When Vesna Vulović arrived at a hospital in Czechoslovakia, the full extent of her injuries was documented by the medical team that received her. The catalogue of what had happened to her body in the crash is extensive.
She had a fractured skull and cerebral hemorrhage. She had broken both legs. Three of her vertebrae were damaged — accounts consistently note that one was crushed completely. Her pelvis was fractured. Several ribs were broken. She had suffered significant blood loss.
She was paralyzed from the waist down.
She was in a coma.
Her parents were told, in the initial medical communication from Czechoslovakia, that she was not expected to survive. The standard of care at a Czechoslovak hospital in 1972 was capable; the extent of her injuries was beyond what medicine routinely expected to reverse. The skull fracture and cerebral hemorrhage alone, combined with the spinal damage and the blood loss, would have been considered unsurvivable in many cases.
The coma lasted — accounts vary somewhat on the precise duration — somewhere between twenty-seven days and a month. She did not know it was happening, of course; the first thing she was aware of, on the other side of that blank period, was seeing her parents. That recognition — the sight of her mother and father in what she gradually understood was a hospital room — was the first memory she retained from after the crash.
She did not know why she was in the hospital. She did not know what had happened. She had no memory of January 26, 1972. She had no memory of the flight she was assigned to, the stopover in Copenhagen she had been looking forward to, the explosion, the fall, the snow, the forest, or the man who heard her screaming and gave her first aid. She did not know that twenty-seven people had died and she was the only one alive.