Swimming won’t let go of Iris Elliot. At least not yet. A year after sustaining a neck injury that almost killed her and put her promising Olympic-bound swimming career on hold, the third year mechanical engineering student still craves its highs.
“I still find it very, very addictive,” she said, her face animated. “One of the things I enjoyed most about swimming is once in a while a swim meet goes really, really well. Being in the zone is absolutely amazing. You’re flying through the water. You’re flying. For me, that’s the most addictive reason to ever swim.”
Iris is a powerful, broad-shouldered woman, blessed with a physique that suits the short freestyle sprints she excels at. Iris is introverted and reserved, quick to blush. But once comfortable, will sprinkle her conversation with glib self-deprecation and sudden bursts of exuberance, often physical. She recounts her most embarrassing swimming moment at her first provincial championships at age 13, with an undulating voice and dramatic hand gestures.
“It was a disaster,” she said laughing, cheeks red. An inadvertent PA announcement confused her into thinking a false start had been called. “I was up looking around, and nobody else was stopping, and I thought ‘Oh no!’ and I kept on going. I didn’t even make the standard. You have to make a standard just to go to the meet, and then when I swam, I swam slower than the standard.”
She quickly moved beyond the mishap, however, and soon torpedoed to success: provincial and national honours, a place among the best Varsity Blues swimmers, a rare team captainship in her second year.
Beneath the accomplishments is a fiery competitiveness. She’s happiest when she swims fast. She set her sights on the 2004 Olympics. “I wanted to work really hard and succeed,” she said.
And to do so she stretched her engineering degree over six years to accommodate her demanding six-day-a-week practice schedule, three to five hours a day. Things were going well. She swam a personal best in Edmonton, at the national championships in the last week of November, 2002, and, if she made the final, would have placed 5th in the country. She was happy. But the triumph would be overshadowed by the following week’s drama sparked by a genetic disorder Iris has carried for most of her swimming life.
Iris has Klippel Feil Syndrome, a congenital disease that fused her neck vertebrae into two chunks of three and four. The inflexibility adds stress and wear over the years, at the point of contact between the two units. She told the Blues team when she arrived, undergoing physiotherapy for remedy. Routine stretching would sometimes send tingles down her arms, but she continued to swim without complications, and didn’t think anything serious would come of it.
But things changed, suddenly and frighteningly, on the evening of December 6, 2002.
It was a Friday, the last day of the fall season. Byron MacDonald, the varsity coach, decided to end practice with a fun game of inner-tube relays.
Iris stood on deck, waiting and positioning her body to receive the six-feet inner tube from her incoming teammate. She jumped into the water, intending to do a belly flop. With her hands outstretched she instinctively closed her eyes.
But she changed positions midair, her head now at a downward angle to the inner tube. The impact, innocuous for most, was enough to misplace her fragile neck and hit her spinal cord.
Her arms hung lifeless over the tube. Miraculously, she did not slip through. She was conscious but paralyzed from the neck down. She couldn’t feel the water. Her body was numb.
“Oh my god, Oh my god,” she screamed. Swimmers passed her by, the air thick with yells and screams of fun from the other swimmers, unbeknownst to the situation at hand.
“Com’on Iris, move, let’s go,” said MacDonald, who was immediately in front of her on deck and initially unaware of the grave circumstance.
“I can’t move, I can’t move.” Her voice panicked. Tears filled her eyes.
Realizing what happened, MacDonald called Dave Ling, a varsity swimmer and professional lifeguard, to orchestrate the recovery. The growing crowd was dispersed and the deck cleared. Pool manager Jennifer Leek jumped into the water, along with Ling. With his forearms on her sternum and back, Iris’s head was held in place and positioned on a spinal board, the tube deflated by scissors, and she was slowly placed on deck and draped with towels to keep warm.
Iris vividly remembers it all. “You feel like wet spaghetti. It’s a very out-of-body experience because you can see things but you can’t feel anything. It’s like lying on your arm during the night and you wake up in the morning and you can’t feel it. You can touch it, you can feel that your right hand is touching your left hand, but you can’t feel with your right hand. “
Iris began to sense the cool wooden board after 15 minutes. It was a good sign. But the pins and needles that would continue for a week were painful for the first two days. Even now she’s still relearning sensation. “If I go like this,” she said, touching her forearm, “it’s not the correct feel.” It will take time to know her body again.
The team would come together behind her. Hospital visits were frequent, and, in an extraordinary show of support, the team imprinted the initials I. E. on their jerseys and wore them at the Ontario University and Canadian Interuniversity championships. “It’s something that’s really helped me through this thing. You get to see how much of an imprint you’ve made on people.”
An operation was slated for the summer, but was postponed until September due to SARS, delaying her return.
She wears a halo made of rods around her neck and head now, a healing measure after invasive surgery that required titanium plates be inserted to keep her fused vertebrae in place. It has its advantages. “I come with a wrench now,” she said, lifting her shirt to reveal a wrench taped to her plastic abdomen encasing that is used in case of emergencies.
She wants to be back in the pool. But re-injury is a frightening-and real-possibility. “I really like the feeling of floating, of not dealing with gravity, but I’m not willing to risk not being able to walk on my own again.”
Soon after the accident, she would watch practices in a neck brace, even helping to officiate swim meets-anything to be close to the water, to bring a sense of normalcy to a life that suddenly was anything but normal. She still goes to the pool, still crack jokes. A sense of connection is important to her.
“Quitting a sport you’ve been doing 20 hours a week on cold turkey is really quite difficult. It’s essentially a drug. You’re getting endorphins, and I was missing all those sorts of things. You have all these crazy mood swings.”
Time heals all wounds, goes the saying, but it also gives the opportunity to raise new questions. Lying immobile the first three days, Iris pondered the incoherence of it all. And like many placed in a situation not of their making, of opaque circumstance and consequences borne out of randomness, Iris questioned: why?
Her voice lowers. “Why things occur, chaos, religion, or whatever you want to call it, you definitely consider whether there is some supreme, omnipresent, omnipotent force that’s controlling everything and shooting dice. You think about it.”
It is maybe an irony for Iris, an athlete so in tune with her body, so in control of it, to have her body so abruptly taken away.
As much as it has frustrated, the event has given her a greater dimension of feeling, a deeper empathy. It has given as well as taken away. “It gives you a better appreciation of others who have disabilities. It gives you a different outlook on life.”
There is no trace of bitterness in her voice. She smiles, she jokes, she seems genuinely thankful for the return of movement, however limited. Even now the memory of that fateful day is recited with cool, clinical detachment-even with self-deprecating humour.
The routine of setting her clock to 4:44 a.m. (“I like palindromes a lot”) in giddy anticipation to next day’s practice is gone. The balance offered by swimming is now off kilter, and she stands in delicate equipoise between the immediate void left by swimming and a new future, possibly, without it.
Things change, start afresh, settle to an equilibrium. Iris senses a new beginning, a new start. But her swimming career faces an indefinite future. She hasn’t ruled out returning to the water-she loves it too much not to-but understands her heightened vulnerability.
Despite her ordeal, the sleepless nights, the agony of recovery, the love of swimming is still palatable, still present. “I think everybody should have something they’re passionate about,” she said. Her eyes widen. “I’m very lucky that I found something that I’m just so passionate about.”
