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Ms Greenshields was rushed to Batemans Bay hospital after she started vomiting blood in January 2006.

It was there that a doctor x-rayed her chest, noticed she was in a critical condition and phoned for the emergency helicopter. Ms Greenshields was airlifted to Canberra Hospital’s Intensive Care Unit while she was intubated and in an induced coma.

“I went into anaphylactic shock, my left lung was completely whited-out, my head was so swollen I was unrecognisable, and my eyes were sunken slits,” she said.

Once in Canberra, Ms Greenshields’ family was told she has less than 25 per cent chance of survival.

After she woke from her weeklong coma and underwent a further two weeks of tests, Ms Greenshields was told she has a pheochromocytoma tumour, the size of a small football. Her doctor said this type of tumour was found in one in three million people, of which one out of 500,000 survive.

The tumour was removed during surgery about two months after her rushed visit to Canberra Hospital.

If it wasn’t for the helicopter, Ms Greenshields said, she wouldn’t have made it - and that’s why she and her friend Sue Charls joined the committee that fundraises for the cause.

“If the helicopter wasn’t here, Sue wouldn’t be here today,” Ms Charls said.

“It just seemed the most obvious thing for us to do.”

The friends both agreed that the helicopter was vital for the area.

“When you think about an emergency like that, if you didn’t have the helicopter, lots of people would die,” Ms Greenshields said.

“This place would be stuffed without it,” Ms Charls said.

The fundraising committee’s treasurer, Di Fielding, said the cause was very worthy and she couldn’t understand why they were in desperate need of new members.

She said there were two big fundraising events coming up this year - one was a ball, which hasn’t been held since 2004, and the other a convoy where local people drive behind one another from Malua Bay to Corrigans Beach.