A once-bustling hospital in 2011 lays dormant, cold and desolate, in the early hours of a rainy Melbourne night. Patient monitors stir, buzzing away like crickets, guardian angels keeping watch in the darkness. A weary brigade of nurses shuffle through the drowsy hallways, checking vital signs, doing their best not to wake the fragile faces enveloped in the mask of sleep. Halfway down the hallway, where the sicker children reside, lies a small freckled girl in a bed more familiar than her home. Her eyes are closed, her angelic features look tranquil as the lights of the monitors swathe her face in an alien-green glow.
These walls have been her home from the first hours of her delicate life. But life has told her from day dot, “She can’t.” Her body has fought gamely, but without medical care, it’s fighting a losing battle. No matter how brave she is, it seems fate’s cards have dealt a brutal finality.
She can’t fight her illness without medication. Even with medication, she can’t lead a normal life. She definitely can’t risk becoming sick or injured. And, surely, she can’t be a professional athlete.
Even as an infant, Quincy Symonds didn’t know the meaning of the word can’t. Two years after being stricken in hospital, her destiny seemingly written, she stood proudly on her father’s surfboard.
A decade later—her diagnosis unchanged—Quincy navigated the insides of cavernous Superbank barrels, proudly displaying the Rip Curl logo on the nose of her board. When life said she couldn’t, she said she could.
Now at 14, Quincy continues to redefine her limits in and out
