One
of Australia’s top newspaper
and TV reporters , author Toni
McRae , has been to Hell ( more likely the other place )
and back . While working in Brisbane , after a double mastectomy, she collapsed in an hotel ,was taken by ambulance to the Mater Hospital, treated
for infection from chemotherapy; in a
coma for nine days and three weeks in intensive care, she had two transfusions and dialysis .
Doctors
said she had a 15 to 30 percent chance of survival. Came to paralysed ; flown back to Hervey Bay,
where she lives, having worked on the
Fraser Coast Chronicle, she was then taken to Maryborough Hospital and to
a new rehab unit where she is beginning to walk again –“ very
slowly and like a duck.”
Prominent in Kiwiland , Sydney and
Canberra (where a
major interview was the Junie Morosi-Jim Cairns
Affair ), Toni worked in Darwin for a time and knows
Magnetic Island well .