Chris & Mel Cairns 'WE'RE IN THIS BATTLE TOGETHER'

The cricket legend and his beloved wife open up about his new life in a wheelchair and how it’s made their love stronger than ever

As Chris Cairns’ wife Mel watched doctors prepare the Kiwi cricket legend for an emergency helicopter dash from their hometown of Canberra to a heart unit in Sydney last August, she didn’t know if she’d ever see her husband again.

“They didn’t know if he’d survive the flight,” she recalls, her voice cracking with emotion. “They’d done all they could for him, but they didn’t think his heart would make it. This was his last chance. It was the hardest moment.

“When the helicopter took off, everything hit me. I shut myself in a room and burst into tears, holding my phone and my breath until I got the call that they’d landed in Sydney. He was still alive.”

Speaking about the traumatic 10 days when surgeons desperately battled to save Chris, 51, after he suffered a deadly aortic dissection – a tear in his largest heart vessel – Mel, 41, says she and their children, Isabel, 10, Noah, eight, and Angus, four, endured a “rollercoaster ride” as Chris underwent four open-heart operations, which led to massive organ failure, internal bleeding and ultimately a spinal stroke, leaving him paralysed from the waist down.

“I never left his side at the hospital in Canberra and wanted to go with him to Sydney, where I knew it was a possibility he could need a heart transplant,” she tells Woman’s Day.