Accident changes Dutch rower’s main perspective | The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

Two years ago, doctors stood at the hospital bed of Dutch rower Marloes Oldenburg and asked her if she would like to donate her organs in case the upcoming risky operation went wrong.

She had just been flown to a hospital by helicopter. Her back was broken in several places. The accident happened on a trip to celebrate the silver medals she had won at the World Championships a week earlier.

The doctors didn’t know if Oldenburg would survive or even walk again, so rowing wasn’t really a priority at that point.

About 12 weeks later, Oldenburg resumed training. And in less than a month, she will be rowing again at the Olympic Games in Paris – still with the pins inserted under the skin on her neck and still unable to turn her head to the side due to the surgery that saved her life and changed her attitude to the sport.

“It sounds a little weird when you’re 36, but I’m really happy to be alive. When you’ve been so close to death, you have to appreciate a lot of things,” she said. “My goal has really changed. Before, it was, ‘I have to go to the Olympics, I have to get a medal.’ And now it’s more like, ‘I’m going to the Olympics. How cool!'”

Oldenburg had to relearn how to swim before he could get back into a boat, but quickly found his pace and will travel to France with the Dutch team in the four without coxswain as one of the medal favorites.

“It happened really quickly,” she said. “My teammates picked me up and supported me. After six months we won bronze at the European Championships. And after ten months we became world champions. It was crazy.”

Oldenburg landed on her head after her bike tipped over as she was riding over a small bridge on a mountain bike route in the Netherlands. The fall fractured her first vertebra and damaged a major artery in her neck.

“It was stiff, I couldn’t move,” she said. “My body was protecting itself, so to speak. I wanted to move, but my body didn’t want to.”

A male nurse cycling along the same route was one of the first to stop to help, and he immediately told Oldenburg to hold still. Her husband cycled ahead of her and returned to the scene of the accident. There he found Oldenburg motionless – she only had feeling in her toes and fingers at this point – but in good spirits.

“I thought, ‘Well, I’m fine tonight and we can eat,'” she said. “And then the ambulance came and every time they moved me, I can’t describe the pain in my neck. It was intense pain.”

Oldenburg was taken to a hospital and doctors said her injury was “really bad.” She was immediately taken by helicopter to a larger hospital in Austria so she could undergo surgery.

The operation lasted nearly six hours while doctors inserted six pins into her spine. Immediately after the operation, she was still unable to move her legs and it took nearly a month before she could walk again.

“The first thing I did when I woke up was, ‘Can I move my head a little bit?'” she said. “Because they said there are two possibilities: one is where we connect everything, head and vertebrae, and the other possibility, which is fortunately the reason I’m still rowing, is where only the vertebrae are connected.”

Oldenburg could move her head up and down, which allowed her to row, but not sideways, which is less of a hindrance for her in the boat. It is more of a problem during training, as she cannot pay attention to other boats or obstacles.

“Everyone in Amsterdam knows I can’t turn around, so the whole community always calls when there’s a duck or something else,” she said. “I never go alone. That’s the price I have to pay.”

Oldenburg also needed some adjustments during the competition. She was always fastest when she was in the bow position, where the rower has to turn her head a little, but rather than move her to a different position, the coaches realized it would be better to leave her there and let her teammates take over the task of looking around when necessary.

Oldenburg said she was able to get through the grueling recovery process by setting small goals for herself – it took five days before she could eat a piece of bread again and two weeks before she could go to the bathroom on her own. Brushing her teeth was particularly difficult because she couldn’t keep her head still. She said she sometimes played “The Floor is Lava” to help her move.

“I celebrated the small goals. I set a lot of goals, like 500, really small goals,” she said. “Instead of feeling really miserable because of the pain, I was in a lot of pain, but I really enjoyed setting small goals every day.”

She stayed in hospital in Austria for two weeks and needed about six weeks of rehabilitation in the Netherlands. About 12 weeks after the accident, she took part in the Dutch team’s training camp, although she still “couldn’t do anything”.

“All I could do was bake my own bread and eat it slowly,” she said. “I had to learn to swim again, which is completely unusual for a rower. I swam a little in a really tiny pool and it was OK. In the end, after almost four months, I was sitting in a boat.”

And “the strange thing,” she said, was that she was still rowing as fast as before the accident.

“It was completely natural,” she said. “The only problem was that I couldn’t turn my head!”