Vulin - Worth Fighting For

Thank you, thank you, thank you... I feel I could spend the rest of my life, every minute of my life, saying thank you and giving back and it still wouldnt be enough. In my heart I dont even feel like there has been a word invented yet to be able to express how grateful and appreciative I am of everyone. However, there are definitely special thank yous I would like to mention.

Thank you to Denis Ericson for coming into my apartment, helping me in the shower and calling for help. Thank you for the amazing, lightning-fast response of the ambulance, firefighters and police. Thank you to the courts and the WA justice system.

Thank you to Royal Perth Hospital and all the doctors, nurses, physios and occupational therapists. Special mention and thanks to my main surgeons, Professor Suzanne Rae and Professor Fiona Wood. My main occupational therapist Rosemary Kendell, physios Dale Edgar and Paul Gittings, and my bedpan nurses Lynnette Barnden and Kim Webber Bowen: honestly, there is a special spot etched in my heart for you all. Not only for your professionalism but also for your kindness, compassion and willingness to go above and beyond. Thank you to Lisa Anne Stewart of L.A. CosMEDink Cosmetic-Medical Tattooist. Thank you Paxman and Paxman barristers and solicitors. Thanks to all the other doctors and specialists who have also helped along my journey.

Thank you to all the survivors I have met along the way and people who have supported me. Thank you so much to my amazing friends who have gone above and beyond the call of friendship. Thanks to all my aunties, uncles and cousins. Thank you to my immediate family, mum, dad, sisters, brother and brothers-in-law, and to my nephews and niece for providing a constant source of pure happiness. Im sure there are people Ive missed but thank you to everyone Thank you so much for making my heart so full. Thank you for my faith.

And I know Ive thanked them already but to my mother and my sister Svetlana: I will never find the words nor the actions to express how grateful I am to you and how proud I am to call you my family. You have literally been my everything at times when I was completely unable to do anything. You didnt just help me with all my physical needs, you were also there to wipe the tears from my face when I couldnt, and then to replace them with laughter and hope. You spent every moment with me for years, never leaving me without anything I needed. You fed me, showered me and helped me move. Without you by my side there is no chance I would have made half the recovery I have. Your selflessness is unmatched. Even though life has been tough, I still feel like the luckiest person and that I could do anything with you by my side. For that reason I dedicate this book to you, my mum, Vera Vulin, and my sister, Svetlana Velickovski.

Dana Vulin was born into a tight-knit family, with two older sisters and a twin brother. She and her family lived in the small community of Koolan Island off the coast of Western Australia during her early childhood, before relocating to Perth when Dana was six years old. On completing high school, Dana enrolled in a Bachelor of Communications at Edith Cowan University, where she graduated with majors in Advertising and Business Management.

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First published by Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd, 2017

Text copyright Dana Vulin, 2017

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Cover design by Alex Ross Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd

Cover photograph by Julian Kingma

Picture section photograph (Dana Vulin and family outside court) Theo Fakos / Newspix

penguin.com.au

ISBN: 978-1-76014-287-2

I was burnt because of my face. Because I was young and happy and full of life. A woman I didnt know grew jealous of me, then obsessed, then dangerous and, finally, murderous. Because I love life, another person decided that I didnt deserve to live.

But because I love life, I could not die.

I had so much to live for. To fight for.

I might never understand why it happened, or how another human being could do what was done to me. All I can tell you are the facts. That in the prime of my life I was engulfed by a living nightmare, one that took away my face, my body, my whole life. It took everything.

But I was born into a family and a world that taught me that love is stronger than hate, stronger than fear. I was born into a family that taught me how to fight for the impossible. And so I did.

When the doctors told my family I would die, I lived. When they told me I would be lucky to survive, I thrived. When my body wanted to quit, when my heart stopped on the operating table, I would not let myself go. I would fight for my heartbeat, for my body, for my face, for everything the fire took away.

Because I knew my life was worth it. I knew it was worth fighting for.

You know how when you read a book about someone whos been through a huge struggle, or endured some unimaginable horror, they start out by talking about their life beforehand like they grew up in paradise? Well, theres no way around it. I grew up in paradise.

My dad, Don, whod worked in mining ever since hed arrived in Australia in the 1970s, got a job driving trucks on Koolan Island, a tiny iron oremining island off the coast of Western Australia. That was where we lived for the first part of my life: Mum, Dad, my two older sisters Svetlana and Suzie, and me and my twin brother Denis. When my mum, Vera, was due to give birth to Denis and me, she was transported to a hospital in Perth. Then we all got on a plane and flew 1900 kilometres, to live in this palm-tree paradise.

It was amazing, a tiny little town with beaches on all sides. We knew everyone on the island, but that wasnt hard it was tiny. It is such a wonderful privilege to have had that childhood. Koolan Island was like its own little world, with palm trees and coconuts all around our house, and lizards and goannas escaping up the trunks when you went out into the backyard.

It was the best place you could imagine growing up in but, even back then, I wanted more out of life than that little slice of paradise could offer. There is only so much excitement you can find on an island. We had a VCR and I would watch the few tapes in our collection over and over. Some of them I never got sick of watching, like The Little Mermaid. I can still sing all the songs from it off by heart and its one of my favourite movies, even today. Others, I got sick of. One time I won a VHS copy of Back to the Future and just watched it again and again, because there was nothing else to do. I trashed that tape; must have seen it a thousand times. I hate that movie so much these days so sick of it but I still love Disney.

There werent many other kids to play with. My sisters were always just that little bit too old for me and would leave me out of their games. That would drive me crazy, so I would go and dob on them to Mum to get them into trouble.