Two years ago, doctors were by the hospital bed of Dutch rower Marloes Oldenburg asking if she wanted to donate her organs in case the risky surgery they were about to perform on her didn’t go well.
She had just been airlifted to a hospital with her back broken into multiple places following a nasty bicycle crash during a trip to celebrate the silver medals she had won at the world championships a week earlier.
Doctors didn’t know if Oldenburg would survive, or even walk again, so rowing wasn’t really a priority at the time.
About 12 weeks later, Oldenburg was back training. And in less than a month, she will be rowing again at the Paris Olympics — still carrying the pins that were inserted under the skin of her neck, and still unable to turn her head sideways because of the surgery that saved her life and changed her perspective on sports.
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“It sounds a bit weird when you are 36, but I’m really happy I’m alive. If you’ve been so close to death, you have to appreciate a lot,” she said. “My goal really changed. Beforehand, it was: ‘I need to go to the Olympics, I need to get a medal.’ And now it’s more like: I’m going to the Olympics. How cool!’”
Oldenburg had to learn how to swim again before getting back in a boat, but quickly got up to speed and will arrive in France as one of the medal favorites with the Dutch team in the coxless four event.
“It went really fast,” she said. “My teammates picked me up, they supported me. After six months we got bronze at the European (championships). And after 10 months, we became world champions. It was insane.”
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Oldenburg landed on top of her head after her bicycle flipped over while she went across a tiny bridge on a mountain biking route in the Netherlands. She broke the first vertebrae and damaged a main artery in the neck during the fall.
“It was stiff, I could not move,” she said. “My body was, like, protecting itself. I would want to move, but my body didn’t want to.”
A nurse who was biking along the same route was among the first to stop to help, and he immediately told Oldenburg to try to stay still. Her husband was biking ahead of her and returned to the scene of the accident to find Oldenburg motionless — she only had feeling in her toes and fingers at that point — but was in good spirits.
“I thought: Well, tonight I’ll be fine and we’ll have dinner,’” she said. “And then the ambulance came and every time they moved me, I cannot describe the pain in the neck. It was a lot.”
Oldenburg was taken to a hospital and doctors said her injury “was really bad”. She was immediately transferred by helicopter to a bigger hospital in Austria so they could operate on her.
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The surgery lasted nearly six hours as doctors put six pins to her spine. She still couldn’t move her legs right after the operation, and it took almost a month before she could walk again.
“The first thing I did when I woke up was like, Can I move my head a bit?’” she said. “Because they said there were two options: One is we connect everything, head and vertebrae, and the other option, which luckily is the reason why I still row, is only the vertebrae are connected.”
Oldenburg was able to move her head up and down, which allowed her to row, but not laterally, which is a smaller hindrance for her on the boat. It is more of a problem when she is training, as she can’t look for other boats or obstacles.
“Everybody in Amsterdam knows I cannot turn, so the whole community is always calling if there is a duck or something else,” she said. “I’m never going alone. That’s the price I have to pay.”
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There were also some adjustments needed for Oldenburg during competition. She had always been fastest while sitting in the bow position, where the rower needs to turn her head a bit, but instead of switching her to a different position, the coaches realized it would be better to keep her there and have her teammates take over the task of looking around when needed.
Oldenburg said she was able to go through the gruelling recovery process by setting small goals for herself — it took her five days before she could eat a piece of bread, and two weeks before she could go to the bathroom by herself. Brushing her teeth was especially difficult because she couldn’t hold her head still. She said she played “the floor is lava” at times to help with her movement.
“I celebrated the little goals. I set many goals, like 500 goals, really small goals,” she said. “So instead of being really miserable because of the pain, I had a lot of pain, but making tiny goals every day was really joyful.”
She stayed two weeks in the hospital in Austria and needed about six weeks of rehabilitation back in the Netherlands. She joined the Dutch team’s training camp about 12 weeks after the accident even though she still “couldn’t do anything.”
“I only could make my own bread and eat it slowly,” she said. “I had first to learn to swim again, which is totally unusual as a rower. I did some swimming in a really tiny swimming pool and it was okay. So in the end, after almost four months, I was in a boat.” And “the weird thing was,” she said, she was still rowing as fast as she was before the accident.
“It was just natural,” she said. “The only problem, I could not turn my head!”
