This account is based on a real case and, of course, most of the personal details have been changed. The young lady is still living in special accommodation, with a full-time carer and still awaiting a life-partner.
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I'm a loss adjuster in the insurance industry. I work for myself and provide a contract service to insurance companies; to investigate claims against their policies, especially when there is some uncertainty or doubt over the claim or its magnitude.
People ask me why I got into this business and my joke-reply is that I found accountancy and auditing to be too exciting. So, OK; most people would regard my job as boring and repetitive and depressing; delving into tragedies and the lives of people who have suffered. But it's a good income and I'm good at it.
I was called in to the case of Akira Raukawa because her lawyers were claiming a whole lifetime of financial support after an airport runway collision over a year earlier. They claimed she was permanently and totally disabled; and therefore incapable of supporting herself: almost $20million to include an element for inflation over the next 45 years. She was a lone orphan aged 22 years, with no known family in her father's native New Zealand, nor her late mother's community in India. I was detailed to visit her in a special nursing facility near Auckland; to assess her condition and the extent of her claim. Nothing prepared me for my findings, nor the fact that she would change my life.
At my first meeting with Kira [as she was known to everyone] she was wheeled into the room, enclosed in a shiny steel frame that held her shoulders, her hips, her thighs and legs, and her feet in a fixed position. Only her arms and her head were free of the framework and was she able to move voluntarily. The rest of her body was immobilized in the metal framework which had 6-inch wheels at the floor.
But most noticeable was the injury to her spine and the need for the framework to bend her pelvis backwards through 90-degrees, so that her buttocks, hips and legs stuck out of the line of her spine. Second most-noticeable was the bodice, that contained her torso from breasts to hips. It was not made of metal but looked rigid, laced at the back and with a hard panel front. It was covered in a stiff material such as denim or coutil, and it made her waist much smaller than I had seen on any other woman.
I asked the surgeon and the nurse to explain her condition and they spent over an hour pointing at every part of her body. Her spine had been fractured at Lumbar 4-5 vertebrae and also at Cervical 7, behind her shoulders. Her injury was so extensive that repair surgery had been abandoned and she was fitted into the frame for the rest of her life. Her pelvis had been rotated backward by 90-degrees by the injury and now bone-growth had fixed it there.
Her anus pointed backward, parallel to the floor, and her vulva pointed vertically downward.
"She urinates freely but without warning, so she wears a diaper at all times. A catheter would be more convenient for the nurses but not comfortable for her", explained the surgeon, "But we need to clear her rectum every day. The peristalsis finishes before her sigmoid, and so she can't evacuate herself and will never be able to do so. And she still menstruates normally so we assume she is fertile. We haven't checked out her ovaries yet."
I have some knowledge of human anatomy, and so could just imagine her daily procedures.
"Come and look at this," he motioned round the frame.
