Dancing Her Way To Her Dreams

HER dreams were shattered when she fell out of a moving bus and was dragged beneath it.

- Vanessa Papas

CHRISTA CALITZ was 17 when she boarded a bus and the unthinkable happened. The door wasn’t closed properly and she fell out the moving vehicle and was dragged underneath it. “Our matric class was on a bus trip to Knysna for the weekend,” she recalls. “The bus swerved for something in the road, causing the door to open behind me and I slipped down whilst hanging onto the rail. My feet dragged along on the tar road as the bus was moving forward. The wheel caught my left foot and pulled me in under the bus. I remember rolling and bouncing on the highway with cars coming at me in full speed from behind.

When we came to a stop I was losing a lot of blood. At first I hadn’t realised what had just happened to me, and I thought that I could get up. Only when I saw my leg I realised I couldn’t. The average adult has about 4.7 litres of blood. I had lost almost three and had gone into hypovolemic shock. I started swallowing my tongue. One of the teachers stuck her hand in my mouth and succeeded in pulling it out and calmed me down, constantly talking to me and praying. A man took his belt and tied it around my leg to stop the bleeding. I have little recollection of what happened next.”