by Joe Thompson
It probably sounds like an obsessive routine, but it meant that I knew after Thursday night I had no excuses. If I did well it was because I’d done everything right. If I had a shocker, but had done everything right off the pitch, then I could narrow down what had gone wrong. Maybe it was how I warmed up or perhaps my opponent had just got the better of me on the day. You have to be very selfish, but even before Lula was born I set my stall out with Chantelle and told her this was how I had to live. To this day she’ll pester me to do certain things, but I tell her that I have to stick to my routine. If you cut corners in professional football you’ll get caught out.
Everything was in place that Saturday afternoon, but when the game kicked off I felt like I was being tossed around in a tumble dryer for the first 20 minutes. Everyone seemed to be moving at a million miles per hour. The roar of the crowd and the players on the pitch were just a blur of noise and colour. I felt like I was running in quicksand and playing in slow motion. I was taken by surprise by players tackling me and didn’t have the speed of thought to make quick decisions.
I thought that I was just having one of those unexplainable starts to a game when your lungs and legs are burning before you settle into the rhythm of the match and get your second wind. But my condition didn’t seem to change. Twenty minutes in, our right-back, Danny Holmes, was sent off and I was substituted as Keith made a tactical switch. For the first time in my life I was relieved to be coming off the pitch. I’d dodged a bullet. I felt terrible and described my symptoms to our club doctor, but he didn’t think there was any immediate cause for concern and told me to rest up and get plenty of fluids in my system.
In the weeks before that afternoon, my physical and mental state had never been better. During the summer I’d really focused on nutrition and what I thought was a healthy diet at that time. Tranmere had employed a nutritionist who looked at our calorie intake and how it was broken down into carbohydrates, protein and fat and then liaised with our fitness coach, so that training and food intake were in sync. Our sessions became shorter but were more game specific, including lots of sprint work, which was perfect for my style of play.
During a pre-season match against Camel Laird, a non-league side who the club face every summer, we ran riot in a 7-1 win. The margin of victory was unsurprising given the gulf in quality between the sides, but on a personal level I knew the additional detail to my training had improved me physically. I scored a volley and set two goals up that day for our new signing, Ryan Lowe. He was an experienced striker, small and slight in build, and a bit of a poacher in the mould of Francis Jeffers. He saw that I could be a useful source of ammunition for him in front of goal, so we immediately hit it off.
We played Burnley in another pre-season game and my performance earned the praise of our coach, John McMahon. His endorsement and the consistency of my performances were building blocks for my confidence. My form continued when the season got underway. In a Johnstone’s Paint Trophy game against Mansfield, I was up against a left-back called James Jennings. He’d been at Macclesfield when I was in Rochdale’s youth team and I gave him the run-around on the night and let him know about it. If I’m having a good game I’ve got a bit of a gob on me and I like to let the man I’m up against know that I’m coming for him, just like I did when I was pretending to be Ian Wright and Thierry Henry as a kid.
That game was the first time I’d been named man of the match in a home fixture for Tranmere, and I felt it took the heat off me a bit. Their fans hadn’t seen the best of me at Prenton Park and it was my first step towards showing them why I’d been signed. My tail was up and I was man of the match again when Crawley came to town. One of my good friends, Nicky Adams, who I’d played alongside at Rochdale, was playing on the left wing. We were represented by the same agent, so Lloydy was sat in the stands with divided loyalties. The night before the game I spoke to Nicky on the phone and had a bit of banter, but once the referee blew his whistle the goodwill went out of the window.
We went 1-0 down early on, but I scored twice to turn the game around in the first half. One of those goals came after the goalkeeper had miskicked the ball and was left stranded miles out of his goal. I ran the full length of the half and rounded him before slotting it home. It was the sort of situation where if you’re not confident you can easily make a mess of it because you’ve got so much time on your hands. But I was flying and there was never a doubt in my mind that I was going to score. For the rest of the match the pressure was off me; I’d done my job, which enabled me to play with freedom. Once again, I was dishing out the verbals and even tried winding Nicky up by telling him he wasn’t giving his full-back enough help defensively.
