Playing football again was the last thing on Sophie Stapleford's mind when the Cessnock teacher's aide was diagnosed with a brain tumour nearly two years ago.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
or signup to continue reading
She had endured 18 months of misdiagnosis, excruciating pain, extreme fatigue and illness before doctors found a large, aggressive brain tumour, known as a schwannoma, in her sinus cavity in April 2015. She had risky surgery to remove it the following month.
“At the start, when they found it, it was a 2.5cm tumour,” Stapleford said. “A few days before surgery I had another MRI which showed the tumour had grown a significant amount in a very short period of time.”
Neurosurgeon Charlie Teo performed the operation.
“He said there was a good chance my left eye would be closed forever. He said soccer is probably not looking good if that happens,” Stapleford said.
“I was positive before surgery, but the whole soccer thing, I wasn’t even thinking about that. Somehow he did the unthinkable and got it all out with nothing really, a little bit of loss of feeling in my face, but I can live with that.”
Stapleford was among the most promising players in Northern NSW as a teenager and was playing for Valentine in the Women’s Premier League when she began to feel something was wrong.
“I was actually still playing and I was getting really dizzy, and all of the doctors put it down to chronic fatigue [syndrome] and said I could keep playing if I wanted to but it was going to be a struggle.
“I wanted to play because I love it, but it just got too much. There was one game at Valentine, the ball was up in the air and I went to look up and there were just balls everywhere. I didn’t know which one the real one was and I thought, ‘It can’t be chronic fatigue.’”
After a long recovery, she returned to work last year and started thinking about football again. But first she needed a clearance for a heart condition, sinus tachycardia, which was diagnosed after surgery. She wears a heart-rate monitor on the field and is watched closely from the sideline.
On Sunday, there was plenty of emotion around the ground when the 23-year-old took the field for Warners Bay against Adamstown in the WPL at John Street Oval. She played wide on the left, making some penetrating runs down the flank for the defending champions.
“It’s been really hard. I was so nervous today, but it felt so good,” she said. “I’m probably not as good as I was, but hopefully I get better.”
She was not looking too far ahead but would “love to make Jets if I’m good enough”.
She said the support of the football and wider community, which raised $65,000 in a Goal For Sophie campaign in 2015, “literally got me through everything”.
