SAMUEL Shooter and his family have made a special visit to the site where he nearly died after being hit by a flying roof in a mini-tornado in South Dubbo 20 years ago today.
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Samuel, then 13, suffered massive head and other injuries when the tornado ripped through South Dubbo Oval on February 8, 1996.
His heart stopped twice in the ambulance. Specialists treating him in Sydney told his parents he would not survive.
On Monday he and his family are celebrating his miracle survival. He is married with two children and has the "understanding that every day is a gift and what can I do with it to make someone else's life a bit better?"
On the afternoon of that fateful day, Samuel was training with Newtown at the South Dubbo Oval when the mini-tornado struck.
Almost 200-kilometre winds tore the roof from the Girl Guides hall and thrust it into the cricket nets. Samuel was right in its path.
"Somehow I didn't see it... and it hit me in the head," Samuel said when he and his family revisited the site last week.
"I had a bit of a fit, went straight into a coma.
"One of my cricket teammates tipped me onto my side because I was actually starting to drown in my blood."
Paramedics arrived, followed closely by Malcolm Shooter.
It was one of those things a parent never wants to hear, he said.
"I came to pick him up and the further I came towards south the more debris we had to go through," Malcolm said.
"As I parked, somebody came down and said Samuel had been hit. It was him in the ambulance."
Samuel's heart stopped beating twice on the way to hospital.
He had suffered an extremely severe traumatic brain injury, a brain haemorrhage, a bubble on his brain and critical facial injuries.
His knee was cut to the bone, his ear nearly ripped off. His parents watched medical teams "pumping blood out of my kid's stomach by the bucket-load".
In his own words, he was "stuffed".
Flown straight to Westmead Children's Hospital, Samuel spent two weeks in a coma. Specialists told his parents he would not survive.
A month and three days later, after dramatic facial reconstructive surgery, Samuel was out of hospital. He hasn't looked back.
"We came home and...we wondered, because he was hit in the frontal lobe, whether he would have memory," Malcolm said.
"He walked into his room, picked up his guitar and played a song perfectly that he had written the day before [the incident]. And he hasn't looked back."
Today, Samuel is married with two beautiful children of his own, and "loving life".
His family has come together to celebrate 20 years since fate took away their son, brother, husband and father, then gave him back.
He still loves "wind storms, rain and scary things", and he is still grateful to the Dubbo community for supporting his family.
"The lasting impact was more on how I did life I think," he said.
"Obviously...I have good days and bad but just the understanding that every day is a gift, and what can I do with it to make someone else's life a bit better?
"How can I be the most that I can be, given that I've had a significant second chance?"
