KEY POINTS:
Holly McLean takes a long drag on a cigarette.
She knows she should give up. She will, but not just yet.
On Thursday, Holly found out that she and husband Ben had been approved finance to buy their first home.
Good news for most young couples, but for
Ben and Holly, it came just a week too late.
Ben, 23, is paralysed from his chest down after falling from a sidecar and being run over by a following bike at the Meannee speedway in Napier on Good Friday.
Like giving up cigarettes, the house, says Holly, talking exclusively to the Herald on Sunday, will have to wait.
"We're going to hold off now until we know the outcome for Ben... Anyway, we might have to look for something quite different."
She takes another drag, and admits she's got peppermints and breath freshener in her bag. Ben, also a smoker, is stuck in Christchurch Hospital on his back counting the squares in the neon tube fitting above his bed.
"He's on nicotine patches," says his wife. "He keeps asking for a smoke, and I have to be a bitch and say no.
"I know I should stop, but I'm surviving on them at the moment."
Ben's also dying for a bourbon - and to sit up, she says.
Exploratory surgery on Friday, in which pins were inserted into Ben's spine, didn't reveal the extent of his injury. He is due to be transferred to Burwood Hospital tomorrow, to begin an extended period of rehabilitation.
The couple married on New Year's Eve 2005, after falling in love at Timus Hardware Centre in Gisborne where they work.
Holly introduced Ben to speedway. Her father and brother both ride, and Holly is one of only two female sidecar riders, known as swingers, in New Zealand.
Speedway had become their life, she said.
"And there's no way in hell this is going to stop us riding. Dad's already said he would build him a sidecar with a seat belt..."
Her first reaction to seeing Ben fall off the bike was to think 'shit, what's going on?' but she didn't panic until she was told she couldn't accompany him on the plane to Christchurch, because of the weight of the medical equipment needed.
"He started getting scared then, and when he started so did I. I was absolutely devastated they wouldn't let me go with him."
She says Ben remembers the fall and waking up in the ambulance as he was rushed to Napier Hospital, but nothing in between.
Though "comfortable" and "totally with it", a broken collarbone, sternum and ribs means Ben is still receiving some pain relief. Severe muscle damage around an elbow had caused it to swell to the size of a rugby ball.
Despite an early prognosis suggesting Ben might not walk again, the couple remain remarkably upbeat.
Ben was in good spirits - friends had dropped by with a Ralph magazine and Easter eggs - and the accident has brought them closer together, Holly says.
"It's definitely hard for him. He's such an energetic person and constantly on the move, but we've got high hopes.
"And he's had some sensations - shivers in his legs - so we're hoping that's a good sign. But if he can't walk again, then he can't. I'm not going anywhere and if it was reversed, it would be the same for him."
A collection at the Gisborne speedway last Saturday raised $1000 for the couple. It has been put away for a rainy day, Holly says.
"A lot of people have been beating themselves up over the accident, but it was just that, an accident. No one is to blame."
Holly, who has been staying in the hospital's family unit since the accident, wants to thank staff in the hospital's intensive care and trauma unit, and "everyone who's supported us and sent their love".
She plans to return to Gisborne in the next few days to sort out various personal matters, pick up some warm clothes, and give the couple's boxer-huntaway cross, James, a pat from his master. "Ben's missing him quite badly."
McLean's accident was among several serious speedway accidents in a month.
It coincided with a horror smash at West Melton's Moore Park speedway near Christchurch, which left "whizz-kid" motorcyclist Dale Finch, 16, with a crushed lower vertabrae and punctured lungs, and came just days after the deaths of 18-year-old quad-bike racer Luke McCrostie in Cromwell on March 17, and spectator Charlie Higgins, 13, at Blenheim's Eastern Bay speedway.
