Mose Masoe and partner Carissa land back in Australia to start their lives all over again

“He was 11 when we left,” Masoe says. “We’re coming back to a 14-year-old. We’re so excited.”

Until Sunday, when the family of five are released from 14 days of hotel quarantine, a wave is as good as it gets. La Niña has reduced the Sunshine State to a weeping mess so even the balcony is redundant for anything other than fresh air. The Wi-Fi in their hotel is patchy and the three kids are going stir crazy, but Mum and Dad are reluctant to complain.

Like everything that has happened in their lives since January 12 of last year, this situation requires patience and perspective.

At the age of 30, Masoe’s life changed forever, as did those of everyone around him.

Benson, the worried son who couldn’t get to England, his partner, Carissa Crews, who is now his full-time carer, and the couple’s three children – Evie-Rose, 8, Marlowe, 6, and Lui, 16 months.

“Benson was going to come over when the accident happened,” Masoe says. “My best mate was going to bring him over, but the borders were closed.”

The life adjustments they’ve made since are immeasurable, as is the love that sustains them.

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Gratitude radiates from Masoe so vibrantly one might assume he’s doing better than he is.

A spinal cord injury suffered while playing in a pre-season trial game for Hull Kingston Rovers in 2020 rendered him a tetraplegic, meaning he has partial or total loss of all four limbs and torso. At the time he could move only his head and neck, but with extensive rehabilitation he can now take some steps unassisted and can move his arms.

“We smashed the rehab for a good year and a bit just to try and get back the basic things,” he says. “But I still have heaps of things I need to work on. I’m happy where I am now, but like any other sports person you still want more.”

If he was 100 per cent active before the accident, he rates himself between 30 and 40 per cent now. And even that is a miracle.

“That might be a forever thing now, I’ve just got to come to terms with it that I’ll never get back to 100 per cent,” he continues. “I just have to make the most of the little things I’ve got. I really struggle with my balance at the moment and fatigue, so that’s what I’m working on.”

Frustration has become part of his daily routine. He can dress and feed himself, but one day it’ll take five minutes to put on a sock and the next he won’t be able to do it at all. Spinal injuries can cause complications with how the body functions in other ways, too. He has severe bowel and bladder issues, meaning Crews needs to help him go to the toilet. He doesn’t have sensation or dexterity in his hands.

“Sometimes people see Mose walking around on crutches and don’t realise. They think, ‘Oh wow, he’s walking, everything is fine,’ but sometimes it’s frustrating for me more than Mose because he’s a lot better at accepting the situation,” Crews says.

“For instance, we’ll go to a restaurant and they’ll hand him his plate, but his hands don’t work very well and that’s hard to know if you don’t know him. So, I’ll quickly grab the plate because I know he feels awkward. I know he doesn’t want to say anything.”

They move as a team, these two. On this Tuesday afternoon in quarantine they finish each other’s sentences and the appreciation between them is evident. What they have been through as a couple and individuals is impossible to fully appreciate but they have returned to Australia looking for a fresh start as a family.

“It’s definitely not been easy. Mose is so positive so it’s hard for me to ever feel bad for him,” Crews says. “I don’t want to bring him down ever. At the time everything happened we had not long found out that we were having a baby. It was only us in another country with our two girls. We kind of had to not focus on anything negative otherwise where would we go from there?”

But the negativity in such a tragic accident is palpable.

Masoe spent four months in hospital before he was released to go home, and into lockdown.

From March until he returned home in April he wasn’t allowed visitors due to Covid-19 restrictions, and then the UK were in and out of lockdowns until September. The kids missed about seven months of school and baby Lui was born in July, adding to the chaos.

Crews is asked how her life has changed but Masoe answers for her.

“For me watching it day in and day out, her life has changed heaps,” he says. “She’s taken on not just the mum role, but dad role too, plus, she’s taken on the nurse role.

“In the morning Carissa does stuff that a nurse should be doing, with my bladder and my bowels. She’s our chauffeur. She does a lot, and with a one-year-old as well. I can help out a little bit, but she’s chasing them around. I don’t know how she does it.

“I always have appreciated her, but just with everything, her job has become 10 times harder. I’m really grateful that she’s by my side.”

