Just a few month’s ago Kerri-Anne Kennerley was told her husband John might never speak again after a life-threatening fall at a party left him paralysed.
While still partially paralysed, he is making “miracle” progress, the television favourite says, he’s even been talking despite having had a tracheotomy.
“I hesitate to use the word miracle but for us that is what John’s recovery has been like, a series of minor miracles,” Kerri-Anne told the Australian Women’s Weekly in the latest issue of the magazine.
“It started with him being able to breathe unassisted. And that was such an important step. Otherwise, he faced a life being attached to a respirator, being fed through a tube in his nose.”
It took three attempts at removing his respirator before John could breathe by himself, the 62-year-old said, describing the agonising process of trial-and-error.
“Survival is the first thing you hope for in a situation such as this and I was grateful John was alive, but if that life was to have any quality at all, he needed at least to breathe for himself,” she said.
“It was as though a great weight had lifted from our shoulders, from both John and me. That was the moment when I felt he’d really come back to me.”
Kerri-Anne thanked John's medical team on her Instagram account.
The couple, who have been together for 25 years, were at Bonville Golf Resort in early March when John lost his footing and fell backwards through a hedge and onto lawn.