UK Edition
Danielle Gibbons interview: 'How do you tell your mum you have a brain tumour?'
There is the faintest trace of a scar to mark the spot where, during her ten-hour operation, Danielle Gibbons had a hole in her head. Beyond that, the only sign that the Blackburn Rovers goalkeeper ever had the brain tumour that has left her partially deaf and with one balance nerve is the tattoo beneath her left ear: a black speaker and a cross denote the mute symbol.
She got the inking two years ago, “to try and remind people, and make a joke about - well, everything. It’s useful. People use it to check which ear it is. You think my mum would know, but sometimes she checks. They see it and they know they need to switch sides.”
2019 marks four years since Gibbons had brain surgery to remove a rapidly growing acoustic neuroma, a noncancerous tumour that develops on the balance and hearing nerve between the inner ear and the brain. Around one in 100,000 people are affected, usually aged 30 to 60.
Gibbons was 20 when she was diagnosed, a goalkeeper at Liverpool and otherwise healthy bar the dizzy spells that, with hindsight, could have been symptoms. In 2013, she woke up and thought a rubber ball from the 3G training pitch had burrowed into her ear: she tried to dislodge it before going to A and E. They told her it was not a pellet but a head cold. Another doctor sent her for a scan. She went to the hospital on her own. Then she heard the words ‘brain tumour’.
“The first thing I thought about was how I was going to tell my mum,” she recalls. “It’s always one of those things where you think it’s going to happen to someone else - but this time, it was me. I heard the word tumour and nothing else went in. The nurse followed me and asked me how I was - and then I started to cry.
“Because there was no build-up. It wasn’t the thing that I jumped to: I’ve got something in my ear, so it’s a brain tumour.” In the end, she broke the news to her mother with the words: “‘It’s not cancer, but I’ve got a brain tumour.’”
Treatment options read: scans to monitor the tumour, then radiotherapy or brain surgery should it grow. Gibbons had two years where “I could forget that it was there” - until tests in 2015 indicated doctors had to act.
The letter came when she was away in Sweden for the Champions League. She opted for surgery, scheduled in the off-season, but despite reassurances she would be fine to play again a player on a one-year contract agonised over “whether I’d get back to what I was. There was always a fear of [Liverpool] not wanting me.
“There were times in training that I was very tense,” she says. “The assistant manager came over and I had a bit of a cry. I would try and hide it and be strong - then it builds up. The pressure behind my mask was getting bigger. Maybe at the beginning I was trying to be more positive than I believed.”
It meant Gibbons’ overriding emotion on the day of the surgery was relief. “Whereas my mum and dad - worst day of their lives, they said.” Her last memory before the operation was watching her parents “in bits” as she was wheeled away.
Two days later, she woke up for the first time. “They’d cut through the muscles in my neck, so I couldn’t move. If I wanted to roll over, I had to grab my head-” she clamps one hand on her jaw and the other on the back of her skull and twists - “and move it. I felt sick from the morphine and I had wires everywhere because I was in intensive care. They cut my stomach to get fat to plug the hole in my head. I had a drain and I had a catheter in. I remember looking in the mirror and thinking, who are you?”
A week later, Gibbons was back home. She injected herself daily to prevent blood clots - bruises covered her stomach and legs - but worse was the tiredness. “I’m not very good at sitting down and doing nothing. I had to be someone I wasn’t comfortable being: just sat watching TV.”
She returned to Liverpool at the first opportunity and her first physical session was to walk the perimeter of the training pitch, turning cones over. “Every time I bent down, I felt dizzy. That was the test. It’s like running when you’re drunk: a bit wobbly, everything looks uneven, is spinning a little bit.”
She had been back in full training for a week when injury stuck Liverpool’s first-choice keeper ahead of their game against Bristol and the Champions League game against Brescia the following Tuesday. It would have been three months since Gibbons’ operation but she featured in both. “Looking back, I absolutely wasn’t ready. But I wanted to have that as a thing that I did: three months after my operation, I played football again. That was the thing that was driving me forward.
“I was absolutely petrified. In Italy, when they’ve got the flares going off, it’s so loud. I still felt dizzy, but I just kept saying to myself, it’s just like playing Fifa [the computer game]. To me, that was completing my challenge of recovering.”
She left Liverpool in the summer of 2017, and after a season at Sheffield FC signed for Blackburn last year. Now an ambassador for the British Acoustic Neuroma Association, the tattoo by her ear is a reminder to herself to stay upbeat. “As much as I did that to be positive to people that are going to be deaf, it was to me to say, look at these good things about it. I’ve spent a lot of time with other sufferers and I’ve been able to share my experiences with them. I want to keep proving to myself that it’s not stopping us. And that makes everything that I’ve been through absolutely worthwhile.”