In the end my cockiness came back to haunt me. The game finished 3-3 and I was denied a hat-trick after a block on the goal line, but I’d done enough to be named man of the match for a second time, which was a small consolation. I was over the moon at the start I’d made to the season, but then everything suddenly came grinding to a halt. After my nightmare at Crewe, my symptoms would come and go, but a few weeks later I suffered a repeat episode of what had happened at Gresty Road in a home game against Port Vale. Once again, the pace felt relentless and I was all over the place. Remarkably, we again went down to ten men in the first half and I was sacrificed. I deserved to be brought off but there wasn’t much I could do about it; inwardly something was sapping me of my energy.
A few days after the game the whole squad had taken part in a hot yoga session to help us loosen up and speed up our recovery. For some reason I just couldn’t reach one of the positions, which required me to lift my arms above my head. I was in pain as I tried and failed to perform the move and was shocked to feel a load of lumps in my armpit. I alerted the club doctor again and he decided to send me off for further tests. I was pretty certain I was suffering with a bout of glandular fever. Reuben had come down with it during his freshers’ week at university after getting with too many girls, and the symptoms I was feeling seemed to tally with his.
But my condition continued to worsen. I was losing weight and constantly felt tired. I then started to have night sweats and I’m not talking about the sort you have when you’ve got a fever. One night I woke up at 2am and literally felt like someone had thrown a bottle of water over me and Chantelle. The bed was like a swimming pool and the sheets and duvet were completely soaked. My temperature was fluctuating between roasting hot and freezing cold and I had horrendous pain in my neck. I’d had enough and was booked in for a biopsy to find out once and for all what was going on. My team-mate, Ash Taylor, had undergone the same procedure and thought I probably just had a cyst. I hoped he was right.
I was pencilled in for an early morning appointment at a hospital on the Wirral. The night before I stayed at my team-mate Evan Horwood’s house. He’s a cracking lad from the north-east, with a wand of a left peg. He’d joined us from Hartlepool that summer and lived pretty close to the surgery, which saved me the hassle of having to get up at the crack of dawn and drive there from Manchester. I remember being sat in his house refusing to take my jacket off. ‘Is my house too cold for you or something?’ he asked. I knew the heating was on and that it was perfectly warm but I was freezing cold and felt like I was sat outside in the middle of winter.
The following morning he dropped me off at the surgery. The nurse injected me with anesthetic to send me to sleep, but after she had counted down from ten to one, I was still awake and my hand started to swell in size. Another nurse intervened and jabbed me with a needle, which knocked me out cold. When I came round, the first thing I looked at was my hand, which had thankfully returned to its normal size. I had three stitches in my neck from the biopsy and was told I’d have my results in two to three weeks. I jumped back on a train to Manchester, where Chantelle was waiting for me at the station. We set off back home and began the wait for the news.
Wednesday, 23 October 2013 will be etched on to my psyche for the rest of my life. That was the date, two weeks later, when I was
asked to return to the surgery to discuss my results. Me and Chantelle decided to make a day of it while we were there and brought Lula along with us. I imagined I’d be in and out in 10 or 15 minutes so we could go to the beach afterwards, have a bit of dinner somewhere and a look around the shops. The three of us were called into Professor Radford’s office, who was an elderly gentleman with a comforting voice. ‘Do you want the good news or the bad news?’ he asked me. ‘Let’s start with the bad news,’ I replied. ‘The bad news is you’ve got cancer,’ he said. ‘The good news is that it’s Hodgkin Lymphoma, which is treatable.’
