In 2002, Gayle Shann was working with her husband, Mac, when an accident shattered her body. Here, the couple tells Michael Sheather of the love and grit that keeps them going.
It’s the same expression Gayle has when she looks back at him. “Mac does everything for me,” says Gayle, 31. “And he never makes out that it’s an effort or makes me feel guilty about having to do anything. I’m a very lucky woman because there wouldn’t be too many blokes who would do what Mac does for me, that’s for sure.”
Four-and-a-half years ago, Gayle Shann suffered horrific injuries when her right arm and shoulder blade were torn from her body and, among other injuries, her left arm was paralysed. It’s heartbreaking that disaster should strike such a young and vibrant couple as they toiled to fulfil their dreams. Not long after dawn on August 9, 2002, Gayle and Mac were working together building a new fence around their home, Cantaur Park, a 12,000-hectare cattle property three-and-a-half hours west of Mackay in central Queensland. Mac was operating a post-hole digger from the back of a tractor, while Gayle, in coat and leather work gloves, was shovelling soil away from the auger bit as it cut through the hard, red earth.
One moment, their future stretched out before them, the next, Gayle’s work glove caught on a release pin, part ofa spinning drive shaft, which pulled her into the machinery. In the second or so it took Mac to react and shut down the motor, Gayle twisted around the spinning shaft and through a metal frame as many as a dozen times. Unconscious, Gayle was a mangled and bloodied wreck.
Their lives, so full of promise just minutes before, changed irrevocably. “We had everything that we needed,” says Gayle. “We had each other. We had established a successful cattle breeding business here on Cantaur Park. Mac and I both grew up on properties in Queensland and that is the kind of life that we wanted — a property, a business, a family, the whole fairytale.”
Like most fairytales, Gayle and Mac’s story of love and courage had the happiest of beginnings. Both were brought up on large properties in rural Queensland — she from the lyrically named property Valley of Lagoons on the upper Burdekin River and he from Myall Springs, about six hours further down the Burdekin — they shared a love of the land, of horses, cattle and the romance of the bush.
When they met, at a campdrafting event in Charters Towers, Mac was 19 and Gayle 21. “We bumped into each other and started talking, and well, I guess we both felt the same way about each other,” says Mac. “We just hit it off immediately.”
Later, Mac would come to Valley of Lagoons to help with the mustering. “It’s full-on for three or four weeks and we’d be out working all day, and then we’d come in to prepare the evening meal and Mac would come in and help,” recalls Gayle. “He was always in the kitchen with me helping prepare the vegetables and my sisters used to say, ‘How come we can’t get a boyfriend to do that?’
“We were always together and when you’re on a property, you’re together every day. You’ve got to be best friends because you’re never apart and we’ve been the best of friends from the start.” They married in October 1999, just18 months after they met. Eleven months later, Gayle’s father, Alan Atkinson, a well-known Queensland cattleman, bought Cantaur Park and offered Gayle and Mac the chance to manage it.
The newlyweds knew and loved the routines and hard work of big station life, and the idea of doing it for themselves was both romantic and challenging. They moved on to the station in September 2000. Soon, the couple had a thriving cattle breeding business and were able to finally turn their attention to their new home. The garden needed work, they decided, and in late 2002, they asked a friend to help build a new metal fence, which they started on August 9.
Shortly after dawn, the three friends broke ground. What happened next was the beginning of a nightmare, much of which Gayle, mercifully, does not remember. The accident caused her to be pulled, time and again, through a space about half her size framed by metal bars.
“It just made a sickening, thumping noise,” recalls Mac, who ran to alert his friend, who, because he was wearing a welding mask, had heard nothing. “Gayle was unconscious, had a massive cut across her head and was pretty badly cut up,” recalls Mac. “She had a coat on, so I couldn’t see the rest of her injuries.”
Mac, reasoning that speed was crucial, ran to the house and called 000. Their friend carried Gayle inside and laid her on a single bed at the back of the house. “I didn’t know that Gayle was inside and I ran back out to the tractor to see that she wasn’t there,” says Mac. “I followed the trail of blood back into the house, to the bed where our mate had covered her up with a blanket.”
“She had regained consciousness and kept saying, ‘Can you move my right arm? I feel like I am lying on it’. I picked up the blanket and there was just a massive hole in her side. That’s when I realised she’d lost her arm.”
Gayle’s injuries were ghastly. Her right arm and shoulder blade had been torn from her body. Her left arm was broken in four places, her left leg smashed. She had four broken ribs, a broken nose and multiple lacerations, including a gash across her face. She’d also lost lots of blood. She was now conscious and in terrible pain.
When the doctors and paramedics arrived — a road ambulance from Moranbah, a helicopter from Rockhampton and the Flying Doctor Service from Townsville attended — two hours after Mac made his initial call, they believed Gayle had little chance of survival. Doctors made ready to put her into an induced coma and asked Mac to say his goodbyes. “That was probably the hardest thing I have ever had to do,” says Mac. “She wasn’t stable and they knew there’d be at least a few hours before they could leave for the hospital so, yeah, I had to say goodbye, an awful thing to do…”
The doctors operated for two more hours in the spare room, sealing off the arteries and blood vessels, and making sure Gayle stood at least a chance of surviving a two-hour flight to Townsville. Mac was joined by Gayle’s father, Alan, and together they drove for four hours through the night to Townsville, not knowing whether Gayle would be alive when they got there.
