25 March, 2011 5:04PM ACDT

Surviving a car accident, cancer and an incurable will to live

After being nearly killed in a car accident and later diagnosed with cancer, Eva Sifis has never had a greater will to live.

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At 22, Eva had the world at her feet.

She was touring the world, dancing in nightclubs, and preparing to launch a pop group career.

In one split second as she crossed the road, her world changed forever.

10 years later she would experience another scare that would give her her life back.

The accident

Life had never been better for Eva.

The Adelaide girl had made it big.

Launching a successful dance team for local nightclubs, she had just returned from two years of touring Japan.

1999 was her year.

Settled in Melbourne, Eva worked in clubs wearing 'a pair of roller skates and not much more' and was about to embark on a venture to launch her new team as a pop group in China.

Returning home from their second rehearsal, Eva was crossing the road when fate struck its' first blow.

"I was carried on the bonnet [of the car] for forty metres."

As the car stopped, Eva was thrown headfirst into the concrete curb and was trapped under the car.

A passerby leapt from their vehicle and got the driver to slowly drive back to uncover Eva.

On the ground Eva lay with severe head injuries and a broken tibia and fibula.

She stopped breathing twice as the ambulance sped towards the Alfred Hospital.

Eva was placed into an induced coma for four days.

"During that four days I got compartmental syndrome, which meant my leg muscles swelled up, and they were thinking of chopping my leg off," she recalls, sitting in the lounge of her Adelaide home.

Surgeons opted to slice the leg open on both sides of her shin, rather than amputate, and managed to release the pressure.

After four days Eva was taken off the coma inducing drugs, but to no avail.

"I stayed in the coma for three and a half weeks."

The doctors feared for the worst.

"They were telling my parents 'she's going to be a vegetable for the rest of her life'."

Confronted with the news that Eva was not likely to walk or talk again, her father replied, "You don't know my daughter."

Once out of the coma, Eva spent the next 8 months in a wheelchair.

She was taken through the rehabilitation process of learning to tackle life again and through the work of the Epworth Hospital managed to run before she could walk.

"When I was learning to run I used to think 'Oh my God I'm falling and I've got to catch myself'.

"The running helped me progress and helped me advance on lots and lots of different levels, other than just the physical levels."

From living life at a flying pace, to learning from scratch again, Eva says the process of rebuilding is still going some 12 years later.

"This has taken over a third of my lifetime now."

The one thing that continues to drive Eva is her unwavering knowledge that things will get better.

She astounded doctors by surviving, and plans to continue to achieve what others have said she would not.

"We can create ourselves again," she said with a steely resolve.

"We can be whoever we want to be."

A second cruel deal from fate

Almost ten years to the day after the accident, Eva was once more in hospital.

After months of restless nights, troubled breathing and waking with her face so badly swollen she had trouble opening her eyes, Eva made yet another trip to her local doctor.

At first, the specialists believed she may have contracted glandular fever.

A cat-scan revealed something more serious.

As Eva left the cat-scan theatre, she witnessed a group of people gathered around the monitoring equipment.

The following morning her family doctor entered the room, looked at Eva with what she described as 'misery-torn eyes' and delivered some very unexpected news.

"He just said Eva, there's a high possibility you've got lymphoma.

Eva replied, "What, that's cancer isn't it?"

Diagnosed with the cancer, the oncologist was unable to determine whether it was Hodgkin's or non-Hodgkin's lymphoma until the end of the Easter long weekend, when laboratory staff would return.

In a slip of mind, when Eva was diagnosed with the easier to treat Hodgkin's lymphoma, she thought she had developed the worse of the two.

For the following eight days Eva 'bemoaned' her existence until a doctor pointed out that she had contracted the lesser of the two strains.

"It felt like a weight of twenty years had just lifted from my shoulders and I was elated."

Two sessions of chemotherapy in hospital and a following six months of treatment and Eva was given a clean bill of health.

In an unusual way, Eva is actually grateful to have contracted the cancer.

"It ripped me out of victim consciousness," she said with an every present glow from within.

"I'd been inhabiting victim consciousness for 10 years up till then, thinking I am an accident victim."

The second jolt let her release that life was not over.

Even though the accident may have left Eva with a permanent limp, crushing her dreams of returning to her cherished love of dancing, she can still see the glimmers of sunshine through the storm clouds.

These days, it seems, are filled with more sun than rain.

"I'm free to go on with my life without thinking of myself as hard done by."

She describes her outlook now as looking around the world with a great big smile on her face and a twinkle in her eye that was not there before.

The future

With what she hopes is all of the bad news out of the way, Eva is heading back to Melbourne to turn her bad experiences into positive messages through inspirational speeches and disability art programs through local companies and councils.

Although not able to don her once favoured roller skates again, Eva is still keen to regain her life prior to the car accident and allowing herself 'to be 23 years old again'.

As the old saying goes, growing old is mandatory but growing up is optional, and with the worst of what fate has been able to throw at her now well behind her, Eva is looking forward to starting anew and learning how to enjoy life again.

"I'm a baby for life," she says with that ever-present smile.