Elite athlete Catalina Thiersen tells Alison Jones why she got back on her bike after nearly dying in an accident while out cycling.
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When the armchair enthusiasts of Britain settle down to enjoy the Olympics in Beijing this summer, cyclist Catalina Thiersen will not be among them.
Watching the athletes, who will probably have trained most of their sporting lives for this one moment, would be agonising for her.
Because Catalina could have, would have should have been competing there alongside them.
That dream ended last August when, two days before her 30th birthday, Catalina was involved in a collision with a car while on her bike taking part in a time trial.
She suffered horrific injuries, the damage to her leg so severe that surgeons considered amputating it.
Originally from Girona in Spain, Catalina currently lives in Birmingham where she is working with Vets Now, which runs emergency clinics for animals across the country.
When she comes out to greet me she is dressed for the sun in a short skirt and flip flops.
It is an outfit she wouldn't have thought twice about wearing before last summer. Her legs, toned by years of pedalling, were one of her best features.
Now the calf of her right leg is disfigured by a scar of puckered skin twice the size of a clenched fist. Higher up on her leg is a rectangular patch slightly paler than the rest of her thigh. This is where surgeons took the skin graft from which they used to cover the exposed wound.
Catalina admits it has taken time to work up the courage to start wearing clothes that revealed her legs again.
"I am getting to the point where there I have more good days than bad but when they are bad they are really, really bad - drag yourself out of bed, cry yourself to sleep kind of days.
"Before I would have hidden my leg from the whole world. My mind would have been 100 per cent occupied with what people would be thinking.
"I know it is never going to be a pretty leg. My lifestyle and the way I dress are probably not appropriate for what it looks like but I am past the point where I want to change who I am because of it. Keeping my identity has been a fight, Ithink Ihave aright to hang on to it."
Apart from the obvious damage to her leg, Catalina is an attractive woman with an engaging smile and a ready laugh, her conkercoloured hair and tanned skin attesting to her Spanish heritage.
But when she gets tired the left side of her face starts to droop. She reveals it is an "active process" to keep her face straight after it was partially torn away in the crash.
"I kept telling the doctors and nurses 'there is a hole in the back of my head' but it was a nerve thing.
"That side of my face is now numb but the funny thing is if you press anywhere on my forehead I get the sensation at the back of my head."
She was in so much pain and so disoriented after her accident that, at first, she was unable to comprehend the severity of her injuries.
"It was only when the first dressing changes were being done and they were measuring my eyebrows to see if they were even that I actually registered there was something wrong with my face."
At the time of the collision she was taking part in a time trial, part of her preparation for the UCI (Union Cycliste Internationale) World Championships. Her ultimate aim was the 2008 Olympics having missed out in 2004 after breaking her ankle.
Catalina has been cycling since she was 14 and competing seriously since she was 18. She trained as a vet, at the urging of her mother, to give herself a career to fall back on but she admits it wasn't where her heart lay.
"Training came first and lectures second. I tended to attend practicals and spend a lot of time renegotiating my exam dates and doing a lot of make up orals because I was often out of the country racing. I studied on planes and I studied on buses.
"But I just love cycling. I love bicycles, I love their lines, I love the technology, I love the competitiveness. To me the sound of a solid disc wheel is the most beautiful music I ever heard in my life."
The accident happened on a quiet road in Derbyshire where she was living last year.
She was the last rider on the course and remembers little of the incident. Most of her information she has gleaned from the police reports.
"It felt like someone had shoved me with this really huge force. I heard my helmet crack and then my next recollection is the flashing lights, paramedics, people resuscitating me and pain like I have never felt before.
"Obviously I have come off bikes before in my life but this was pure, pure agony. From the moment I opened my eyes I think I screamed nonstop."
By pure luck an off-duty nurse pulled up to the scene just after the accident happened.
"The headlight of the car had cut into my leg and lodged itself into the bone in the front of my leg, cutting of my main arteries," Catalina explains. "I was literally bleeding to death. The nurse was the one who called the paramedics and she also used her top to tie off my leg and put pressure on it to stop the bleeding. Had she not done that I would not be here today. I just remember her sitting and looking down at me and holding my head all the time."
Catalina had suffered a fractured skull, fractured heel, fractures in her lower spine and disc damage. The flesh of her calf was hanging off and she lost some of the muscle and all of the skin. The left side of her face was also pulled away.
She was taken to the nearest accident and emergency unit but eventually transferred to Northern General in Sheffield where they felt they would be able to save her leg.
