She smiles shyly but doesn’t hesitate when the photographer wants to take her picture. “I just can’t ride my bicycle for the pictures,” nine-year-old CARLI PRETORIUS says seriously. “Because then all my stitches will fall out and it will be back to hospital again.”
Thanks to the Smile and Vodacom foundations bubbly Carli recently had surgery to repair facial injuries caused by a freak accident when she was 14 months old. Her father drove over her head at their Nelspruit home.
It took surgeons at Charlotte Maxeke Hospital (formerly Johannesburg Hospital) 13 hours to transplant a small piece of muscle from her thigh to her cheek so Carli will be able to smile again.
Although her face is still swollen there’s a visible difference, her mom, Marinda Koch (33), says. “Her mouth droops a lot less.”
Since the accident she and Carli’s dad, Johan Pretorius (39), have divorced and she has remarried.
Marinda won’t forget that horrible day their lives changed forever. It was Mother’s Day, 13 May 2001. “Carli was a busy baby girl. I was 36 weeks pregnant with our second child. Friends were visiting us and we were outside when Johan reversed his bakkie out of the garage.
“We heard someone shout ‘Stop!’ but by then Johan had driven over her,” she says sadly. “He thought he’d driven over a brick.”
They rushed an unconscious Carli to hospital where she was immediately placed on a ventilator. She was in a coma and didn’t respond at all, Marinda says. “I was so scared. I kept waiting for the doctor to tell me my child had died.”
Carli regained consciousness on day three. And 10 days after the accident, the day her little brother, Franco, was born, she was taken off the ventilator.
Part of her brain was injured and nerve damage was severe. The left side of her face was paralysed and vision in her left eye was poor.
“But seeing Carli do something new every day, such as saying a few words, was like winning a Nobel prize.”
Marinda and her new husband Robert, who now live in Stellenbosch, have a 21-month-old daughter, Liezel, and they’re expecting another daughter next month.
“We’re waiting for the nerves in Carli’s face to heal and will be able to see the full effect in two to six months,” Marinda says.
