His recovery is a miracle! 15 years ago, Marko Sentic (43) was picked up on a motorcycle by an acquaintance. While driving near Dubrovnik, they fell. Marko spent two months in a hospital, with serious injuries.
Marko Sentic, 43, from Dubrovnik, was a professional athlete, a judo national team player, who ended up in a coma instead of going to 2004 Olympics in Athens. His injuries were so severe that doctors wrote him off. Fifteen years later he tells the story of his recovery.
After 22 days in coma, Marko’s mother and brother noticed Marko was trying to open one eye. They started shaking him, pinching him and shouting, “Open the other one, open it!“. And they managed to wake him up. For the next five to six months Marko was in a comatose, semi-conscious state.
– “I don’t remember the accident, but I know for sure that I wasn’t the one driving that motorcycle. I had numerous head injuries, it was full of hematomas. I spent two months in the hospital in Split. My weight dropped to 42 kilos. The doctors wrote me off. I also got the last anointing, they almost declared me dead, they were ready to let me leave, but I wasn’t ready to give up just yet” – says Marko, who afterwards continued his recovery in Krapinske Toplice, (rehabilitation center).
He wasn’t wearing a helmet – “During the ambulance transport, entire right side of my body was cramped. My leg was bent so that my knee was in my chin and my arm stiffened behind my head. I don’t even remember the first months of recovery” – says Marko, whose life before the accident was dedicated to judo, the sport he has been training since he was six years old and with whom he participated at the big tournaments achieving remarkable results.
Among other results, he was ninth at the 1997 World Cup in Paris, at the Mediterranean Games in Bari that same year he was fifth, and as a student at the Faculty of Kinesiology in Zagreb, he competed for the Police Academy at the Zagreb Military Games in 1999 and won the silver medal.
In a surge of power, big life plans were disrupted by one ride on a motorcycle. That April 12, 2004, he got on a motorcycle behind a girl he met that night. He didn’t have a helmet. They fell in the curve near the Minceta Tower in Dubrovnik. She suffered a leg injury and recovered quickly, but Marko began the biggest fight of this life.
After going out of a coma, he spent eight months in the rehabilitation center.
“You go home when you put your foot on the ground” – I remember my mother telling me she will take me home as soon as I put that foot on the ground. I was exercising, and exercising, and exercising … And I managed somehow to tap the floor with that finger. In that instant I asked my mother if we were really going home and what if the doctors say no. She just said that she had promised me that and that she will make it happen somehow – says Marko. His mother did keep the promise and took Marko home.
“I continued my rehabilitation in Dubrovnik. The whole family was there for me. My brother Martin dropped out of his studies in Split in order to help me, and my sister Martina was coming home from Zadar every weekend.”
“My mother was in the spa with me the whole time. I’ve never seen her cry. I just saw her walking around the building and smoking” – remembers Marko.
After the car accident, everyday life situations I once took for granted, were now the actions I needed to learn how to do from the beginning.
“My mother would spill rice on the table. I would spend hours collecting it grain by grain. She had no mercy. When I was done with that, she would give me a bucket of ‘pinch’ and send me to the balcony to put them on the wire and then take them off. I would rebel. I couldn’t talk so I would only release the sound: ‘Anngrmm’. She would just say to me, ‘Marko, I love you, but don’t eat sh**, work!’.
Thanks to my mother Jadranka, my dad Bozidar, my brother and sister, I am here where I am today, I have fine motorical skills again, I speak, I work and I function with normality. They used to do everything for me, showered me, dressed me … I owe everything to them” – says Marko.
After returning home, he had to occasionally go back to the rehabilitation center. He remembers his father giving him a car in 2006. They started with driving on the parking loath, to later on driving through the villages of Zagorje.
“That was a great success for me” – tells Marko, who still persistently practices facial expressions and voice. He remembers the day when his face was completely stiff, he couldn’t even laugh. That’s why he doesn’t take a smile off of his face today. And every morning, without exception, Marko does 40 minutes of speech therapy. This way he is strengthening the muscles of his face, throat, tongue … Exercise control of the chin and neck.
Moreover, every day he reads at least ten pages of a book, doing it out-loud.
He swims for an hour and a half every day, goes to the gym at least once a week and runs for half an hour daily.
“Dr. Joško Glavić lets me use his robotic devices for rehabilitation for free during one month where I currently spend four hours a day. However, this is not the first time this man helped me, I used to go to his clinic before, he is a great expert, but even a greater men”– says Marko whose rehabilitation continues even today, 15 years after the accident.
His mother Jadranka tells us how Marko needed to learn again to write, to hold a spoon and to speak. “Some people were surprise to hear he was still alive. Even doctors didn’t believe in his recovery, giving him at the time only 1% change of staying alive. But he opened his eyes. He practiced a lot in order to recover, and when he would rebel, the whole family was there for him, encouraged him. We didn’t let him quit!”
I would cry at night, but in front of him I would stand with my head up. ”I want to thank everyone who helped us, however they are also those responsible of hiding the truth about what exactly happened that night, the night that changed all of our lives forever. But that is on them”- says Marko’s mum.
Today Marko is employed as a professional technical officer at the Dubrovnik Sports Federation and trains juniors in judo.
