Just six months ago, Timothy Disken lay in a coma in Canada, with doctors unsure if he would survive emergency brain surgery. He had been due to compete at the para world swimming championships the day after. Disken suffers from hydrocephalus – the excessive accumulation of cerebrospinal fluid on the brain. The tube he had fitted as a child to help with drainage of that fluid had suddenly broken – an unusual occurrence – and within eight hours of the first signs of a headache, he was comatose.
“When I was about a month old, I had a stroke which caused the hydrocephalus,” Disken explains. “So they put a shunt in, which is effectively a valve with some tubing that drains the spinal fluid from my brain down into my stomach where it dissipates. Normally, if the system blocks, symptoms progress over three days. But because the tubing just broke, it was 12 hours from first signs of a small headache to emergency brain surgery.”
Originally, the para swimming world championships had been scheduled for Mexcio, but earthquakes caused the tournament to be rescheduled. The Australian team then diverted to swim in Canada instead – something Disken is now grateful for. “It was kind of a blessing we didn’t go to Mexico,” he says. “Where we were in Canada, we were right next to a world-renowned neurosurgical hospital, so I was incredibly lucky.”
Now, just six months later, Disken is a dual Commonwealth Games gold medallist, and has, at the time of writing, won the equal-highest number of individual golds of any Australian athlete competing on the Gold Coast. “I’ve surprised myself, to be honest, with how well I’ve bounced back,” he says.
Humbly, Disken adds that he thinks he has “done well to be back where he is” given he has only been in training for four months post-operation. “I had to have four weeks out of the water, and another four weeks with no strenuous exercise after surgery, to allow the brain and everything else to heal. I’m pretty on top of the world to have performed as well as I have.”
On top of the hydrocephalus, Disken was also born with a mild form of cerebral palsy, the combination of which he says can make him “fatigue very quickly”. He took up swimming as a boy to help him with the stiffness he experiences with cerebral palsy.
“My left side is a lot weaker than my right, so there’s an imbalance in strokes like freestyle, breastroke and butterfly – the left side droops a lot more,” he says. “My legs are also weaker than my arms, so my right arm is the one that does most of the work. It stiffens up and gets tight a lot [as a result]. The swimming really helps to reduce the spasticity though, because you don’t have to contend with gravity. That’s why I started swimming in the first place. It’s fantastic for stiffness.”
Thanks to the integration of para and other sports in this year’s Commonwealth Games program, Disken and other para athletes have finally been able to share their stories with a wider audience. Disken has also had plenty of support from the Australian crowds, with over 10,000 at each of his medal swims.
“It has been really special,” he said. “This is my first Commonwealth Games and it’s a really unique experience to be able to able to walk around the village and just be a part of the same team [as the other athletes].”
Disken says the experience has been “very inspiring” personally, and after the Games, wants to “better himself as a person as well as an athlete.” Currently, he is based in Canberra (at the Australian Institute of Sport), where he also volunteers as a teaching aide at a school for children with intellectual impairments. He hopes to continue in this line of work.
“Eventually when I hang up the togs and move back home to my base in Melbourne, I want to work as a teaching aide for kids with disabilities,” he says, “just to give back to the community that has given me so much.”
He has a particular school in mind, too: Glenallen School in Mount Waverley, where he completed his senior years of high school. His school were so proud of his Paralympic debut in Rio (where he won gold), that they named the high school pool after him – something Disken says ranks as even more special than being awarded an Order of Australia medal in 2017.
“The naming of the school pool was particularly special to me given how much the school and all the students there mean to me, and how much they helped progress me as a person. I wouldn’t be where I am today without them.”
Apart from that, the man they call “Disco” says he has plans to continue his love affair with music – possibly by taking up DJing. Disken has played piano for over 14 years, also taken up to help with stiffness, while his trademark is to walk out onto the pool deck with a pair of headphones blasting electronic dance music.
“Music is a massive part of my life. The first 12 months of my life I was stuck in hospital, and music was used as a way to relax me and calm me down. So from day dot, I was using essentially using music as a tool. I’ve still got a ballon in my place in Melbourne that says “happy 100 days” [in hospital]. I think it was from a day in February that was just before my due date, because I was born at 24 weeks. It’s a really special momento that I look at every now and then to remind me how far I’ve come.”
