UTD Unscripted: Just keep going

With things as they are, I have to recognise that there will be good days and bad days.

Bad days, man… I’ll be happy if I can get out of bed by midday. 

A good day is waking up at a reasonable time, like 7am, then I get on with my day and crack on. 

I was saying to the boys at the Transplant Games, when I get to 12am each day then I’m happy that I’ve completed another day. A lot of people might think that’s odd, but when you’ve got something as serious as what I’ve got, getting to 12am is another day completed. You don’t know what tomorrow is going to bring. 

If tomorrow brings you a s****y day, you don’t just accept it and get on with it. No. That’s easy. I can’t do easy. Can’t do it.

Some are s****ier than others. You’ve got to accept it, but I don’t. I fight it.

Even before this, everything was a fight for me. I’ve never known any better. I always known I’ve got to fight. That’s how I was in football and this is the exact same thing. Acceptance, I’m not good at that. I’m not saying that it’s not good, that, because if you have to accept something, you have to accept it, but I don’t want to accept failure and that’s just me as an individual. I don’t accept failure in me. We’re all different, but that’s me.

When I was a footballer, success was scoring goals, winning games, lifting trophies. Now, success for me is doing what I can do. Days are different. One day I’ll accept something, the next day I won’t. I’ll accept this today, some day I won’t accept the same thing. That’s me and I get a bit complex with it, but I try to push to the limit. I’ve always got to push. With this illness you can’t push. You’ve got to accept. Accepting is failure. I don’t want to accept failure. So it’s a double-edged sword for me. For me, it’s a real balancing act. You understand the conflict I’ve got?

I can only talk about me, but if I’m going to accept failure now then I might as well have given up on the football pitch. Same thing here. I’m saying now, I’m not going to be beaten by it, but at the same time I have to respect it. It’s a disease that can kill you and I know that.

Football is football. If you lose a game, you lose a game.

If I lose this, I can lose my life. 

All I can do is keep giving it a go. I know no better.

This story was first published on 9 November 2019.