Her ears were bleeding. It was February 2023, at Sunset Beach on Hawai’i’s North Shore midway through the World Surf League Championship Tour’s second event of the season, when Caroline Marks woke up feeling like something was stabbing her face from the inside. Her pillow was soaked in blood. On her way to the hospital, she couldn’t stop crying.
“So much pain,” she says now, during an early-January drive north on the Pacific Coast Highway from her home in San Clemente, Calif., to Salt Creek Beach in Dana Point. Her ear canals had closed and ruptured, she explains. Issues related to her deviated septum and an influx of seawater had created infections in her sinuses, adenoids and ears.
That night, the doctor ordered immediate surgery. “Well,” she replied, “I have to surf.”
