How Football Saved My Life by Alan Stubbs

Author:Alan Stubbs [Stubbs, Alan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781471128356
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

9

Super Caley Go Ballistic

The first time I had cancer, I was back in training pretty quickly. The time from the actual operation to being put back through my paces was only about six weeks or so. I treated it exactly as if I’d had a hernia operation. As it happened, I’d had a hernia operation once before – a double one when I was only a month or two old. I still had the scars, and when I had the operation to remove the testicle that was where they had gone in.

My routine of recovery was left in the hands of the Celtic physios. I started by doing strength exercises and gym work, focusing on the abdominal area. By the end of the second week I was back to doing light jogging, and then built back up to full training from there. I was used to the routine of returning from injury, so it was nice just to be able to slip back into that. It also gave me a target: I’m a restless person, as I’ve said before, so if the doctors said it was going to take me eight weeks to be back to full fitness, then I was determined to be back on the pitch in six.

For the first few days after the operation, it felt uncomfortable, just from the initial efforts of stretching and sitting up. But these were only small pains and bearable. I’d encountered far worse on the football pitch. The biggest thing to deal with was that from a male point of view I was a bit lighter: one testicle down, to be precise. I didn’t want a false one put in and was glad I’d made that decision. I soon got used to the fact that my left groin area felt a bit numb. It would stay that way for the best part of a year. Only then did the nerves start to grow and I got feeling back again. That was a bit strange – sometimes, almost out of nowhere, I’d suddenly get a tingling sensation down there. Other times I’d have a touch around, and wouldn’t be able to feel a thing. That was all to be expected: it was part of the recovery.

I felt okay about it, mentally as well as physically. This first time round, I never went through the process of thinking that I could have died: I was very much in the state of mind that I’d had a lucky escape, and everything was going to be fine. I never for a second worried that I wasn’t going to play football again: the specialist had said from early on that it wasn’t going to be a problem, and I’d been reassured by that. I also wasn’t worried about where the cancer had come from: I asked about my lifestyle and if there was anything I could do differently, but the doctors were clear that there wasn’t. I was fit and as a professional sportsman was in about as peak condition as you could get.

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