Cancer left Christiana Balogun unable to walk. Now she's in the England squad

Christiana Balogun is part of England's Women's Six Nations squad. Andrea Southam - RFU Share articleChristiana Balogun’s life was about to descend into a blur of scans, tests, and treatment so brutal that she would struggle to eat, walk or speak. But she hardly grasped that at the time. When the Bristol Bears back rower received the news of her cancer diagnosis, she headed to the hospital with her rugby kit and boots in tow, fully anticipating that she would train three days later. “When I think back to it now, it’s the most ridiculous thing ever,” says Balogun. “You’ve literally been diagnosed with cancer on a Friday, and you think that you’re going to go to rugby training on a Monday? You are absolutely mad.” Perhaps that naivety is necessary when such a grueling, life-affecting period lies ahead, particularly at 24 years old. Balogun had found a lump on the underside of her jaw while washing her face four months previously, and now her career and identity were about to be upended. This was back in 2022, soon after she had joined Bristol and entered a new phase in her rugby union journey. She hadn’t even played a game for the Bears when she was diagnosed with Burkitt lymphoma, a rare and aggressive form of blood cancer. Instead, Balogun spent much of her pre-season confined to a hospital bed, largely isolated from friends and family. “How aggressively fast (the cancer) could grow is how you need to match it with the treatment that you’re given as a patient,” she says. “My Burkitt’s was low-grade. It was localised. It was only in one side of my neck and hadn’t spread anywhere else — thank God for that. But it meant that my treatment was very intense.” Three rounds of chemotherapy followed, each bringing with it a catalogue of debilitating side-effects: strange tingling sensations in the fingers and toes, mouth ulcers so painful it was impossible to swallow, and all-consuming fatigue that made it exhausting for Balogun to even consider leaving her hospital ward. “You walk five steps to the toilet and then you’re tired and you have to walk five steps to the bed,” she says. “The thought of going outside, you’re dreading it because you’re just like, ‘How am I going to get downstairs?’. That was a physical and mental battle.” “As a Black, Nigerian woman by heritage, I held a lot of pride and attachment to my hair,” says Balogun. “And it all fell out, unfortunately. That was another difficult thing to navigate. Your face changes as well. You no longer have hair on your head, you don’t have any eyebrows and you’ve lost most of your eyelashes. “You almost look like not you… I went through a lot of body identity challenges because my body changed, as well as my face.” Throughout this time, the thought of returning to rugby kept Balogun sane — not that she would be needing that hastily packed kit bag anytime soon, but learning lineout calls, watching match analysis, and undertaking light sessions in the hospital gym all reinforced the sense that she was a rugby player before a cancer patient. Her new team-mates would come to visit her in the hospital, none more often than Simi Pam, a close friend, even though they had only known each other for a matter of months. Once the final round of chemo was over and she had received the all-clear in January 2023, Balogun was still some way off returning to the rugby pitch. Beyond the hospital walls, there were no doctors or nurses to provide advice and reassurance, and no obvious checkpoint at which her body could once again withstand the rigours of elite sport. “In some ways, I found that the most difficult period — you are now on your own and you have to navigate life completely differently,” says Balogun. “You’re still recovering physically, but then mentally you’re not quite where you need to be, especially in a rugby sense. “I’m not where I need to be to be the best team-mate for the people to the left and right of me on the field. And then I felt quite disappointed in myself, that I couldn’t give to my team-mates in the way I wanted and needed to.” In the years leading up to her cancer diagnosis, Balogun had fallen deeply in love with rugby, even when it didn’t always love her back. When she first started playing — initially because she had to pursue the sport outside of school — there were signs that this wouldn’t always be an easy relationship. Balogun almost stopped rugby entirely after breaking a team-mate’s leg during tackling practice. “I heard a snap,” is how Balogun recalls that grisly incident, “and my memory says that the bone was out of the leg. I was like: ‘Oh my God, what have I just done?’.” Balogun persevered, more out of necessity than joy — she was beginning to enjoy the physicality of rugby as a means of expressing herself. A five-year spell with Wasps came next, and even when she never clicked with team-mates — “I felt like an outsider,” says Balogun — it was her love for the game itself that always endured, proving too compelling to ignore. “My journey to where I’m at now wasn’t the typical, ‘Oh, I love rugby so much because you make the best of friends and everyone’s so welcoming’,” says Balogun. “That wasn’t my experience when I first joined. I fell back on how playing and training made me feel.” The 28-year-old has earned a call-up to the England squad for this year’s Women’s Six Nations. A first cap remains elusive, but simply being part of one of the greatest sports teams on the planet — the Red Roses are on a 36-match winning run, which includes last year’s World Cup triumph — is enough to leave Balogun content. The focus has moved to improving her game as much as possible. England have comfortably beaten Ireland, Wales, and Scotland, the latter by running in 12 tries in an 84-7 victory, and after facing Italy this weekend, will travel to France for a likely Grand Slam decider on May 17. “I would love a cap to come. That’s always been my dream,” says Balogun, adding: “I like to stay grounded… I try to stay as neutral as I can to not allow myself to be drawn too high with the highs or too low with the lows.” And cancer has already dealt Balogun more highs and lows than many experience in a lifetime. The diagnosis and subsequent recovery, she says, have shaped her values and who she is today, on and off the rugby pitch. “It is a privilege to experience hardship, because when you then experience hardship on a micro level, it builds your resilience to trust yourself and believe in yourself that you can overcome that,” says Balogun. For the person who innocently took her rugby kit to the hospital four years ago, representing her country would feel like a just reward for Balogun’s perseverance and strength of will. Few have had to overcome more adversity to get there. Spot the pattern. Connect the terms Find the hidden link between sports terms