A WOMAN whose 12-year-old daughter was left partially paralysed by a car crash on a family holiday has told how her life is being rebuilt.

Susi Coulthard’s daughter Freya Deacon is slowly learning to walk, talk and eat again helped by a team at Oxford’s John Radcliffe Hospital.

The 49-year-old mum-of-three from Wantage is now trying to work out what life will be like when her daughter comes home from hospital in six months time.

Freya, who moved to Wantage with her mum and two brothers three years ago, was 11 when the accident happened on August 24.

She and her dad Neil Deacon booked a holiday on the Greek island of Rhodes. Mrs Coulthard stayed nearby with her mother, a friend and her son Oliver, seven.

Mrs Coulthard said Freya and her father were going for a drive when they were hit by a speeding car.

She said: “The vehicle hit Freya’s side of the car, She was in the front. She had two haemorrhages and a stroke, which caused the paralysis.”

Freya was put in an induced coma and flown to hospital in Athens. She was kept in a coma for the next four days. Mrs Coulthard stayed in a hotel nearby and was allowed to visit for just two hours a day.

On the fifth day Freya started to come round, but was only just conscious and doctors soon realised she had no feeling on her right side.

Mrs Coulthard said: “It took Freya 10 days to come around completely and even then she couldn’t speak and didn’t have feeling in her right side.

“For all that time all I knew was that anyone in a coma could supposedly still hear you, so we read her books and played music.

“We just did everything we could to make her happy.”

Three weeks later Freya and her mum were flown by air ambulance to Kidlington, where an ambulance took Freya to the John Radcliffe.

She has now been there for more than six weeks. She spends every day from 9am to 3pm having physiotherapy, speech therapy and lessons to help her keep up with school work.

In December, she will go to the Brain Injury Hub in Tadworth, Surrey – the largest residential brain injury rehabilitation unit in the UK.

She will live there for six months while her mum’s home in Orchard Way is adapted for her.

The family have had offers of financial help. Didcot charity Changing Lives has offered to buy a £9,000 wheelchair and Wantage electricals shop manager Ray Collins held a bake sale for the family last month.

Mrs Coulthard said: “It’s her mental state that worries me, how emotionally upset she is.

“At the moment I can’t give Freya the answers she wants.

“She just wants to come home and I keep telling her: ‘What you do over the next six months will change the rest of your life. It will enable you to go to school and university’.

“I just hope she is listening to me and believes me.”