Sue Townsend wondered if her son would make it through the night.
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A motorbike accident left Toby Riley in hospital with a fractured scapula, two broken vertebrae, a compound fracture to his left arm, a fractured right wrist, a fractured hip, a fractured pelvis, and a broken left femur. His bowels, kidneys, and bladder were bruised. His spleen was mangled.
"I sat there all night listening to him make strange noises, and I didn't know if they were the last noises he was going to make. It was horrifying," Townsend said.
The first thing Riley remembers is a doctor's voice at the end of his bed 20 days later saying "he'll be lucky to ever walk again".
"The first thing that went through my mind was worrying. I remember when they walked away, I looked at mum and said 'there's no way I'm not walking out of here'," Riley said.
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Now Riley is about to do so much more. Come Saturday night, he steps between the ropes for a different kind of fight.
Seven years after the accident that left him fighting for his life, Riley will make his boxing debut against Lachlan Foley-Guren on the undercard of Adrenalyn Fight Circuit's first show at the Hellenic Club of Canberra.
Riley says he is fulfilling a lifelong dream. He has moments when his excitement levels are through the roof, "moments when I'm scared shitless really, and other moments when I'm so ready".
In a sport they say is as much mental as it is physical, few could be quite as ready as Riley.
When he throws a jab, he throws it with an arm that had to be rebuilt during what might have been 12 or 13 operations on his compound fracture alone. So many surgeries the family can't quite remember the exact number, but they will never forget the first.
"His lungs actually collapsed," Townsend said. "When they brought him back to the ICU room, he was on a ventilator. When I walked in and saw that, my husband actually kicked me out of the room. Seeing your only child laying there in bed with all those tubes coming out of him was just something you don't want to see.
"Toby was an ADHD child so he never sat still ever in his life, until he was in a hospital bed for nine weeks flat on his back. Physically, I was always sure he'd give it 100 per cent, but mentally it played really big mind games with him because he didn't know how to be still.
"When he came home from hospital we had ramps installed at our house because he was still in his wheelchair. That very day he got himself out of the wheelchair, plonked himself onto bed and re-broke his arm.
"He wouldn't tell me because he knew I'd take him straight back to the hospital. On our four-week check-up he had a totally separated bone again and had to go back for more surgery."
Doctors said the only sport he could do was swimming. But Riley defied them when he walked again, so of course he was going to take the chance when promoter Shane Tipa offered a fight.
Boxing, after all, was among his first true loves. The only book he would ever read as a kid was Kostya Tszyu's biography. Now the sport has become his way to rid himself of mental demons and excess weight.
"He has more determination than Phar Lap," Townsend said.
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