‘It’s hard to tell anyone’: The debilitating, hidden injury affecting thousands of Australians

Early one Saturday morning in July, 2021, Gold Coast triathlete Alexa Leary set off on a training ride with a group of elite cyclists in the hills behind Noosa, on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. The route was demanding; an undulating 90-kilometre ride, including a 2.5-kilometre climb to the summit of a local landmark called Black Mountain. Her father, Russell, would tag along as a support rider. Her fellow cyclists had a reputation for riding fast and even for being a little reckless. But Leary, who was 19, had ridden the route before and was a fierce competitor: two years prior, she had won silver at the Women’s Under 18-19 World Triathlon finals in Switzerland in 2019 and she had her sights set on the Paris Olympics.

Leary kept pace with the group up Black Mountain and down the other side, then on to the top of the next hill, just above Cootharaba. Exhilarated, she texted Russell, who had fallen behind. “I made it with them,” she wrote. He replied: “Great effort. The universe is changing, keep trusting it.”

Leary then began her descent, pushing herself to stay with the group. She was charging downhill at 75 kilometres per hour when, in a split-second miscalculation, she clipped the wheel of the rider in front. She immediately catapulted over the handlebars before landing on the right side of her head, causing her helmet to fly off. She then flipped, slamming the left side of her head onto the bitumen with a cracking sound so loud that a fellow rider later likened it to a tree splitting.

When Russell arrived at the scene, some 30 minutes later, he saw a crowd of people, and two ambulances. He had no idea who was injured. As he approached, one of the paramedics remarked, “They don’t think she’s going to make it.” It wasn’t until he got closer that he saw it was his daughter. “She was unconscious, her eyes were rolled back,” he tells me. “There was blood everywhere, and her knee was ripped to pieces.”

Alexa was rushed to Sunshine Coast University Hospital, where she was put in the ICU. By the time her parents made it to the hospital, the pressure on her brain was already so great that, as Russell remembers it, “her eyes were bulging out of her head.” The doctors told Russell and his wife Belinda that their daughter had suffered what was called a TBI – a traumatic brain injury. It was so severe that if she survived, she would be a vegetable, unable to walk or talk.

Leary was placed in an induced coma and airlifted to Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital. In order to relieve the pressure on her brain, part of her skull was removed and placed in a freezer in the basement. (Unrestrained, Leary’s swollen brain bulged 20 millimetres outside her head.) Two weeks later, she emerged from the coma. Three months of rehab lay ahead, during which Leary, with the aid of doctors and therapists, would relearn the rudiments of human functioning, from how to chew, swallow and communicate, to the difference between a knife and fork and how to use them. After 111 days, she walked out of the hospital, against all the odds, alive and breathing.

Her family was traumatised, but Leary had survived.