It’s a warm sunny Friday afternoon as I write my column this week, just a few days before my next MRI on Monday at 8 a.m.
This three‑month scan always looms with a quiet tension.
I’ve come to know its rhythm: the nerves, the scan, the wait.
But today, I’m writing from a peaceful spot beside a small lake just outside London, not far from where I used to row.
The pain in my broken ribs has started to ease, and that simple shift less pain has made the world feel just slightly more manageable.
I wish I could say the last six weeks were filled with progress and light.
In truth, they’ve been some of the toughest of my life.
I was stuck in my small London flat, barely seeing another human.
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I felt swallowed by it, the pain in my ribs, the frustration of my paralysed arm. There were days I wanted someone to cut it off just to end the discomfort and dead weight.
I’ve lived through hard moments before paralysis, hospital corridors, surgeries but isolation brings its own sharp edge. You can be physically healing and still mentally crumbling. You can be alive but wondering if you’re actually living.
One moment in particular cut deep. A Waitrose delivery driver, the only person I’d seen in days, casually said it was my fault the cancer was inside me.
That I must have been weak to let it beat me to this.
I was stunned. In that moment, all I wanted was human connection, and instead I got judgement and ignorance.
It felt like a punch to the face. I’m not sure he knew how cruel his words were.
Maybe he didn’t care. But when you’re already hanging on by threads, a comment like that lands like a wrecking ball.
It reminded me how isolating this injury is. This illness. This life I’m trying to navigate with a body that doesn’t work the way it used to. Some nights I lay there wondering: how much more can I take?
But then, I got out into nature. I walked for over an hour, slowly, deliberately, surrounded by trees.
The sun flickered through the leaves. Birds cut through the silence. I didn’t need to explain myself to anyone out there. Nature doesn’t ask questions. It just lets you exist.
As I walked, my mind drifted to Aviemore, the Scottish Highlands. I started to dream again of golf, of being strong enough to play the rounds I had planned.
I imagined the course, the quiet, the greens opening up and leaving me with the pure joy of the beauty of golf. That walk didn’t fix everything, but it gave me just enough hope to get through another day.
This week in sport, the world kept moving at a furious pace. Wimbledon. Tour de France. Athletics heating up ahead of the World Championships.
In Jamaica, a blistering 9.75 seconds was run in the men’s 100 m trials the fastest ever on Jamaican soil which sets the stage for what might be one of the best world championships 100meters in recent times.
But amid all that, one story stopped me cold. Liverpool forward Diogo Jota, and his brother André Silva were tragically killed in a car crash in Zamora, Spain.
The brother’s car reportedly suffered a tyre blowout while overtaking, veered off the motorway near Cernadilla, and burst into flames.
Jota was newly married, just eleven days before the crash, and left behind a wife and three children.
Silva. an attacking midfielder, had recently graduated university and was building a promising career of his own.
The news was a gut punch. Two young lives taken in an instant. I thought of their families, the silence left behind. I paused beside the lake and thought of how fast we move as a world, especially in sport. One day you’re celebrating human achievement and the next, wrestling with heartbreak.
So, this week, I want to echo: no one is promised tomorrow.
Amid the roar of crowds at Wimbledon and the Tour, through records broken and headlines made, tragedy can strike without warning.
Rest in peace, Diogo Jota and André Silva. Your stories remind us to pause.
As I sit here, still, the contrast is striking. Out there, everyone is pushing for medals, records, headlines.
And I get it. I’ve pushed too. I still push. But I also hope, especially now, that people find space to pause. To breathe. To sit beside lakes, or under trees, or in their own quiet corners of the world. Because life isn’t just about achievement. Sometimes it’s about surviving the bad days and appreciating the brief reprieves amongst all the noise.
So as Monday arrives and that familiar MRI machine hums to life at 8 a.m., I’m holding on to this stillness.
I don’t know what the scan will show. But I do know I’ve made it to this point, and I refuse to give up.
