The Young Woman Who Fought 25 Brushes With Death — And Chose Her Final One.

Annaliese Holland had spent so much of her twenty-five years inside hospital walls that the world outside sometimes felt like a distant dream.
For most people her age, life was only beginning — full of first jobs, first homes, new loves, weddings, babies, beginnings.

But for Annaliese, life had been a series of medical rooms, fluorescent lights, pain scales, IV poles, and days measured not in joy, but in how many crises she could survive before nightfall.

She had lived her whole life carrying a body that betrayed her.
A body that one day stopped digesting food.
A body whose nerves slowly died.
A body that refused to obey the simple commands needed to survive.

And she was tired — tired in a way that no rest and no medicine could cure.

Born and raised in Adelaide, South Australia, Annaliese had been a bright, warm child — sharp-witted, curious, endlessly polite.

Her parents used to joke that she “apologized for everything,” even for things that weren’t her fault.
But as she grew, her world began shrinking.
Hospitals became her second home by the time she was ten.

Doctors searched for answers but found none.
She grew up not with birthday parties or school dances, but with feeding tubes, scans, and pain she never fully understood.