I was dumbfounded. My heart and mind were racing as I tried to digest the news. A thousand questions raced around my head. It couldn’t be right. The results must’ve been wrong. I was only 23 and in the shape of my life. I looked at Chantelle and we both started crying. I wanted her to say something to make everything better but I knew there was nothing she could do. The Professors respose was firm, he explained that Hodgkin Lymphoma was cancer of the blood. Tumours had formed on my lymph nodes; small, bean-sized noodles of tissue that form part of the immune system. The biopsy had uncovered an area the size of a watermelon on my chest covered in tumours, which meant hundreds upon hundreds of them were swimming around my body attacking my healthy cells.
Worse still, my cancer was categorised as stage 3S. This meant it was already well advanced and had reached my spleen, one of the body’s key defences against illness. I would have to undergo 12 cycles of chemotherapy, one every two weeks, for six months, to try and rid my body of tumours. Each cycle would involve me spending a day or a day and a half in hospital, depending on how I’d reacted to the treatment. In my head I started to calculate the dates and naively thought I might be able to finish chemo and start training again by May or June. Professor Radford’s response was firm. My season was over and there was no guarantee I’d play again, never mind at League One level.
We left his office, got in the car and set off back home. It was the worst journey of my life. It had been a sunny day, but rain began lashing down and bouncing off the windscreen. We then got stuck in traffic, while Lula was kicking and screaming in the back of the car. It was only just over a month since we’d celebrated her first birthday with a big party, and now in my darkest thoughts I was wondering if I’d be alive to see her second. Me and Chantelle stared outside at the gridlocked roads with tears rolling down our faces. We just wanted to get home and start doing some more research. I was inconsolable. I wasn’t angry; I was more frustrated and felt that everything was so unfair. Why me? What had I done to deserve this? My lifestyle was perfect but even that hadn’t been enough to protect me.
I didn’t know how I was going to break the news to family and friends. My biggest concern was my mum. Stressful situations can trigger her bipolar disorder and send her off the rails. My brother was also living and working in Newcastle, so I knew he would feel helpless. They were the first people I told, while Chantelle spoke to her mum and dad. I then rang my agent, Lloydy, who took the news the worst out of everyone. The transfer market was shut, so he was in Abu Dhabi enjoying a well-earned holiday with his family. When I called, he was running along the beach in the sunshine, but minutes later I could hear him crying down the phone. Later on that day, his ten-year-old daughter found him under his duvet in bed bawling his eyes out. Looking back, I feel guilty that she had to see her dad in that state while they were supposed to be making happy memories.
Football was the last thing on my mind, but I needed to break the news to Tranmere. Lloydy had spoken to the club’s chief executive to explain my situation and he’d relayed his message to the coaching staff. It took two days before Ronnie called me. I was surprised he didn’t ring immediately, but I suppose he didn’t quite know what to say and was probably trying to put things in place to replace me, knowing that I was unlikely to be kicking a ball again anytime soon. He told me to give him a call anytime if I needed ‘a bit of Ronnie love’. I thought to myself, ‘I’ll need a bit more than that.’ I was scared to think about the future. I was out of contract at the end of the season and had a mortgage to pay. Lloydy promised me we’d sit down with the PFA and draw up plans in the event I couldn’t play again.
In the weeks that followed I underwent a multitude of tests and scans to establish baseline scores of my body’s performance so my progress could be monitored. Although I’d only fallen ill a few weeks before, I was astonished to hear that I’d probably had the disease for up to three years. It was explained that this estimation was based on the size of the tumours and their current rate of growth, which could be used to predict when they had first formed. In a way, my fitness had counted against me. Because I was strong and healthy, my body had adapted and actively fought the cancerous cells. Had I been weaker, I’d probably have experienced the symptoms far sooner and been diagnosed with cancer when I was 21 or 22.
