Quake CTV survivor: 'still too fragile'

Anne Malcolm just moments after she was rescued from the rubble of the CTV building. Photo / Geoff Sloan

Christchurch resident Anne Malcolm knows all about anxiety - her years as a counsellor meant she had all the tools at her disposal to help clients who were suffering from the disorder in the wake of the September earthquake.

But nothing could prepare her for her own troubling experience with the illness, just weeks after she was pulled from the rubble of the collapsed CTV building, which claimed the lives of 116 people and left her with extensive injuries.

"For the first six or seven weeks I didn't go back to the trauma.

"Then when my physical body began to be restored I was almost out of left field ambushed by what I know now as post-traumatic stress. I couldn't sleep. I absolutely couldn't sleep.

"I had a very obvious deep seated anxiety which my head couldn't control. I kept saying to myself ... 'you can get on top of this, you've been a counsellor for years'.

"But I couldn't. I've had to have the help of a very clever, competent psychologist to get me through it."

"It has changed me forever in some ways."

Anne was in a meeting room with colleagues at Relationship Service Whakawhanaungatanga on the fifth floor of the CTV building when the room exploded.

"The next memory I have is being trapped under a pile of rubble with something very heavy pressing on my chest and just seeing a chink of light coming through.

"I recall someone calling out my name ... and then these utterly amazing young policemen and members of the public clambering onto that shaking aftershock affected rubble."

"If it hadn't been for those people who were brave enough to pull me out, I wouldn't be here."

Anne sustained cracked ribs, a broken hip, dislocated shoulders, broken femur and, in the last few weeks, has had to have a hip replacement as a result of her injuries from the earthquake.

Still, she says she's one of the lucky ones.

"I look back and think it has been six months and I would like to be further ahead than I am and I'm not. And then I say to myself 'well it was huge and I got out alive' and I'm able to really appreciate now that I survived in that building when so many didn't."

At some stage Anne says she'd like to return to work, but at the moment her own recovery comes first.

"I know within myself that I don't have the resources to work with people in trauma and all the stresses of their lives yet because the stuff going on for me is still too fragile."