Christiana Balogun was in the throes of pre-season when she began to contemplate the worst. It was the summer of 2022, she had upped sticks from London after the demise of Wasps and, eager to make a good first impression at new club Bristol Bears, threw herself into her new life in the West Country.
She was too busy to worry about the small lump – hardly bigger than the size of a pea – underneath her jaw that she had found weeks earlier. But a couple of biopsy tests and a CT scan later confirmed the most devastating news: what doctors initially thought was a common infection of her lymph glands turned out to be Burkitt lymphoma, an aggressive type of cancer.
Balogun, then aged 24, received her diagnosis on a Friday. By the Sunday, she was hooked up to machines, her identity as a rugby player reduced to that of a hospital inpatient.
Speaking to Telegraph Sport from Bristol’s training base two years on, Balogun now laughs at the memory of defiantly bringing her kit bag with her to hospital that night in preparation for Bears’ Monday evening training session. She admits to being oblivious to the seriousness of the illness that would hospitalise her for three months and put her rugby career on hold.
The first few days passed by in a blur of endless tests and scans and before she had a chance to process what was happening, Balogun was undergoing the first of three gruelling chemotherapy cycles. “It was a lot,” she says. “It was very intense in such a short space of time.
‘They had to treat it aggressively and quickly’
“Burkitt is a very aggressive, fast-growing cancer, so they had to treat it aggressively and quickly. It was a very quick turnaround. I didn’t really get an opportunity to be like, ‘What does this mean for life, for work, for rugby, for my friends and family?’ I’d only just moved to Bristol at the time, and I had nobody around me. I didn’t know anyone in the city.”
Before her diagnosis, she had struck up a friendship with Simi Pam, the Bristol prop, whose unwavering support would prove invaluable. In a bid to maintain some semblance of normality, Balogun would FaceTime Pam during team meetings, making her feel as connected as possible to the rest of the Bristol group.
A utility forward who can play in the second or back row, Balogun insisted on being kept updated on new lineout calls. One day, she woke to find Pam by her hospital bed with a self-care package from the rest of the team, with fairy lights to decorate her room.
That rugby solidarity sustained her during the toughest months. After her second cycle of chemotherapy, Balogun was granted a rare day outside of hospital and she headed straight to Bears’ high-performance centre.
“I went for a gym session, because I physically could, and just to be there and be around people who weren’t nurses and doctors,” she says. “It helped keep my brain engaged with what was going on.”
Darker days, though, would lie ahead. At the end of her third chemotherapy cycle – when doctors were floating the idea of a fourth – Balogun was physically and mentally exhausted. By this point, she was hooked up to a chemotherapy machine for 24 hours at a time, the monotony of which was disrupted by injections in her back.
Chemotherapy so brutal she considered stopping
“I said to myself, ‘I can’t do this again’,” she says, raw emotion crackling through her voice at the memory. “I refused to come back to do more treatment. Towards the latter part of the treatment, when family and some of my friends were away, I felt very isolated.”
The three cycles thankfully proved enough. Balogun gravitated back to rugby the minute she was allowed out of hospital, easing herself back in at Monday night training sessions in December 2022.
“It was probably too soon for me to go back,” admits Balogun, who was elated to be given the all-clear the following month. “I wasn’t mentally in the right place. I wouldn’t have been able to give my entire self to my team in terms of my ability. My brain wasn’t moving quickly enough and I was so desperate for it to perform, and it just wasn’t.”
A “surreal” call up to the Barbarians squad last year, when she played a part in back-to-back wins over South Africa and Munster, gave her the confidence to head back into an ever-competitive women’s top flight.
Despite working a full day in recruitment and taking part in three four-hour long training sessions a week, Balogun logged on to our scheduled call at 5pm sharp. She is used to finding time for all her commitments.
“There are always extra bits that you have to do around the core hours, whether that’s analysis of the opposition that you’re going to play against at the weekend or yourself in a forwards unit session,” says Balogun ahead of Saturday’s key Premiership Women’s Rugby match against Saracens on Saturday at Ashton Gate. “You’re constantly on the go.”
Not that she would change any of it. “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t enjoy it,” she smiles, safe in the knowledge that she is no longer the cancer patient, she is the athlete – and she is back.
