A Paralympic swimmer’s two-part race against time

By Lia Salvatierra

Morgan Stickney has never hit snooze in her life. When her alarm goes off in the morning she has 27 minutes to get from her pillow to the pool for practice in Cary, North Carolina.

Once at the Olympic-grade pool she has less than 45 seconds to swim the 50 meters to the end.

She trains for two hours every day with two races in mind. The first is training for the 2024 Paris Paralympics where she will compete in 10 months. The second is a race against her body: there is no telling when it will betray her. Again.

At 15, what started as the breakage of a small bone in her left foot at swim practice worsened into years of agony and confusion. Surgeries proved as ineffective as the doctors’ visits were inconclusive. Only potent drugs helped manage the pain.

At 18 years old, she faced a decision: amputation or what was becoming an opioid addiction.

Her surgeon removed her left leg below the knee.

She rebounded, reworking her stroke as a para swimmer. She qualified to race at the 2021 Tokyo Paralympics.

But her right leg suffered soon after, leading to a diagnosis — the cause of her original amputation – of a cardiovascular disease that limits the flow of blood to her legs. Only one other person in the U.S. suffers from the same condition. There’s not even a name for it yet.

Less than two years after her first amputation, Stickney became a double amputee. Still, she found her way back between pool lanes determined to compete in Tokyo. She took home two golds.

After the victory, Stickney thought the only race ahead of her was her next Paralympics. But a new understanding of the progressive nature of her condition means that it now threatens one of her knees and one of her arms. Doctors believe it will eventually come for her organs.

Now 26, Stickney will need a life-saving bone marrow transplant. But she decided it can wait until after Paris.

Right now her doctors are using a band-aid treatment, holding off the pain and progression long enough for her to compete in August.

Until then, she rotates four to six weeks of training in the pool with nine days of pain treatment at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. She takes the same flights each time, practicing before flying out and waking up for dawn practice after she returns home to Cary around midnight.

“I have everything down to a T. Yeah, and that’s kind of just how I live,” Stickney said.

Pushing through the pool

The mornings at Triangle Aquatic Center are cold and quiet. Steam rises from the pool as the swimmers like Stickney stir the water.

A steady pulse of water slaps the pool edges, on beat with the emerald-lit pace clock.

Once Stickney finishes a set she pops up, a big dimpled grin beneath the reflective goggles, which replace her glasses while she’s in the water. Even without seeing her prosthetics, it’s clear that her arms are her job. Her is hair is usually somewhere between pool-soaked and dry.

She doesn’t seem to mind all of the stopwatches timing her life.

“The pool is kind of like my sanctuary, is kind of how me and my sports psych talk about it,” Stickney said. “When I’m in the pool, I don’t think about anything that I’m going through.”

Stickney’s early and able-bodied swim career was defined by a watertight devotion to the sport, said Brian Crawford, her club swim coach throughout high school and middle school.

Crawford witnessed Stickney’s ascent to elite swimming beginning as a teenager training at Executive Swim Club in Manchester, New Hampshire. She ranked in the top 20 in the country as a distance swimmer by the age of 14.

She was unusually coachable, Crawford said.

When Crawford made a big deal of not missing practice, Stickney didn’t miss a single one for two years.

She was the first one there and raced every single set.

Sometimes Crawford had his swimmers write essays. Stickney detailed how to swim at Stanford, where she had aspired to compete when she was younger. Her thesis: “hard work, dedication and extra work.”

“You need to do extra work outside the pool. One way you can do this is by having goals and thinking about them as if they are already true,” her final paragraph reads.

But the goals she had in mind at 14 and the extra work on her plate looked simpler than what Stickney faces now as she continues to push her body and mind through the pool and pain.

Coaching her through her strict schedule of training and treatment is John Payne.

“How is she special?” Payne asked, repeats after being asked.

“Well there’s an obvious one,” Stickney said, smiling and waving around her blue cheetah prosthetics. She decided to stick with her height of 5’6” when choosing her new legs.

Laughing, Payne said, “When I see Morgan, I see somebody that is going through something really, really difficult. She understands the endpoint of that. But she does it with a lot more composure than I think many people could.”

Stickney digs deep with her sports psychologist.

One of main things she works on is overcoming the mental challenge of feeling ill while she’s racing.

“If I don’t feel good racing, normally, like, in my mind, I would just be like, oh, game over kind of thing,” Stickney said. “And my coach always said you don’t have to feel good to race fast. So that’s always something that I repeatedly tell myself.”

Payne adds: “We can be honest with each other about what’s going on in the water and outside of the water. And that makes the job of getting better that much easier.” he said.

The volume and intensity they’re training with right now seem to be working.

Pushing through the pain

Stickney’s treatment consists of nine days of epoprostenol infusions, a drug that dilates blood vessels, typically used to treat hypertension.
Morgan Stickney receives epoprostenol pain treatments while she awaits a life-saving bone marrow transplant.

It has all of the side effects of chemotherapy, making her nauseous most days. During her most recent treatment, she lost 20 pounds in less than two weeks.

Stickney said she doesn’t remember much of what goes on in the hospital as she usually tries to block things out.

She points to her parents as her unfaltering army of support. Her mom is always feeding her ice cream topped with protein powder to help her maintain her weight.

But it’s challenging to find other paralympic athletes dealing with what she’s facing.

“I mean, there’s definitely people on my team that have progressive diseases, but they don’t normally go in for treatment constantly,” Stickney said.

“Probably 90% of the people in Paralympics were either born that way, or they became disabled at a very, very young age. So even going through what I went through with my amputations was extremely rare.”

This method is only a short-term solution, Stickney said, as her medical team continues to research cures to prevent loss of her right knee, arm and eventually organs.

The plan is a bone marrow transplant, but Stickney spends hours per week researching too. Her years between hospitals led her to pursue premed during undergrad at Biola University before her health worsened and she switched to a psychology degree.

She has developed close relationships with her doctors and nurses.

Three of them are among the people flying out to watch her race in Paris.

“That will just be so special to have them in the stands. I’ve been through so much and they’d been there for me throughout it all,” Stickney said.

“People always ask me, ‘Oh, how long are you going to swim?’ and it’s always until my body will allow me because I just truly love the sport.”

She’s also connected with others who have lost limbs in different walks of life.

“I think sometimes you really just have to realize who you are,” Stickney said. “You know, I’ve inspired so many people around me, and I really just, it took me a long time to realize that a lot of people look up to me.”

“I have to stand in that and know that I inspire other people and kind of dig into that on the hard days.”

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