Kim Tillie, player of Cholet, spoke to the media after returning to the court following his recovery from testicular cancer.
“I thought it could be a cyst, something benign. We tell ourselves it’s impossible and that something like this only happens to others, not to us. It was a blow to the head when they told me what it was. It’s very scary when someone talks to you about a tumor.
I tried to see who else had this, but I really couldn’t find much information on the internet. It’s great what Sebastian Haller did. It really gave me strength because it was worse with him. It had spread to his abdomen, and he had to have surgery there too. I decided it was a good opportunity to testify, to convey a message so that it could help one or two people to go get checked just in case. An appointment takes 10 minutes,” Tillie said, as reported by BeBasket.
It’s interesting that he postponed his surgery to help Cholet in the FIBA Europe Cup Semifinals.
“I have rarely seen La Meilleraie like that, I drummed in front of the supporters, and the pitch was invaded. I was still able to experience it to the fullest because you forget everything else, even a tumor, when you play basketball. It’s when the game is over that we say to ourselves: ‘Oh s**t, tomorrow I’m having surgery’.”
A month after the surgery, when he was supposed to start training, the biopsy showed that the tumor had started to spread.
“Second blow. That was really the hardest part. The oncologist warned me it would be okay because I was athletic and young. I have taken all prescribed anti-nausea medications, and they are helpful. In fact, during the first few days, things weren’t too bad. I just felt a little nauseous and dizzy and lost my appetite. Teammates came to see me, my parents, too, I had visitors, it helps to get through the weather.”
Also, the recovery was very difficult, and the side effects of chemotherapy hit him hard as he lost all his hair.
“I lost all my hair everywhere: beard, hair, I had nothing left. When I returned home for the weekend, I had like a hangover, with everything at the same time: Covid, fever, dizziness. It was horrible. The operation was okay in itself, but it was the chemo that really knocked me to the ground.
I hadn’t done any sport for 6-8 weeks. I started training gradually between June and July to be ready at the beginning of August for the return to Cholet. I’ve had much worse injuries, like my complete adductor rupture with Olympiacos in 2017/18. There, it had been really complicated. In the event, I recovered as if it were any sort of injury really. We just had to get back into general shape, cardio, muscles. If I had been born 100 years ago, I would actually be dead. That’s what’s crazy…,” Kim Tillie concludes.