A woman has had to "re-grow" her spine after landing on her neck during a pole dancing exercise.
Kaitlin Rawson was practicing a pole dancing routine until one slip left her on the ground paralysed with a shattered spine.
After being airlifted to the hospital the 25-year-old woman's only option was to go through life-threatening surgery by inserting a metal cage into her back to allow new bones to grow – a procedure that could have killed her.
Now Kaitlin, from Johannesburg, South Africa, has defied the odds and is back doing what she loves and has even gone on to become a world champion pole dancer despite her life-threatening accident.
The gold medallist said: “My thigh shifted in place on the pole, and I lost my grip completely, I ended up falling and landing directly on the front of my neck.
“My feet went over my head - it was just a huge amount of pressure that ended up being put on my cervical spine.
“I realised I'd fallen and immediately knew I couldn't move, which was a really scary and surreal feeling to try and move and get up and just not be able to.
“I was completely freaked out and was trying to shout at everyone telling them that I couldn't move.
“Luckily one of the girls in the class is a paramedic. She was able to come over and help roll me onto my back without moving my neck while we waited for the ambulance.
“The paramedics then arrived and put me in a neck brace and on the stretcher, then loaded me up into the ambulance and took me to the hospital.
“The first hospital I got to couldn't get hold of their neurosurgery team, so I then had to be airlifted to another hospital nearby where they had a really excellent neurosurgeon who was then able to operate on me.
“My C5 vertebra ended up bursting. It shattered into hundreds of tiny pieces. On the X-ray, it didn't look like a vertebra anymore.”
Kaitlin also remembers being told that she might not make it through her surgery, and if she did, she may never be able to walk again.
She adds: “It was scary at the time because it was a situation where no one knew what damage was permanent and what could be recovered from.
“They couldn’t tell me anything about what the injury would entail in terms of what my prognosis would be and what the recovery would look like or what sort of quality of life I could expect afterward.
“It was really like me thinking I might be completely paralysed for the rest of my life, I might never be able to walk again.”
Luckily, her surgery was a success, and she was able to make a full recovery and was back on her feet in four months.
She added: “I was in the ICU for a week, and then rehab hospital for four months, they said it could be up to a year or longer.
“But as I started progressing and recovering, they were able to bring the release date closer and closer.
“I had my accident on September 16, and I was out before Christmas, which was my goal. I was like, I want to be home for Christmas.”
Refusing to let her injury get in the way of her pole dancing dreams, she has now gone on to claim a gold medal at the World Pole and Aerial Championships, even breaking a world record while competing in para pole dancing.
