When 16-year-old Angela Barker gradually regained consciousness, she thought she must have been in a car crash. It was the only explanation she could find for why she was lying in a hospital bed, surrounded by her tearful parents, Helen and Ian, unable to move anything but her eyelids.
But horrendously, what had left Anj, from Victoria, with such life-altering injuries had nothing to do with a car.
The teenager’s 20-year-old ex-boyfriend was responsible, and after beating her to near death in the grounds of her school, Anj had been unresponsive, in hospital for nine months.
“The attack was so brutal my doctors didn’t think I’d survive, and if I did, I would remain in a vegetative state for the rest of my life,” Anj, now 38, tells Woman’s Day.…
