Nat McMillan, with daughters Ava and Grace, and Candice's mum Sharon Horan.
Photo by
Owen Sinclair
Candice Horan, 30, collapsed one day in October this year while leaving the Cobram Hospital. After doctors at Shepparton’s GV Health discovered a ruptured disk in her lower back, she found herself undergoing critical spinal surgery at the Alfred Hospital in Melbourne, hundreds of kilometres from her home and 12-year-old daughter.
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Since then, Candice, an educator at Cobram’s Punt Road Kindergarten and Childcare Centre, has been recovering at the Caulfield Hospital (Alfred Health) in Melbourne.
Candice’s mum Sharon said her daughter suffered permanent damage to the nerves in her lower back, and will need an electric wheelchair to move around.
“She’s basically got to learn to walk again, and probably will need help with that for the rest of her life,” she said.
“It will be a permanent disability, but nobody can tell just how much use she’s going to get back.
“She’s just going through so much at the moment... she’s on her own, and she’s got a 12-year-old daughter, and she won’t even be considering returning to work for at least two years.”
Candice Horan, 30, with her daughter Olivia, 12, before her accident.
Photo by
Contributed
But despite the distance between herself and her loved ones, help was never far away.
Some time after Candice’s accident, Koonoomoo local Nat McMillan heard what had happened.
Before the accident that sent her to urgent spinal surgery in Melbourne, Candice taught Nat’s twin daughters, Ava and Grace, at the Punt Road Kindergarten and Childcare Centre.
In that moment, Nat decided something had to be done to help her daughters’ teacher.
“When I heard about it, I thought, ‘I want to do more’,” Nat said.
So without further ado, Nat went about doing all she could to raise as much money to support Candice’s recovery.
“She’s going through a hard time — for her and her daughter because her daughter’s in Year 7 next year,” Nat said.
“So she’ll have to buy all the uniforms, a laptop.”
It was her first-ever time fundraising, and Nat took to it with tenacity.
“Candice always made me feel welcome. She is just a lovely lady,” she said.
And once the word got out, almost every small businesses around the community was on board.
Nat sold raffle tickets outside Woolworths for hours each day, then later ran a barbecue outside Manto’s Produce and Providore earlier in November. Prizes for the raffle were donated by several local businesses.
And on Wednesday, December 4, in the shade of a brush box along Punt Rd, Nat’s fundraising efforts came to a head.
Unbeknownst to Candice, Nat handed over a cheque for a total of $3827.73 to Sharon.
With the cheque in hand, Sharon was at a loss for words as she wiped away a tear.
“It fills my heart, it really does, as a mum, to know that this will just go a long way in helping Candice to be independent,” she said.
“This will just give her some normality.
Nat said she was proud she was able to raise as much as she did for Candice, but stressed she couldn’t have done it alone.
“Without all the shops involved, it wouldn’t have come through,” she said.
“Thank you so much. Without you, it wouldn’t have happened.”
