When I was first diagnosed with a spinal AVM in July 2022, I searched for stories of people who'd come back to sport afterwards. There weren't many. So this is the article I wish I'd been able to read in those first weeks.
I'm not a doctor. I'm a surfer who happens to have an AVM in my history. Everything below is personal experience, not medical advice. Every AVM is different, every recovery is different, and your medical team is the only source of advice that matters for your specific situation. Please talk to them about anything you read here.
An arteriovenous malformation (AVM) is a tangle of blood vessels where arteries and veins are connected without the normal capillaries in between. They can occur in the brain or spinal cord. They are rare. They can grow slowly or appear suddenly. In my case, swelling around a spinal AVM caused nerve damage and the loss of normal function in my legs over a period of hours.
Honestly, the first few weeks were mostly other people. I was in surgery. I was in hospital. Decisions were being made and explained and re-explained. The biggest mental work I did in that period wasn't about sport at all — it was just accepting that the situation was real, while also accepting that I didn't yet know what its long-term shape would be.
If you're reading this in those first few weeks: it is genuinely okay to not have a plan yet. The plan can wait. The first job is to recover from surgery and let the medical picture stabilise.
Once I was discharged, the first goal wasn't surfing. It was hand-cycling. It was upper-body strength work in the gym. It was paddling around in calm water in Tallebudgera Creek, just rebuilding the feel of being in water. None of it looked like training in the way I used to train. All of it added up.
Progress in the first six months wasn't measured in performance. It was measured in possibility.
I'm going to be careful here because everyone's experience is different and I don't want to pretend I always handled it gracefully. There were weeks I was angry. There were days I didn't want to go to rehab. There were moments I caught myself comparing what I could do with what I used to do, and felt the weight of that comparison fully.
What helped me — and again, this is just one person's experience — was three things. One: reframing recovery as a series of small experiments rather than a single goal. Two: surrounding myself with people who treated me like I was still myself. Three: getting back in the ocean as soon as it was safe, because the ocean has a way of making most other questions quieter.
If you're an athlete returning from an AVM, you'll likely work with neurosurgeons, neurologists, physiotherapists, and possibly rehabilitation specialists and exercise physiologists. Be honest with them. Ask the questions that feel embarrassing. Bring up sport early — a good team will help you build a return-to-sport pathway that's realistic for your specific situation, even if the pathway isn't the same one you were on before.
For me, surfing prone was the obvious answer because it was the closest thing to what I'd been doing before. For others, the natural sport might be different — wheelchair basketball, hand-cycling, swimming, sit-skiing, climbing, athletics. The principle is the same: find a movement pattern that's compatible with your post-AVM body, learn it patiently, and let competence build confidence.
Don't rush the timeline. I was very lucky that my recovery moved quickly. Plenty of athletes take three or four years to come back. Plenty find an entirely different sport. None of those outcomes are failures.
The version of me that was diagnosed in 2022 couldn't have imagined the version of me that won three world titles. I don't say that to flex. I say it because, in that hospital bed, the future looked impossibly small. It wasn't. It just hadn't arrived yet. Yours probably hasn't either.
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