Former NIU soccer star goalkeeper Amy Carr recovering from brain tumor

Amy Carr was bed-ridden in the hospital in London for more than a week.

She had lost her ability to speak and was temporarily paralyzed on the right side of her body after a pair of surgeons extracted a cancerous golf-ball sized tumor out of her head. A former star goalkeeper for the Northern Illinois women’s soccer team, the aftermath of the July 2015 surgery – along with the extensive chemotherapy that followed – robbed her of her strength.

Just more than a year later, she’s training for her first half-marathon.

“I’m feeling good now – best I’ve ever felt,” she said now at her home in Hemel Hempstead, England. “I reflect every now and again. I changed my career plans. I used to want to play and coach out in America, but there’s a new thing here where patients who had cancer can get qualified to personal train clients who are going through cancer treatment. I just got a job in a gym and am working on my personal training certificate and so hopefully I can train people with cancer to give them a sense of achievement and control over that aspect of their life.”

Carr is relatively stoic talking about the whole experience – which consisted of three seizures that occurred in a two-year window. The surgeons had told her there was a small chance – maybe five percent – that the surgery to remove the tumor from the left side of her brain could leave her permanently paralyzed on the right side. More than likely, it would take six months to get back into the swing of things.

However, she wasn’t sure how to prepare for a 10-hour surgery, one that she would need to be awake for – although she was so heavily medicated that she only remembers about 10 seconds of it and that a Chris Brown song was playing in the background. So she prepared for it like she would for the biggest match of her life.

She trained.

“I didn’t know how to prepare for it, so all I could do was prepare like it was a game,” she said. “I trained harder for the surgery than I would for a game. I just did what I could. I got so fit, it was unbelievable. I was running twice a day and lifting three times a week. I did everything I could to get ready because I didn’t know what else to do.”

When she finally left the hospital after nearly two weeks, she was back on a stationary bicycle.

Before her senior season in 2013 – a year after being the first Huskie goalkeeper to earn all-Mid-American Conference honors in program history – she was getting ready for bed back in England when she saw a dreaded spider in the bathroom. She called for her mother, Daryl, to come take care of the eight-legged enemy before she started to feel funny.

“I did a couple of laps around my bedroom and the next thing I remember is waking up to the paramedics over me,” she said.

She had suffered the first of three seizures, but all that tests revealed was that low blood pressure was likely the culprit.

Two more seizures followed while coming out of a 10-minute sauna session each time – one at a gym in Algonquin in November 2014 and another at her gym in England in February 2015. Even after the episode in Algonquin, she said her fears were more monetary than about her physical well-being.

“I didn’t really connect the dots, I was just worried about the medical bills, to be honest,” Carr said of her seizure in America. “It was just frustration because I knew I didn’t have the money to pay for it and it would be a lot of money. I just was worried about my parents’ reaction.”

The third episode was the one that made her family realize she needed an MRI. It showed a benign tumor in the left side of her brain, but her surgery got postponed five times from March until July as it had turned into a glioblastoma, a malignant tumor that affects the central nervous system.

When the successful surgery was finally over on July 12, she had lost the ability to speak for more than a week. The recovery left her confused – giving a thumbs up to offers for tea and coffee even though she hates both and blurting out at random. At one point, when asked how she was doing, she responded that she was okay, but said so in French.

“I spoke French – how embarrassing,” she laughs.

However, none of this was the hardest part of the journey for her. Instead, it was losing her hair in the chemotherapy sessions that followed, which would eradicate all the leftover cancer cells in her body.

“My hair is part of who I am and I felt like that was going and I couldn’t do anything about it,” she said. “I was literally pulling clumps of my hair out, if not brushing it out. It was like three times a day. I didn’t want to shower because I didn’t want to lose my hair. I couldn’t deal with that. My hair has always been my pride and joy.”

Her hair is slowly and surely growing back now that she was cleared in May. While her hair is still shorter than usual, she laughs that she looks like a German boy, she has slowly made her way back to physical activity. She ran the Adrenaline Rush obstacle race on May 21 and is raising money for the Macmillan Cancer Support Centre and the Molly Lane Fox Unit, the latter of which was the ward she was at during the process.

Once a star goalkeeper not only with the Huskies but with England’s U17 National Team and professionally in Norway, her sights are set on the Great North Run, a half-marathon on Sept. 11 in Newcastle, England. It will be the longest race of her life, but it’s not the physically demanding part of the run that she thinks will be the toughest.

“I just get really bored,” she said. “I hope it’s good scenery because I’ve never been to Newcastle so I think that will help me. I could never do a full marathon. I have the fitness for it, I just get too bored. I don’t know how people do it.”