“She could have died during the flight,” says Mac. “We simply had no idea and there’s no mobile reception for most of the way. Finally, we drove into range and we heard she’d survived.”
After extensive surgery, Gayle awoke in a hospital bed surrounded by her family and friends, to the news that she had lost her arm. It was a blow, but one she faced bravely. “I thought, ‘Well, there are plenty of people with one arm,” recalls Gayle. “There are even riders who compete with one arm. I’ll just make do.”
Yet a second blow awaited her. Her left arm was almost completely paralysed. The accident had not only torn away her right arm and shoulder blade, but also wrenched the nerves connecting her left arm away from her spine.
“That absolutely gutted us,” says Mac. “If you live life with one arm, then you can do 80 per cent of things for yourself, but if you’ve lost two, it’s back to zero. At least, that’s how it hit us at the time. Still, Gayle took it pretty well, considering.”
It wasn’t until they went home that the reality of her situation hit Gayle. “I realised pretty quick that day-to-day living was going to be a lot more difficult than not riding my horses,” she says.
Mac became Gayle’s full-time carer. From the moment she woke to the moment she went to sleep, Mac had to be nearby in case she needed something. “Gayle was always pretty particular about the way she looked and I started to help with her make-up,” says Mac. “It was a pretty steep learning curve. I had no idea, but aside from a few early mistakes, I think I got the gist of it pretty well. All it takes is a bit of practice.”
In fact, there were a full range of skills that Mac had to perform for Gayle. He learned to clean her teeth, feed her, wash and dress her. Mac had to learn to live with little sleep because Gayle’s left arm would need to be moved about every half hour or so through the night. As difficult as that was for Mac, it was also hard for Gayle.
“It’s frustrating because I was such an independent person,” says Gayle. “I used to shoe my own horses, which was pretty hard yakka. But now when things get busy and I see Mac running around after me, it’s hard. In the rural industry, you’re judged by what you can and can’t do physically — that’s hard for me, because I grew up doing everything a man could do.”
At first, she was forced to wear her arm in a sling. “If I let it dangle, it felt like a dead weight,” she says. “It felt like it was going to pull out of the socket.” And there were phantom pains from her missing arm, something many amputees suffer.
“When I came out of the induced coma in hospital, almost immediately I started getting the most terrible pains,” Gayle says. “Like someone was bending back my fingers to the point where they were about to snap. The doctors said it was probably some kind of memory of how it felt during the accident, the last thing I felt before I passed out.”
In a groundbreaking 17-hour operation a few weeks after the accident, the nerves from her missing right arm were attached to her left arm. The nerves run across the top of her chest. “It was strange,” she says, “because for 12 months nothing happened. Then, one day, while Mac was helping me with some exercises, I felt a twinge in my left arm. Mac thought he saw some movement, but we weren’t sure. And then we tried it again and there it was, a little movement. We were ecstatic.” To make her left arm move, she had to get used to pretending that she wanted to move her right arm, an eerie feeling.
There were also excrutiating headaches that continued for months. “Finally, the doctors discovered that I was leaking fluid from my spine where the nerves had been wrenched out and there was another three rounds of surgery to plug that up,” she says. “It took a while, but the pain eventually stopped.”
Gayle and Mac found a measure of fame after their story was told by ABC-TV on its award-winning documentary series, Australian Story, in 2003. Four years on from the accident, Gayle and Mac’s fairytale is finally coming true. Though she lives with recurring pain, Gayle has regained limited movement in her damaged left arm.
Though her range of arm movement is restricted, Gayle has recovered some of her independence, an important achievement. She’s learning to live with her disability and now regularly drives the station’s 4WD flatbed ute using her feet to both steer and change the gears.
Gayle rides a modified four-wheel motorbike and helps muster their 2500 head of cattle. Gates around the property are specially modified so she can open and close them with her feet. She also works on the farm computer and does the books for their cattle breeding business.
Their home has been almost completely rebuilt with the help of Queensland’s close-knit rural community, which donated almost $200,000, and local tradesmen who gave their time, allowing her more freedom and ease of movement. “She even waters the garden, moves the hose with her feet,” says Mac. “It’s amazing how much she does.”
There’s also a lap pool where, suspended in its cooling water, Gayle finds relief from the pain that has become her constant companion. The ruptured nerves in her left arm keep firing off messages that can’t reach her brain. The messages go unanswered and so the nerves keep firing, causing unending pain. It’s in the pool that she finds most relief.
There’s one part of their dream that hasn’t become a reality. They have decided that, although they’re capable of becoming parents, they won’t. It was a difficult decision and one they struggled to make. “The more time that passes, the more we realise just how difficult having a child would be for us,” says Gayle. The couple’s saving grace is that they have each other. “When I first got home from hospital, I used to worry that, with all the problems I have, Mac wouldn’t want to stay,” says Gayle. “But he’s still here and we’re working through this together. I couldn’t do it if it wasn’t for Mac. “
“Despite my injuries, we’re raising cattle and we have our horses. We’re working together, side by side, almost every day. It might not be the full fairytale, but we’re happy.”
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