A 22-year-old Irish woman who was left in intensive care after being struck by a car in Sicily last October could soon be returning home, her father has said.
Hannah Leonard from Co Wicklow was training for the Dublin City Marathon when the incident occurred at a pedestrian crossing on the Italian island.
She suffered brain injuries and underwent an initial surgery where a piece of her skull was removed in order to access her brain and relieve the pressure.
“There’s finally a light at the end of the tunnel,” Kevin Leonard said. “It looks like within the next week or two we will be able to get her on a plane and bring her back to Beaumont to start her recovery journey in Ireland.”
Speaking on RTÉ’s Today with Claire Byrne, he said that “things are lining up at home” and they are keen to help her progress.
“Hannah is sort of at a stage now where she needs to start interacting with therapists and people to get her moving. The aim of the ICU is to keep her alive and save her life and that’s what they did.
“They’re not physiotherapists, occupational therapists, speech therapists, they are there to keep her alive and they are keen as well [for her to return to Ireland] – not that they want to get rid of her – because they have said Hannah can stay here as long as she needs to because they have accepted her.”
Mr Leonard said that his daughter could not be moved until her condition improved and that a bacterial infection delayed that.
“We had thought, or hoped, it was going to clear quickly. In the end it actually took five weeks for that infection to clear,” he said.
“And then we had to wait for the prosthetic, the new piece of skull, to arrive, which then delayed things a little bit further. All in all, it was the week before Christmas that she was finally able to get the surgery once everything had settled down.
“Now that she’s had the surgery, she looks like Hannah again. There’s no longer the dip in her skull, she is moving her body a lot more than she used to,” he said.
Mr Leonard said that the infection had slowed his daughter’s responses but that “she’s slowly, very slowly coming around and time will tell just where she gets to with those reactions and interactions with people.”
He said that she has had “some reaction to pain” and they are seeing facial and mouth movements from her.
Mr Leonard said that the Health Service Executive has been assisting “with the logistical side” of his daughter’s return, but that the family is “still still uncertain as to whether or not we’ll have to cover those costs” as it was discovered that she did not have travel insurance to cover the costs of returning home.
“The costs are considerable to essentially rent a private plane for a day with an intensive care doctor and intensive care nurse on the plane as well,” said Mr Leonard.
“We’re still looking at how the costs will be covered but then we have been very fortunate in the support that Hannah has received in the GoFundMe page that my brother set up for her. Thankfully, the money is there to get her home if we need to dip into those finances.”
He said that it was “a long-term injury” and that “there will be a lot of future costs associated with Hannah and her condition”.
“Hannah’s got a long journey to go and we still don’t know where she will land once that journey is finished. Within that journey is going to be a lot of therapy, a lot of care, there’ll probably need to be adjustments made to our house, we’ll probably have to get specialist equipment,” he said.
