During the London terror attacks on June 3, Candice Hedge had a knife plunged into her throat which narrowly missed her main arteries and vocal chords – but she was one of the lucky ones.
The 31-year-old told Seven’s Sunday Night program she had been hiding under a table when one of the men spotted her, dragged her out and then stabbed her in neck.
“He spotted me there. He looked at me, I looked at him,” she said.
“It really happened quite quickly … I was just thinking ‘I don’t want to die’. I want to get through this.”
Ms Hedge thought she was going to die from her injuries.
“I could feel, like, the amount of blood, and it was warm on my hand. Um, and I was vomiting blood, like, quite a bit. Three or four times, I think. It just kept coming.”
“I was thinking for a moment that maybe I wasn’t going to make it. But it was just like, ‘Focus on your breathing and stay awake,’” she told Sunday Night.
“That’s sort of what was going through my head.”
Ms Hedge had been having dinner with her boyfriend Luke Galea-Naudi when the attackers came into the venue.
Mr Galea-Naudi had left her to help others into the safety of the downstairs kitchen, but when he returned he found his his girlfriend bleeding profusely from the neck and vomiting blood.
“All this blood, there was just so much blood,” Mr Galea-Naudi said.
Ms Hedge, who moved to London from Queensland a year ago, will stay in the city.
“I’m not going to be deterred. I’ve got more to do here. The last thing I want is to be scared off by something like this,” she said.
“I’m not going to let them change my life. I mean, they have, but, you know, I’m going to turn it to my advantage if I can.
“And we need to carry on together.”
Hedge reunited with her family in a London hospital.
Ms Hedge also said she doesn’t hate the attackers or hold any religion responsible for what the men did.
She sees them as three murderers who went on a horrific rampage.
“It’s just amazing that I survived,” she said.
Ms Hedge was one of 48 people injured by the three terrorists who mowed down pedestrians on London Bridge before their stabbing spree through Borough Market.
Two Australians, Kirsty Boden and Sara Zalenak, were murdered in the attacks.
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