Cycle News - Archive Issues - 2000's

Aaron Slight On Monday morning he tried riding, but couldn't. "I don't know what's wrong. I can't see," he said after completing only about 10 slow, blurry, dangerous laps. Because he was always tired, a doctor thought it was something as simple as chronic fatigue syndrome, "but 1 didn't think that was what was happening. So I went back to the hotel and woke up the next morning and I couldn't see." After about five minutes his vision started to return, l5ut with severe double vision. Surprisingly, a brain scan had never been done, which a doctor he was consulting in New Zealand noticed. Slight went in to Sydney to get an MRI on his brain. "They said 'You'll be five minutes,'" he remembers. He knew something was wrong when "I was still going in and out of the MRI machine half-anhour later." On that Friday he saw another doctor who suggested they operate immediately. On Saturday morning he underwent a four-and-a-half-hour operation to repair a 2.5-centimeter (about one inch) bleed on the left side of his brain. The date was February 18, 2000. Nearly a year later, Slight recalled the details as if it was yesterday. Still in his Castrol Honda leathers and seated in the upper lounge of the new CompetitionAccessories.com semi-trailer, Slight remembered the days and times of the episode with more precision than someone who's been through something that traumatic should. Slight has always been open and frank, and occasionally outspoken, and was able to recount his story with clinical detachment. There was disappointment when he spoke of his final year with Castrol Honda, but no bitterness. It's time to move on. The medical term is cavitas malformation, which Slight understands more than he ever imagined. Cavitas malformations can occur in a number of places. In Slight's case it was deep in his brain. As he explained it, there's an artery coming from the heart that spreads into capillaries - the capillaries need a lot of blood pressure to feed the brain - then it comes back out in a vein. The artery in Slight's brain was just going straight through, it wasn't feed- By World Superbike season, he hadn't felt well. He was struggling. Doctors had taken blood samples and found nothing. Toward the end of the year he underwent body s"Cans. Again, rlQthing unusual tumed up. The testing season had begun at Phmip Island late in 1999 for the 2000 season. Slight was only four-tenths of a second off the pace. Later in the week he went body surfing in the Bass Strait. When he got out of the sea the sun was too bright for his eyes. Something was wrong, but he didn't know what. There was a touring car race at Phillip Island, so he stuck around to watch it, then flew east to Eastern Creek, just outside of Sydney, on Sunday night. HENNY RAY ABRAMS aron Slight couldn't see a thing. The New Zealander woke up on SURn :Tuesday morning in a hotel room 'Outside of Sydney Australia's largest city, and his eyes registered nothing. He was, in essence, blind. The day before he'd tried to test the new Castrol Honda RC51 at Eastern Creek, but was six seconds off the pace, unable to focus. The track was so bumpy that his brain couldn't keep up with his vision. "I don't know what I'm doing," he thought to himself as he struggled to ride. The malaise he felt wasn't new, but it was more intense that it'd ever been. Throughout the 1999 A 18 MARCH 7, 2001 • c u e • _ n __ s ing any capillaries. Over the years, so much pressure built up in this artery that it burst. "The symptoms were that it was putting pressure on mybrain before it burst, and then it burst and it as lellking into my brain and bleeding so that was putting pressure on my brain," he says. He isn't sure when it burst, but thinks it must have happened between the two testing weekends. "I was feeling bad the whole time. That week I couldn't handle light, I was sensitive to light, so I knew things were getting worse." The schedule was to stay in intensive care for three days after the operation. He was out after one night.

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