BY ALEX STORY
“You are 6’8.31” inches tall,” said the nurse.
“We measured you just before the operation.”
That’s 0.31 inches taller than I thought I was.
“I keep on growing,” I smiled. The good news never stops, I thought, in a half-comatose state.
In the practical world, there are really no advantages to being a giant.
Rarely will you be fashionable or sit comfortably in a car, train or plane. Tube rides are an agony and dancing in a nightclub or shedding a tear are verboten.
And of course, when polite society breaks down, you are bidden to act — usually not to your advantage.
However, as a side note, it is a privilege that one would swap for nothing in this world.
That relatively benign bit of information kept me going for days.
It was, after all, the only bit of “good news” I had received in weeks.
I had been lying on my back in the heart surgery section of the hospital from December 22nd, 2025, to January 14th, 2026.
In that time, the discomfort, not to call it pain, had remained steady.
On the morning of the day of my life-changing arrival at the hospital, my wife had organised an end-of-year check-up at Doringer, a radiology institute in Salzburg, Austria.
A few months before, the doctors thought me in great shape, adding, ominously as it turned out, that they had trouble seeing the aorta. Probably due to my size, they said at the time.
The December 22nd visit, general as it was, was to focus on the aorta specifically. A Computerised Tomography (CT) scan was planned and delivered.
I left the practice with thoughts of Christmas and New Year on my mind. It would be great fun. Much of the sprawling family was here.
However, by the time I reached home, ambulances were already waiting.
I exited my car, walked to my house, and was taken to hospital before I could say my first German word.
The heart doctors thought me a “dead man walking”. There was no time to lose.
I was taken to what would be my home over the next few weeks, stripped of my clothes, given a patient hospital gown big enough to hide little more than my belly button, and told what needed to be done, given what had happened.
The initial view was that I had ripped my aorta in two places, by the basin and by the heart. The death rate for such a condition is up to 40% in the first few minutes and reaches 90% within weeks, if untreated, per rip. At the time, as I mentioned, they thought I had only two.
How did it happen, the surgeons asked? I reminisced.
On December 2nd, early in the morning, during my usual weights session, I had felt my heart crush through my chest while doing squats.
A little later, my daughter though needed a lift to rowing, so I drove her to the club. The pain settled down a little.
I then travelled to Munich airport (temporarily losing control of my left eye) from Salzburg to fly to Milan for a presentation.
A few days later, I took the plane to Stockholm and then Zurich to conclude the year.
On every occasion my friends and colleagues jokingly said: “you look like death.”
Worse, perhaps, I took a few days off to go skiing in Lech, close to the Swiss border in mid-December. Though I felt rather tired, a potential flu was blamed, not a full breakdown of my internal piping.
During my stay in hospital, operations ensued.
The aorta by the basin took five hours to replace with a prosthesis just before Christmas.
The aorta by the heart focused the minds of surgeons for at least 10 hours just before New Year’s Eve.
Other smaller operations ensued. Everything was gone: strength, dexterity, fitness et al.
I was alone.
What remained were the scars, an old man’s walk and the knowledge that life on this earth is a privilege not to be wasted, and, of course — the silver lining of silver linings — the awareness that I was bigger than I thought I was.
After another trip to hospital, they discovered another rip in my aorta. This time by my left leg. Something will need to be done.
2026 will be full of surprises.
Alex Story is an Olympian, entrepreneur and writer on economic and social issues.
Wishing Alex a full and speedy recovery. You’re in all our thoughts here at CSM.