Lacey Harrison has been reorganising her four-bedroom home to make room for a hospital bed.

Her daughter, 11-year-old Denishar Woods, is due to return home from Perth Children’s hospital on Saturday night.

It has been almost three months since Denishar, buoyed with the promise of McDonald’s ice cream, volunteered to turn off the metal garden tap at Harrison’s public housing home in the Perth suburb of Beldon on 3 March and received an electric shock that stopped her heart.

In that time, she has regained the ability to say one word — “mum” — and communicates through blinking.

“Maybe one day she might be able to say a few words other than ‘mum’ … it takes so much energy that it’s been three weeks since I have heard her speak at all,” Harrison said.

On Wednesday, Harrison met the state’s housing minister, Peter Tinley, who told her he “fully supported” her attempt to get an ex-gratia payment from the state to cover some of the cost of providing appropriate care for Denishar.

“I repeated my assurance that the department of communities and I will do all we can to support and assist Ms Harrison and her family, as one of our tenants, within the constraints that we operate under,” Tilney said in a statement.

Denishar Woods at a swimming pool. She is due to return home from Perth Children’s hospital on Saturday night. Photograph: Supplied by the family

It was a positive meeting, Harrison said, but one that does not lessen the task at hand. With the exception of three days a week of respite care, she faces being a full-time carer for Denishar on top of looking after her seven other children, six of whom live at home. And while she’s grateful the department was able to provide her with a new house, it has one fewer bedroom and bathroom than their previous home and the loss of space, particularly when manoeuvring the bulky equipment needed to provide Denishar with a reasonable quality of life, is felt.

Denishar has made a miraculous recovery, considering the original prognosis. She was shocked with up to 230 volts of electricity that flowed through the metal tap to the wet pavement, causing a catastrophic brain injury. She was medically dead, revived, and not expected to survive. Harrison was told that if the year six student did survive, she would remain a vegetable.

Instead she is able to begin the slow, hard process of rehabilitation.

“I feel like Denishar is being looked at like she has gotten better,” Harrison told Guardian Australia. “She has beaten life support, so that means she is OK, she is a normal girl. And Denishar is not normal, she is not OK. She is not walking, she is not talking, she is not eating, everything in her life is gone. Now she is just lying there in her shell trying to find a way to communicate with us.”

EnergySafety is still investigating the electrical fault that caused Harrison’s house to suddenly become electrified.

Harrison said she had gone outside to hose off her front pavers, and called inside for her oldest daughter to turn the kettle on. That caused the power to go out, so Harrison put down the hose and went to the metal electricity meter box, assuming the safety switch had been tripped and she could flip it back on. Instead she got a mild electric shock and heard a constant crackling “like power lines when they get wet”.

She called the Western Australian housing authority to request for an electrician to be sent out and, after being told to expect one later that day or the next morning, decided to take her family to wait in a nearby McDonald’s until the house had been declared safe.

“I said, ‘Can one of you turn the tap off?’ and Denishar went, I think because she was excited about getting an ice cream,” Harrison said.

Then Denishar screamed, and Harrison ran to help.

“Her little body was pulsing on to the tap, like gripped on to it,” she said. “And then I have ended up on the pavement myself for 15 minutes … the next thing I knew the cops were lifting me up. I had passed out. That’s when my daughters were screaming to me: ‘mum, Denishar’s dead, Denishar is dead’.”

For now, Harrison’s priority is making sure Denishar is given the best available support, even if paying for that means suing the state. Her lawyer, Stewart Levitt, has begun compiling a suit.

“To get this little girl home, I can’t do it on Centrelink payments,” she said. “She deserves to have anything she needs to have the best chance at rehabilitation.”

