An Australian woman living in America has been granted her wish to return home and be with her mother who was placed into a coma following a stroke.
Rebecca Vickers, 42, will be catching a flight from Chicago, Illinois, within the next two days to be by her mother’s bedside in the intensive care unit at Sydney’s Royal North Shore Hospital.
Ms Vickers shared the good news on Channel Nine’s Today Show on Monday where she also had one heartbreaking message for her mother.
‘The doctors have told me that she may not be able to respond verbally but she can definitely hear what is going on around her,’ Ms Vickers said.
‘So I just wanted to say, ‘Mum, if you can hear me I love you, hold on, I’m coming home’.’
An Australian woman living in America has been granted her wish to return home and be with her mother after she was placed into a coma following a stroke
Rebecca Vickers, 42, will be catching a flight from Chicago, Illinois, within the next two days to be by her mother’s bedside in the intensive care unit at Sydney’s Royal North Shore Hospital
Ms Vickers took to social media on the weekend to make an emotional plea for help so she could afford a plane ticket back home to be with her mother.
She revealed she was unable to cover the $24,000 cost for a single ticket.
Ms Vickers’ pleas were picked up by the media before airline staff reached out directly to her.
‘An incredible woman from United Air Australia saw our segment and reached out to me straightaway,’ she said.
‘She was so apologetic and really wanted to make it right to just everything possible to get me home. She then contacted United Air America and they tracked me down.’
Ms Vickers has been granted a discount by the airline and has managed to pay off the ticket with the support of family and friends.
She said it had been a terrible ‘nightmare’ to be separated from her mother and ‘best friend’.
‘She is in a stable condition,’ she said. ‘She is comfortable. She has got the best neurosurgeons in the worlds so we are grateful for that but it is really early days for her.’
Ms Vickers revealed she will still have to undergo two weeks of quarantine, but she was just happy to have booked a ticket home.
‘I have just put priorities first getting on a flight, trying to get out, get through this two-week quarantine with a 2-year-old and a 4-year-old in a hotel room.’
Ms Vickers also previously revealed her father had passed away a year ago and so her mother was on her own in hospital.
‘She’s alone, no one is with her. No one can hold her hand,’ Ms Vickers tearfully told Sky News.
‘She’s in a coma right now and it’s all touch and go. She’s really hanging on for dear life.’
Rebecca Vickers said her mother was alone in hospital in a coma after a massive stroke
Ms Vickers, pictured with husband Chris, said airline prices made it too expensive to get home to see her stricken mother
Ms Vickers plea came as Prime Minister Scott Morrison confirmed at a press conference on Friday that the cap on international arrivals by commercial flights would be reduced by 50 per cent to reduce the pressure on hotel quarantine.
A new cap of 3,185 people would now be allowed to arrive in Australia from overseas each week.
Ms Vickers’ mother had been transported from Gosford to Sydney’s Royal North Shore Hospital with bleeding on the brain and underwent brain surgery.
Ms Vickers, a mother of two young children, said she was desperate to return home to Sydney but that Covid-inflated flight prices had made the trip for her family almost impossible.
‘I have a two and and a four-year-old,’ she said. ‘I can’t pay the $23,000 that United want for a single ticket.’
‘She’s in a coma right now and it’s all touch and go,’ Ms Vickers said of her mother. ‘She’s really hanging on for dear life.’
Ms Vickers’ plea came as Prime Minster Scott Morrison announced a halving in the number of international arrivals to Australia, with a new weekly cap of 3.185 arrivals
She asked for help from anyone who had information on travel agents who might offer a better deal to her family back to Australia.
Ms Vickers desperate mission came after Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews and Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk’s call for a substantial reduction of arrivals from overseas in order to relieve pressure on Australia’s leaky hotel quarantine system was heeded by the federal government.
‘Our hotels are stretched,’ Ms Palaszczuk said. ‘We are basically at capacity.’
Her Labor counterpart in Victoria joined Ms Palaszczuk in calling for the reduction.
On Tuesday Mr Andrews said international arrivals should be halved until a ‘critical mass’ of Australians had been vaccinated, to avoid further capital city lockdowns.
Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk repeated her calls for a reduction on international arrivals of 50 percent during her press conference on Friday morning
Ms Vickers attempt to return home also comes at a time when it’s revealed Z-list celebrities and their associates had been allowed to enter Australia.
British reality star Charlotte Crosby, Gordon Ramsay’s daughter Tilly, British singer Alesha Dixon and even Zac Efron’s brother Dylan have entered Australia and stayed in hotel quarantine this year.
Controversially, workers in the entertainment industry can enter under an exemption to Covid border closures because they are considered ‘critical to Australia’s economic recovery’.
They have arrived despite up to 34,000 Australians remaining stranded overseas due to the former cap of 6,370 overseas arrivals a week.