Swimming: Brain injury no match for courageous star Marshall

Penny Marshall is eyeing a spot on the Commonwealth Games team. Photo / Greg Bowker

Being able to stand on the blocks and dive, head first, as the gun goes off is one of the fundamentals of a competitive swimmer's life.

Until a couple of months ago that simple act would have proved life threatening for Penelope Marshall.

Last April, the 20-year-old Commonwealth Games hopeful got it horribly wrong when crossing Hurstmere Road, a low-speed thoroughfare through the heart of Takapuna.

Human versus car - no contest. What was initially thought to have simply been a severe concussion turned out to be bleeding on the brain and a life-saving operation ensued.

She can't remember a thing about the accident or the events leading up to the collision. Her friends have tried to fill her in on the details but they sound utterly lacking in drama, even if the hours that followed were anything but mundane. "I think that I just walked out on to the road and got hit. I was picked up by an ambulance and was taken to North Shore Hospital."

The hospital rang her parents, Dawn and Shane, with the worrying, but hardly desperate news that her daughter had been in a minor accident and was unconscious. They began the journey from their Tauranga home to pick up their daughter to take her back to the Bay of Plenty to recuperate.

By the time the Marshalls got to Auckland, the situation had changed.

"The doctors realised I had bleeds on my brain and I was transferred to Auckland City Hospital."

A tricky operation ensued where the surgeons had to work around a skull that had been broken in several places to stem the bleeding.

"The surgeons later told us they did not think it was going to be as big an operation as what it was," Marshall recalls. "It was four hours and they did not expect it to take so long."

In those post-anaesthesia hours, one thought cut through the fog. "I remember waking up and thinking, 'Oh my God, how am I going to tell my parents I'm in hospital'. Just then they walked in."

The injury left few visible scars. The injuries were confined completely to her head. In the days that followed she struggled with low blood pressure, one day fainting after standing up too fast. "That fractured my skull again so I had to go back in for another operation," she says, matter-of-factly.

So diving into the big blue was out of bounds, but aside from that the almost weightless world of water was quite soothing. Another thing Marshall struggled with, post-accident, was finding the words to articulate her thoughts. In the pool she could do her talking, in December surpassing the personal bests she had set pre-accident.

"I'm just loving the thought that every day I am getting better than the day before," she says. "I'm surprised I'm doing this well, this soon. I knew I would get back in the water, I can't imagine not swimming, but I thought it would take a lot longer."

So did her coach, Scott Talbot-Cameron. "She wasn't very fast but she was still fit. She just needed to build in some power and some speed.

"We took it very easy. We had a plan in place. we knew we didn't have to rush. We wanted her fully integrated into training by December. Times were pushed aside. We just wanted her to be doing the full programme, swimming weight, the full services. We got there ahead of time."

Marshall is now eyeing a spot on the Commonwealth Games team in her specialist 200m backstroke and freestyle. Given where she has come to from lying prone in the middle of the street less than a year ago, you'd be crazy to back against her.