“After 331 days, three operations, six scars, 90 hours of heavy chemotherapy, 20 radiotherapy sessions, I received the call I was waiting for the most in the world: “The exam is good, it shows no trace of the disease “.” Claire Lelarge, a footballer playing in Lille, announced the good news on Instagram at the start of the week: she won her first fight against cancer.
The 31-year-old midfielder, who has played more than 200 matches in the top two divisions of the French championship, suffered from Hodgkin’s lymphoma. In December 2023, she felt something was wrong with her body. “I felt empty, absent,” she testifies. On January 4, everything changed. “My body no longer looked like anything. I was swollen, I had dozens of lymph nodes, you couldn’t even see my left collarbone. I decided to have an emergency MRI.”
At first, the LOSC player said to herself that it would pass, with a few medications. But, over the course of medical appointments, she finally understood. “I had to put my football practice on hold. The priority was my health, she wrote in a moving message. I felt like everything was falling apart.”
Panic, fear, incomprehension and disgust will punctuate his daily life for almost the entire year 2024. Until this good news, which fell on December 2. Of course, Claire Lelarge knows that with such an illness, it is only a battle to be won. “There is still a long way to go before we can say: total healing,” she emphasizes. The examinations will continue and she will have to monitor the progress of her health very closely. “Everything remains unclear, I’m waiting to know what happens next, but I felt the need to shout out all this joy that is overwhelming me at the present moment!”, writes the woman who played her first minutes in D1 in January 2010, when she was only 16 years old.
The footballer thanks everyone who has supported her over the last twelve months, and who gave her the strength to overcome this ordeal. Before concluding: “The word CANCER is so scary, but for me it means FIGHT. Whatever happens, as long as there is hope, you must always believe in it and fight until the end!”