She finishes the thought for him.

“Moving to the other side of the world with young kids and Mose’s job was obviously quite full on so I was always home with the kids anyway,” she adds. “We’ve been focusing on this move to Australia and seeing how things are.

“A lot of people ask what we’re going to do when we get [back to Australia] but it’s hard to think of that because what job can I do where I can leave Mose all day? I don’t know. It’s little things that we just have to wait and see when we get here.”

This is how they balance each other out. He’s her teammate, too.

“I’m a person that if we do have plans and they don’t go that way, then I get stressed out,” she says. “Mose is not stressed in any situation at all. It works better for us to see how it goes rather than to make plans and get disappointed about things.”

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They loved England, but the complications were plenty.

“There’s a lot of things we haven’t done because we were in lockdown for so long,” Crews says of their plans to settle on the Sunshine Coast. “Going to the beach will be a first for Mose. We did little holidays in the UK here and there, we took the kids to a caravan park, but the beaches are so steep you have to walk down a sand hill. So we had to leave Mose in a caravan. That was a bit crap.

“But these are all things we can give a try over here. We can’t wait for that.”

At the time of the accident, Masoe, Crews and the kids were living in a three-storey terrace house in Hull – a building designed long before disabled access was an architectural consideration.

Their shower was over a bathtub, the doorways were narrow and a chairlift had to be installed to get Masoe and his wheelchair up and down the stairs. Outside was a mission, too. The cobblestone streets of England are gorgeous, but impractical for narrow tyres. Bad weather meant it was either too slippery for Masoe to go outside or too windy to stand for long, especially while he’s still working on his balance and fatigue. His body jams up in the cold, too, and he craves the sun’s warmth to move more freely.

Beyond knowing they want to stay on the Sunshine Coast, they can’t plan more than six months ahead. Masoe is still in the recovery phase and will need to get into rehab as soon as possible to keep achieving the goals he has for himself. He still can’t work, and nor can Crews, unless he makes more progress to be closer to independence.

“There’s hope,” he adds brightly. “But at the moment we’re just focused on rehab and trying to get through this fatigue and the balance issue. I’ll just keep smashing in rehab and hope for the best.”

It’s been almost two years since the accident and, frustratingly, insurance is still not finalised. Nor is the payout expected to be anywhere near enough to sustain the family or provide enough resources for Masoe’s recovery.

Funds raised by the Men of League Foundation in Australia and the Mose Masoe Foundation in the UK – around $450,000 and £170,000 respectively – will support them.

Those funds are held in a tightly managed trust for Masoe and Crews to draw on as needed for housing costs, education, facilities and rehab. Of that, Sportsbet donated $265,000 following the wildly successful Try July campaign this year which put a donation figure on each NRL try celebration for the month.

Masoe’s famous smile was in full wattage as he watched them all – in particular Cronulla star Braden Hamlin-Uele’s ‘People’s Elbow’.

“It was just so nice to see them doing something nice for someone,” Masoe says. “I felt emotional watching the videos because I knew they were doing it for me even though I didn’t know them. It really did touch our family.”

Leaving England and the second family they found over there was hard. But a farewell dinner at the end of October sent them off on a happy note surrounded by their dearest friends and supporters. Tickets had to be capped at 500 but people were turned away trying to attend what turned out to be a tremendous celebration of Masoe’s rugby league career.

And it is something to be celebrated.

He played seven Tests for Samoa, 46 NRL games for Sydney Roosters, 17 for Penrith and starred for St Helens and Hull KR before his tragic accident. His loveable attitude and dogged determination makes him a source of inspiration now, but his career is worth a cheer, too.

For just one night, he was thrilled to remember that. It was unexpected and appreciated.

“We weren’t really focused on the injury, which was really nice,” he says. “I don’t mind talking about [the injury]. It’s nice to talk about it for other people who are out there struggling with other similar things.

“That night it was just nice to celebrate something instead.”

On Sunday they get another moment to celebrate.

Benson will get to hug his dad again for the first time in years. A child of a previous relationship, he lives with his mum in Brisbane and a family who supported him while Masoe was away. In this moment they’ve all yearned for, he’ll see his sisters and meet the little brother he always wanted.

A family finally reunited.