Meg Coburn wears her smartwatch about three days a year. Luckily for her, one of those days, it saved her life.
Meg was about 15 minutes away from home at Major Plains, north-west of Benalla, when her car ran off the road and collided with a tree in December last year.
Her watch detected the impact, called 000 for her, and gave the call taker her exact location.
Thanks to her watch, paramedics were able to find Meg, and they did everything they could to keep her alive before she was taken to The Royal Melbourne Hospital in the air ambulance.
Meg was unconscious for 12 days after the accident.
She lost a lot of blood, had bleeding on her brain, both her lungs collapsed and she had a fractured pelvis. She was at the hospital for 123 days.
And although she hasn’t fully recovered yet, Meg is now breathing, walking and talking, and has met the paramedics who saved her.
“I just simply cannot put it into words how unbelievably grateful I am,” she said.
“I owe these people my life, I will be eternally grateful that they existed.”
Ambulance Victoria paramedic Luke Henderson and MICA paramedic Alistair Kyrkou were the first to arrive at the confronting scene.
Ambulance Victoria paramedics Caitlin Goding and Jasmine Clegg arrived soon after.
Mr Henderson said, at first, he and Mr Kyrkou thought the call may have been a hoax because it was in the “middle of nowhere”.
“When we got the job, we both thought, ‘this is a really strange dispatch’,” he said.
“We called a few people to ask if this was real, and then sure enough, when we got there, it was very real.”
Mr Henderson said as paramedics they dealt with a lot of confronting road trauma scenes, but knowing they had saved someone who had the rest of their life ahead of them “makes it very easy to do our job”.
“When we found you, you weren’t in a good way,” he said.
“I think the large majority of the traumas that we’ve all been to (that) have been in a similar state or less have died.
“To actually have someone who was in a position like you, being able to sit here and talk to us and go about their day, is just incredible.”
Meg moved to Australia from Scotland in November, 2016, to do sheep-shearing work.
She didn’t wear her watch very often, but said now she was “never going to take it off”.
“I wear my watch three times a year. Literally, three times a year. I only wear it when I know I’m going to be working really hard,” she said.
“I knew the shearers were going to go hard on that day, so that’s why I had my watch on, just for my steps.
“I wouldn’t have had my watch on if it was any other day.”
Mr Kyrkou said he still thought about how lucky it was that Meg’s watch called 000.
“Your watch has saved your life,” he said.
“Without that watch, we would have found you the next day.”
Mr Kyrkou said given the state of Meg’s car and her condition, it was “quite surreal” to see her sitting in front of them.
“These jobs don’t come around very often where we get feedback like this, let alone to see Meg standing and talking. It’s incredible,” he said.
“To hear about Meg’s outcome and now see her in real life has changed my whole outlook of cases I go to.
“These cases are why we all do what we do. For me, this is what it’s all about.”
For someone who was in a critical condition at the start of the year, Meg’s recovery has been going “phenomenally”.
“The chances are, I will return as close to normal as possible within the 12- to 18-month timeline,” she said.
“The only things I still have (to recover) is my eye and my wrist.
“After such an astronomical event and they’re the only two things that have I’ve still got (to recover)? I’m lucky.”
Meg also has post- and pre-traumatic amnesia, meaning she can’t remember anything from about three months before or three months after the crash.
However, she has been able to piece together some of the night.
“I know I was at a shearing shed, and my co-worker shore his first 300 sheep the day that I had my accident. To celebrate, we went out for dinner,” she said.
“I had maps on, I didn’t know the road. I’d never driven the road before on my own or been in the surrounding areas.”
Although she’s grateful to not remember being in pain, she said it was frustrating to not have any recollection of such a significant moment in her life.
“I wish I knew how it happened, why it happened, where it happened, because I don’t. I do not have any memory of that whatsoever, so that frustrates me,” she said.
“When it’s so confrontational, and it’s such a big part of my life, it’s annoying not to be able to remember it.”
When Meg didn’t get home at the time she said she would, her fiancé, Sean, went looking for her.
He came across the crash site, and the paramedics told him Meg was in a critical condition.
Sean called Meg’s family about 16,000km away in Scotland to tell them the news, and they immediately made plans to fly to Australia.
Meg’s sister Laurie Coburn said it was a “memorable 48 hours” for them to get to Meg’s bedside.
“Everybody did everything they possibly could to make sure that we were there as quickly as we possibly could be,” she said.
“It was a waiting game and Sean just had to keep us updated with what was going on.
“We were terrified about what was coming.”
During an early morning video call from Scotland, Meg’s family also got to meet the paramedics who attended the scene, and thank them for saving her life.
“Thank you so much for everything,” Laurie said.
“It wasn’t just Meg’s life that you changed, it was all of us.
“It would have been a very different story if you guys hadn’t done what you did.”
And to thank them even more, Laurie ran the 2024 Scottish Half Marathon on Sunday, August 18 to raise money for Air Ambulance Victoria and The Royal Melbourne Hospital.
After training for months, Laurie successfully completed the half-marathon in two hours and 16 minutes, and raised £4500 (about $8700).
Laurie originally signed up for the half-marathon so she could tick it off her bucket list, but after Meg’s accident, she said it felt like the perfect opportunity to give back.
“We wanted to thank them, but it felt like nothing we could do would ever be enough,” Laurie said.
“You can’t put a price on the people who did everything they could to save Meg.
“They’re the reason she’s alive today.”