"I was lying in A&E for what felt like a very long time. They kept picking up my leg to examine it but it was so painful I think I was waking up the whole hospital, I was screaming so loud and that was in spite of pain killers.
"They took a picture of my leg and I remember the consultants coming in and saying to me they were not going to let anybody back in that section to fiddle with me because I was in too much pain, they would show them the pictures and discuss things from there."
She understands they came as close as preparing the theatre ready to take her leg off but in the end the decision was made to transfer her to Sheffield.
"Two days later I went into theatre in Northern General and that was on my 30th birthday.
The consultant came and had a long chat to me about what they were going to do. He had students with him and they were holding my foot and examining my leg.
"The pain was so bad, in spite of the morphine, that I was in a cold sweat holding this man's hand and begging him, telling him he could do anything he liked as long as they put my foot down."
Throughout all this Catalina had no relatives to turn to for comfort and advice because she had only arrived in the UK a month before.
"I came over here because I could work less, earn more money and train more. In the year leading up to my last stand that meant a lot.
"I remember waking up in hospital and thinking my parents were going to try and phone me on my birthday. That is how they found out about my accident.
"I played it down. Ididn't let on how much damage there was or how bad the injuries were. I knew they would want to come over and logistically it would have been impossible because they would have been miles from the hospital and I wanted to spare them."
Her brother also cycles competitively and she kept him in the dark about how serious the accident had been.
"He was racing at the time and he was lead-ing so I kept things vague because I didn't want to ruin it for him. He was angry that I had hidden it from him but he was very supportive and kept me afloat financially for a while."
Some of the nurses she knew through her work as a vet came and visited as did some of her fellow cyclists.
"But with sport nobody wants to have a history, everybody wants to have a future so they don't like to be reminded of what might happen."
For a while she dealt with her devastation alone.
"After seeing my leg for the first time I spent three days just crying with the curtains drawn around my bed. I think one of the worst thoughts that went through my head was 'who is going to want me looking like this'."
Comfort came from an unexpected source. Two weeks before her time trial she went to a get-together arranged by shop owner in Bolsover and attended by members of a Matlock Church.
"I was keen to meet some people and I had nothing to do with my Saturday," Catalina explains.
She was recognised when she was brought into hospital and gradually word filtered back first to the shop and then to the church.
Members of the congregation started visiting her and one of the families insisted she come and live with them when she was discharged from hospital.
"Here I was a non-Christian, and these people just opened their home to me. They took care of me like I was one of their own. I was very blessed.
"Those people mean the world to me. I think I would have jumped off the top of Northern General had they not taken me in."
Up until that point Catalina described herself as an agnostic, though she comes from a family of devout Catholics.
"I had seen too many people use it as a crutch in life, an excuse not to pursue some-thing because 'it wasn't God's plan'.
"But the support I got from the church has completely changed my opinion about Christianity and helped me become a Christian."
It is because of this that Catalina is doing a sponsored cycle ride to raise money for Christian Aid, leaving London on July 23 and arriving in Paris on July 27.
The gruelling raceis also part of Catalina's own attempts at rehabilitation after her Olympic dream was destroyed.
"After the consultant levelled with me and told me I could forget about the Olympics I spent three hours speaking to a trauma counsellor at the hospital and all I did was cry. I said 'this has been my life. This is who I am. Life without racing a bike isn't life to me'."
She gained two stone through comfort eating and developed an intense fear of traffic "when you ride a bike you trust people are going to see you and pass you. Now I had experience to the contrary."
She only started cycling again in January and spent months on the turbo trainer (a stationary bike) in the garage.
"I go out on the road now but it takes a good two hours of mentally preparing and convincing myself I am going to like it.
"My right leg fails pretty dynamically on hill climbs that would not have been a problem before. I have issues with my back and I have no feeling in my right lower leg. I can knock my leg or cut it and will go through the day without noticing until I see the blood or a bruise.
"My head injury has left me partially deaf in my left ear and I have to go through some very severe pain barriers because the graft is straight onto raw muscle so my skin cannot expand.
"I live on pain killers and I have also been on antidepressants which help me cope at the moment.
"But my dreams didn't die just because a piece of my body did.
"My love for the sport is not going to go away. I know I am not going to achieve the heights I would have before but I still love my bike and I can still do good with it.
"This ride to Paris has given me something to work towards and I wanted to give something back. Everything that is anything in cycling begins and ends on the Champs Elysees and I thought it was fitting to either hang up my cleats or to find a new way to continue. I am not going to know which until July 27."
* To sponsor Catalina go to justgiving.com/catalinathiersen.
