Running away from the bulls led to something worse. Hedvig Lindahl, four, drowned before her extra mother came to her rescue.
The accident may have led to a chronic illness that has accompanied Lindahl ever since.
– Of course I don’t know, but somewhere I imagine the experiences I’ve had will catch one, as you say in Sommar in P1.
When Hedwig Lindahl, 39, speaking in the summer at P1, tells the Swedish EC goalkeeper, among other things, about his childhood and upbringing. It was a childhood that often contained a longing for the mother who had been separated from her and the father.
My father told me that at the age of two I cried until I fell asleep after my mother left. The mother, in turn, said she felt very bad and often had terrible dreams after the breakup happened, Lindall says in Somar in P1.
stuck in cow dung
Hedwig Lindahl also tells us about a frightening event that took place in a barn. Lyndall was four years old when she went there with her three-year-old sister and her sister’s friend when she ended up alone in a field with the oxen.
I feel insecure, lonely, and afraid. The annoyance drives me to find a solution. I quickly search and find an alternate exit, a door to my left. I act lightning fast, shut the door and run out. This is where my four-year-old story would have ended, says Lindahl.
Lyndall says that the escape route for the bulls was not a good escape route. She fell into a deep pile of cow dung that she was starting to sink into. She would have drowned in feces had it not been for the extra mother Nina who climbed onto a board and pulled it out.
– I realize now that she saved my life. I had never seen it this way before, but the whole event was shrugged off as a vague memory from my childhood. Like a joke you pull to be funny. I realize it must have been painful for everyone involved, Lindahl says.
‘Crying erupted’
Soon after Lindahl’s near-death experience, she developed the first symptoms of vitiligo, a disease that causes the skin to lose pigment.
Vitiligo can appear due to stress. Could this be how the body handles trauma? Of course I don’t know, but somewhere I imagine the experiences you’ve had will catch up with you somehow, she says.
Lindahl rarely wanted to wear shorts when she was younger, or when she was new to the national team.
– A well-known television reporter addressed me at the time and a memory engraved in itself. I can’t quote fully but it was something like “Hedvig, so you can’t be pallid. You have to do what I’m doing, I’ve been to Brazil.”
Nowadays, she loves to talk about the Vitiligo that she suffers from and takes the opportunities she gets for awareness and education. But she still remembers the feeling of not being able to hang out with her national teammates at Bondi Beach in Australia in 2003.
Crying came to my throat. “I felt like the black sheep, who wasn’t allowed to join the gang just because I couldn’t get in the sun that way,” Lindahl says at Sommar in P1.
Summer in P1 was released as a podcast at 07.00 and broadcast on P1 at 13.00.
