Published: 10 November 2020
Last updated: 4 March 2024
IT'S AN IMAGE THAT'S haunted Dr Norman Swan for years. Bicycle helmets hanging on a wall in a shop in Italy where he hired a couple of bikes during a family holiday in 2016.
His then wife was seriously ill with heart disease and couldn't walk far, so they'd decided to hire bikes, including an electric one, for the short trip across a carpark to the beach.
"I remember looking at the helmets on the wall thinking 'should I get a helmet?'" recalls Swan. "But I thought 'we're not going on the open road, we're just going through a carpark', but I should have got a helmet.
"I blame myself [for what happened to Anna], I feel responsible for it.
"In the months and years following, the recurrent vision for me was those helmets on the wall."
Four years on, Anna has made a remarkable recovery and while she reassures him he's not to blame, Swan says the accident traumatised him and he's experienced mild PTSD that he's only now starting to get over.
Dr Norman Swan was born Norman Swirsky in Glasgow, Scotland in 1953.His Jewish grandparents had fled pogroms in Russia and settled in the slum area of Glasgow.
FULL STORY Dr Norman Swan opens up on coping with trauma after his daughter's accident, covering COVID and the question that 'stopped his world' (ABC)
Photo: Norman Swan with his daughter, Anna, and her husband, Mark (supplied)
