in a surprising way.
Two years before Marcel’s accident, a friend had introduced Helen to World Organics, a range of skincare products that’s sold through a party plan system. “I fell in love with it,” says Helen.
“I’d had terrible adult acne and within three weeks, my skin had healed. I figured if I had a display in my practice’s waiting room, someone might be interested in buying the odd hand cream.”
Soon after, she hosted her first party and is now a sales director for the brand – a role she manages in addition to running her osteopathy clinic. The extra income proved to be a godsend in the weeks after Marcel’s accident. Helen was able to drastically cut her clinic hours to one-and-a-half days a week and still earn enough from her skincare sales to pay the bills.
With her World Organics colleagues in India.
As a top performer in the New Zealand-based brand, she recently won a trip to India to visit the company’s organic growers and manufacturers. “I was blown away by the care they take. It was impressive.”
Newly back in NZ, her focus is now firmly on finding a cure for Marcel. “Don’t get me wrong, some of what I earn from World Organics still goes on groceries,” tells Helen. “But most of it is going towards a fund for when a cure for paraplegia is found.
“When that day comes, I imagine the treatment will be horrendously expensive, most likely costing a six-figure sum. I could never look at Marcel and say, ‘It’s not going to be you who gets it because we can’t afford it.’ I just couldn’t.”
