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Im just finishing a book of incredible strength of spirit and courage!
Written by a beautiful woman (with whom I who share a mutual friend) it is a true story that reads like an episode of a TV Crime show, except with places that I grew up in/near and by someone close to my age which makes it feel even more unbelievable!
"Lived to tell" by Raphaela Angelou
JoJo Publishing,
“Why don’t you just die? Give us a body to grieve.” These were the words spoken to 14-year-old Raphaela Angelou by her mother, just after the teenager had been admitted to a clinic. The words were slurred, because Raphaela’s mother was dosed up on prescription drugs.
Some stories are so horrific they defy belief. This is one of those stories!
Raphaela Angelou was four years old when her mother started giving her some of the prescription medication she herself was taking, in order to make the four-year-old easier to manage. Her mother suffered severe depression. Soon the little girl had so many medications in her system she had liver toxicity, which caused multiple seizures. She went in and out of comas. By the time she is 14 her health is so bad her parents put her in a clinic in a leafy suburb of Sydney, unaware they are feeding her to the wolves. Asked if her child is on any medications, Raphaela’s mother says no, knowing full well she has been feeding her a concoction of pills for 10 years. In the clinic she is raped repeatedly while staff turn a blind eye...except to give her condoms to make sure she doesn’t fall pregnant.
She falls in with the wrong crowd “like a chick falling from a branch,” desperate and alone, dying to fit in. She is offered drugs, and the 32-year-old drug dealer who becomes obsessed with her pushes her off a three-storey ledge, breaking her back. In hospital she is put in the same room as her attacker, and he taunts her all night saying she should have died. The brother of the attacker is high up in the force. In a disturbing inditement of the police force and of the justice system, repeated attempts to charge her attacker come undone: the judge is changed at the last minute, the case is dropped, the officer looking to re-open the case is suddenly transferred.
Attempting to start a new life, Raphaela sees her attacker in cafes, on buses and at shopping centres. She receives death threat phone calls. He waves the AVO she has issued on him in her face and in the faces of staff and patients at the new facility she is in.
The horror goes on and on in a story that gives Underbelly a good run for its money. She ‘dies’ so many times she’s lost count. ‘Very serious green ooze and blood’ trickle onto the sheet when her back re-opens after yet another operation, done by the specialist’s underling because she hasn’t the money for private cover.
How does someone survive such atrocity? Such emotional, mental and physical abuse? Faith in God and an unblinking determination to rise above the darkness.
This book will make you cry; it will make you despair. But it will also give you profound hope. Be heartened and amazed as you read about Raphaela’s sense of hope in her darkest hours, the unwavering love of her husband Charlie...and the miracle birth of their beautiful daughter Elizabeth.
Never again will you feel sorry for yourself as you read about what this teenage girl went through right here in a leafy suburb of Australia. Her sense of hope, bravery, resilience in the face of odds stacked completely against her, is breathtaking. At one point a policeman who visits her in hospital for a statement against her attacker, cups her hand in his, and cries. Her parents unable to care for her, try to keep her in their care. Their faces light up when a high-profile lawyer forsays they can sue the clinic for negligence. At one stage her father comes up with a hair-brained scheme to buy a gun and shoot her stalker, change the number plates on the car and move interstate.
