It was 7am on a Monday morning 20 years ago when a freak traffic accident changed the life of Vickie Gauci, then 37.

She was getting out of a car when the baggage compartment of a bus that drove past her sprung open and sliced her spine in half.

The accident – which many remember to this day – paralysed her from the waist down.

But it did not break her.

Vickie chose to focus on what she could still do rather than what she could not. She chose to be grateful rather than angry.

So, on the 20th anniversary of that accident, she shared a Facebook post where she wrote: “20 years since that fateful day... thanking God for another chance at life. Immense gratitude for all the people who make it so worth living. Thank you.”

When asked why she commemorates that day Vickie said: “It is important not to allow such life-changing events to happen without taking something to learn… People say I have a lot of courage but the reality is that this is not an individual thing.

I had immense support and opportunities… Of course, I have my dark moments but I am angrier about what I can’t do because of inaccessibility for people with disabilities rather than for what happened to me,” she says.

In fact, over the two decades, Vickie has been very vocal about the rights of people with disabilities. She is now a lecturer at the Department of Disability Studies within the Faculty for Social Well-being at the University of Malta.

“We have seen improvement but we still see a lack of accessibility and it’s not just in construction. There is also a lack of accessibility to information. We still see a lack of sensitivity and this is especially so when it comes to intellectual disabilities and people are still not employing people with disabilities,” she said.

The day that changed everything

It was March 10, 2003 when Vickie was preparing to leave the house to go to work. 

It was just seven weeks before her wedding to John Gauci (whom she married three years later) and two days after the EU referendum and Vickie was in animated discussion with her mother on the subject. Her car was in the driveway but, to get out, she first had to move her brother’s car into a parking bay in front of the house in Independence Avenue, Mosta.

In an interview with Times of Malta in 2011, she recounted: “I had just come out of the driver’s side onto the road when, apparently, because I don’t remember, a coach came round the bend and, for some reason, the side door of its baggage compartment sprung open slicing my spine in half. I was looking the other way so didn’t see it coming,”

With the blow, she hit the ground, smashing her teeth and jaw and breaking her right hand in several places – the lower part of her face had to eventually be reconstructed. After four days in intensive care battling for her life, she came around.

Vickie Gauci.

All she knew was that she had no sensation in her legs and couldn’t move them. Being a qualified occupational therapist who had done her Masters in neurorehabilitation, she immediately realised what had happened – she was paralysed from the waist down.

During her stay at St Luke’s Hospital, she received hundreds of letters, SMSs, cards, flowers of encouragement from family, friends and complete strangers who were stunned by the bizarre accident.

All this love, she says, was instrumental in her healing and fed her with the strength to persevere.

Vickie spoke about the day she decided to move forward with her life.

“It was like, bang, I looked at my legs and I thought: fine, they don’t work and I’m incontinent but I still have my hands and I’m writing. It dawned on me how lucky I was that I didn’t lose my arms as well and my head; the little grey matter I have… So I thought I can focus on what I still have, not what I lost.”

And focus she did.

Focusing on change

In December 2003, she joined the National Commission for Persons with Disability and was instrumental in securing the EU funds to set up the Sonia Tanti Independent Living Centre.

This project, coupled with the recognition of her hard-working, efficient, determined and honest nature won her the national Worker of the Year award and the recognition Soċjetà Ġusta, which is held annually by the parliamentary secretariat for disabled persons and the active elderly.

[attach id="1292412" size="large" align="left" type="image"]Gauci with her husband John.[/attach]

As an occupational therapist who now had a disability, she realised she had a unique perspective she would put to good use.

“During the nine years I spent working at the CRPD, I came to appreciate the multiple barriers that persons with disability and their families meet with every day. So, I chose to continue my studies in the disability field because I wanted to gain a stronger theoretical basis in disability studies which would then shape my activism in this sector,” she says.

She received her PhD in 2018 from the School of Social Policy and Sociology at the University of Leeds.

Participants in her thesis, which focused on enabling technology in the workplace, claimed that, in principle, the majority of employers and colleagues were in favour of persons with disability being included in workplaces.

“In practice, however, they were still hindering them, especially through disabling attitudes based on stereotypes and assumptions about dis/ability.

“Participants felt they were still dependent on the goodwill of the people around them, for example when they requested reasonable accommodations from their employer so that they could carry out their job like other employees. 

“They felt that lack of information to employers was a major barrier but data also showed that not all disabled employees were sufficiently self-determined to request the technology and accommodation that are theirs by right.”

Not much has changed, she says.