I started to rewind previous injuries and illnesses in my head and suddenly all the pieces of the puzzle started to fall into place. I lived an athlete’s lifestyle, but little coughs and colds had always taken a little bit longer to shift. The previous season I’d picked up a dead leg during an indoor training match, an injury that normally takes no more than a week to clear up. Strangely, the pain in my leg just wouldn’t budge, but our physio, Greg Blundell, was adamant that there was nothing wrong with me. He was under pressure from Ronnie to get me back on the pitch and from the outside couldn’t see anything untoward. Greg is a top physio who treats his players’ bodies like top-of-the-range sports cars and he’ll do anything and everything to get them fit for a Saturday afternoon. I trusted his word, but my body told me otherwise.
There were other problems, like my thigh injury during my final season at Rochdale, which had taken far longer to heal than it should’ve done. I’d always assumed that I was just a slow healer, but I’ve since learned that when your body is dealing with cancer, it doesn’t treat other injuries as a priority because it’s concerned with waging an internal war with the cancerous cells attacking your body. Another incident also stood out from pre-season when I’d fainted after a dizzy spell during training. Again, I attributed that to dehydration and pushing myself too hard, but now I’m convinced it was my body slowly wilting against the tide of cancerous tumours.
I was at my lowest ebb, but I’d been encouraged by some of the statistics Professor Radford had told me regarding the survival rates of patients with Hodgkin Lymphoma. Based on 8,000 cases between 1988 and 2001, the five-year survival rate for people classified as stage three is 80 per cent. That means five years after the initial diagnosis, most sufferers are still alive and living with the disease. Given my age and the fact the cancer hadn’t attacked one specific organ, he was optimistic my treatment would be a success, though he couldn’t guarantee I’d be one of the lucky ones. Every case is individual and a whole host of factors can influence how your body deals with cancer and how intense your treatment will need to be.
I was desperate to get my treatment underway immediately, but I had to wait six weeks before it started. I went back and forth to the hospital for further tests but there didn’t seem to be any urgency to get the ball rolling. I couldn’t believe that something was killing me and still nothing was being done about it. I felt like a sitting duck being shot at. While the wait continued, my condition worsened. I had an idea of some of the problems I could encounter, but cancer is a sly disease and the symptoms creep up on you when you least expect it. Several weeks after my diagnosis I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t breathe. I felt like a snake was slowly wrapping itself around my neck, tighter and tighter, before letting go and leaving me gulping in as much oxygen as possible. I panicked and called the club doctor, but he assured me I’d be fine and encouraged me to try and stay as calm as possible.
I was in limbo and tried to keep myself busy to occupy my mind and avoid dwelling on negative thoughts. My mood was up and down and I decided to send Lula and Chantelle on holiday to Marrakech for a week. I tho
ught a break would give Chantelle time to process everything away from me rather than going through the stress of watching me suffer every day. While they were away my mum moved in with me and made sure I was ok, while I had a bit of me time, watching box sets on the sofa and a bit of football on the TV. Although my immediate family and friends were aware of the news, it was still a secret to the outside world. I’d spoken to Tranmere and they’d agreed not to release any information until I was ready for it to be put in the public domain.
When Chantelle and Lula returned from holiday, I decided it was time to break my silence. I drew up a statement with Lloydy, and Tranmere announced it on a Saturday morning. I remember being sat on my sofa at home when the news broke on Sky Sports News. The yellow breaking news strap flashed up on the screen and Jeff Stelling read my statement with a grimace. It was a surreal moment. Normally you’re used to seeing your name up there if you’ve moved clubs or scored a goal, but now I was the topic of conversation for a very different reason. It was in those couple of minutes that it hit home that I was seriously ill. At first I was almost in denial, but when I saw it in front of me in black and white it almost served as confirmation. I sat there crying my eyes out, contemplating the worst-case scenario.
Within minutes my phone was going mental. I received text messages from current and former team-mates, as well as those I’d never even met before. On Twitter, I was overwhelmed with tweets of support from supporters and fellow cancer sufferers who assured me that I could win my fight. Reading through the messages raised my spirits and provided me with motivation. There was no use feeling sorry for myself, I had to stand up tall, puff my chest out and get ready for the biggest fight of my life.