She was 16 when it all happened.

Now, 10 years later, she looks forward to a bright future, even if it means spending it with the limitations of a wheelchair.

Raisa Falzon went into a coma after suffering a severe headache, and only woke up nine months later.

There were times when doctors were thinking about how her organs would be donated to others, but at the end of the day she made it back.

“You can never give up,” she says now, with conviction.

And she makes it clear that she is against euthanasia for people who are in the condition she was in, as there is always hope.

“I don’t agree with euthanasia because you never know what might await you at the end of a tunnel,” she told The Malta Independent on Sunday.

Raisa, who has gathered quite a following on the social media platform TikTok, suffered a stroke in March of 2013, which left her wheelchair bound.

This newspaper had been the first to report the girl’s ordeal and, in an exclusive interview with the girl’s father, he had expressed his gratitude for the overwhelming support his family had received during the long time that his daughter was in hospital.

Raisa had visited the emergency department at Mater Dei Hospital because of a severe headache and was told that it was nothing serious and prescribed some pain killers. But her condition worsened, and she lost consciousness, with her family little knowing that it was just the start of nine months of agony.

Raisa, in her own words, “spent 39 days in the Intensive Therapy Unit at Mater Dei, followed by nine months in a coma in another section of the hospital”.

Recounting the moment she woke up from the coma, Raisa said that she somehow managed to move her hand to the adjacent chair next to her and caress her brother’s hair.

“My father ran out of the room because he was so shocked; it seemed that he had seen a ghost,” she said.

Doctors rushed to her room to check her vitals and to make sure that she was truly coming back.

She was later told that doctors and physiotherapists started to realise that she might be coming to her senses when, apart from opening her eyes, she started to move her eyebrows naturally.

Although doctors, at that time, were not sure about her mental state, with some of them not believing that she would ever recover, she said that for some time she could hear everything.

“Some nurses used to come into my room at Mater Dei and gossip about people, all I wanted to do was laugh but I couldn’t.”

Raisa also remembers hearing some hurtful comments from people who used to visit her. Apart from friends who visited her, there were also some people who used to visit her just to gossip about her state.

She said that they used to say, “I pity her, look at the state she is in” or “she will never be able to achieve anything”. Raisa, still a teenager at the time, recalls that all she wanted to do was wake up and tell them that she was not to be pitied. “I have nothing less and nothing more than others my age.”

The medical journey

Because of the stroke she suffered, Raisa had to endure several months of therapy at the rehabilitation centre at Karen Grech.

Apart from that she also had to go through more than a year of speech therapy in order to regain her speech. However, during the time she couldn’t speak, Raisa still communicated through sign language.

In the interview given to The Malta Independent in 2014, her father had also said that Raisa used to express her feelings via a computer tablet.

Medics still refer to Raisa’s awakening from her coma as a medical miracle as not many in her condition live to tell the tale.

Apart from that some doctors were, in good faith, asking her father whether he would like to donate her organs as in their opinion there was a very slight chance for a recovery.

Her father had told this newspaper that when Raisa was unconscious they used to talk to her in a bid to keep reaching out, in the hope that she was listening. “The way she reacted when she came out of the coma made it seem that she knew what had happened to her,” he had said.

Although not being able to verbally communicate at the time, she now recounts how she didn’t pay much notice to the fact that she was going to have to use a wheelchair from then on, but it only hit her when she saw it, as it was a personalised wheelchair, which was very bulky.

“The only thought that crossed my mind at that moment was the fact that now I was 16 and had to use that wheelchair.”

In total Raisa had to go through 10 operations for fluid to be drained out of her brain, and because of this, she cannot go abroad using air transport.

Doctors, she said, now believe that it was when she was on her way to London around two months before the whole ordeal happened that a vein in her brain had ruptured.

Recounting the experience she said that she remembers clearly that she had suffered a tremendous headache on the day of the flight, similar to the one that had landed her in hospital the second time round.

Life after

As the new normal set in, Raisa was faced with a new reality.

Although it was a difficult experience, Raisa managed to overcome every obstacle she was presented with, thanks to the help of her family.

Given the turmoil she went through, one might think that she would be spared negative comments on the social media, but this is not the case. When she does what is known as a “live stream”, followers still wish her and her family ill “for no absolute reason”.

She recounted how, in another occasion, a person on Facebook had told her not to interact with their profile “as you are ugly”, after Raisa had just liked a post.

Now a 26-year-old, Raisa likes to hang out in bars and cafes with her peers and family. Additionally she also likes to be surrounded by animals as “they don’t talk back and make the perfect company”.

She said that although others her age might see life accomplishments such as marriage very much within their reach, it is not very easy for her. However, she would be very happy to find the love of her life and have a family with them.

Raisa adores her family and wishes nothing but the best for them. She does not want to oblige anyone to take care of her although she feels very grateful for everything they do for her “especially my father and Maria”.