WATCH: Sarah Carli explains the life and death nightmare she negotiated on her way to the 20212 Olympics.
Video via NSW Institute of Sport on YouTube
Video via NSW Institute of Sport on YouTube
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00:00My accident in the gym.
00:09At the end of 2021, I was stepping up onto a box with a bar on my back when I slipped
00:15and fell and the bar came down onto my neck and I ended up in emergency and what we originally
00:20thought was a split open chin and some cracked teeth, I ended up having a seizure and emergency
00:26and it was a CT scan that diagnosed me with what's called a carotid artery dissection
00:31which is an internal tear in the wall of the main artery here that supplies blood to your
00:35brain.
00:38I had to have emergency surgery that day and they were able to take a vein out of my thigh
00:42to patch the artery in my neck.
00:44The doctor that was on call that day, he had only seen this kind of injury once before
00:49when he was a trainee quite a few years ago so when he performed the surgery on me it
00:53was the first time that he had ever performed it.
00:56Before I went into surgery, my surgeon said to me, if we don't operate you will likely
01:01have a stroke in the next few hours that's going to be fatal so being in there and having
01:06this seriousness of what was about to happen kind of put on me was, it was pretty enormous
01:11and we only had 20 minutes notice before they put me into surgery.
01:17I was sitting in the ICU at Wollongong Hospital and I was telling my parents I'm still going
01:21to be running in Tokyo, I'm going to be there.
01:24In my first week scan with my surgeon I kind of said to him that my heart was still set
01:30on competing at Tokyo and he said he was happy to let me try as long as I was going to stick
01:35within the very strict medical constraints that he was going to set me.
01:39It got me all clear just six weeks before I towed the line in Tokyo.
01:43I had to do what's called proof fitness for team selection so even though I had qualified
01:48for the Olympics I had to still compete before the end of the qualifying period so I actually
01:53had seven days of training, full training before I had to run a 400 metre hurdles at
01:59the last race in Townsville for the qualifying period in Australia.
02:03That race is probably one of the most painful experiences of my life but I was able to get
02:08around the track in a time that the selectors deemed was fast enough.