ANDY COLE - Paris attacks, health and life, and the sad loss of Jonah Lomu

Yahoo columnist Andy Cole expresses his opinion on the Paris attacks, gives us a health update and mourns the loss of rugby great Jonah Lomu.

I’m sure I’m not alone for feeling a little sad at the world at the moment. The events in Paris disgusted me and I can’t comprehend why humans can justify murdering innocent people. Why? Why? Why? You wonder what the world is coming to.

The reaction brings hope. Playing a game of football isn’t any kind of victory, but I thought the fans and players at Wembley on Tuesday were magnificent. Sport is irrelevant compared to what happened, but sport can bring together the greatest of rivals.

I don’t think I could have played in that game if I was French. I can understand why several players didn’t want to play, but respect those who did play. People are different.

As a sportsman you need to be focused and it’s hard to focus when much more important things are happening around you. I remember landing in Athens to play a Champions League game in September 2011, only to hear about the 9/11 disasters in America. It numbs you.

Then, this morning, I woke to the news that the great Jonah Lomu had died, aged only 40. That was tough. I watched his life story on a plane two years ago and didn’t realise that he had a serious kidney disorder, even when he played. I remember thinking: ‘He was the best in the world, an absolute beast, even while being ill.’

The film came back to me forcefully when I was told that I had a kidney disorder last June, which kept me in hospital for three weeks and which I’m still confident to recover from. Jonah was waiting for a transplant. God willing, I won’t need a transplant.

Because I’m a man, I didn’t want to tell anyone about my illness. I felt ashamed and weak to be ill. I didn’t even want to go to the doctor and even when I called a doctor, I called the former Manchester United doctor Mike Stone. The doctor was someone who was part of the team, the man who popped you a tablet if you had a headache. Serious illness was never something I considered.

I didn’t tell anyone that I was ill because I didn’t want anyone to feel sorry for me. I didn’t tell close friends, I didn’t want to trouble them. I felt there were people who were seriously ill, with life threatening diseases and mine was just a minor little problem. I was very bullish about it.

It was only when the doctor told me that I wasn’t going home from the hospital and that what I had wouldn’t pass in a day or two that I began to realise something more serious was wrong. Then he told me that I was very fortunate that I’d come to hospital when I did.

But still I didn’t tell people. Not when I was undergoing dialysis, a process that leaves you exhausted for days as your blood is thinned through a machine. It takes hours, but you’re lucky if you stay awake for 10 minutes. I began to tell close friends and they told me off for not confiding in them sooner.

I’m not comfortable being ill. A journalist described me as being brave for attending the sell-out Unicef game at Old Trafford on Saturday. I don’t feel brave; don’t feel that my condition is worth mentioning in newspapers. I’m not comfortable with it, yet at the same time I had to tell people that I was ill. Because of medication, my appearance changed, I put on weight.

I’ve always really looked after myself, but now my appearance was out of control. People can be so judgmental about appearances. I started getting abuse on social media. Faceless, anonymous strangers I’ve never met asked in public why I’d let my self go as if I’d been drinking beer non-stop after retiring from playing.

They taunted, ‘Who ate all the pies’ and abused me. It began to get into my head. Imagine what it was like for my children to read stuff like that about their father, when their dad is fighting an illness? In real life, people would look at me like I had three heads and four eyes. This was happening every day.

When I realised that I couldn’t play in the Unicef charity game at Old Trafford last weekend, it was decided that I would put a statement out to end any speculation. I’m glad I did it; people have been good to me, so supportive.

I saw all my old team-mates at Old Trafford and the mood was great. There’s still a team spirit there, the laughs and the smiles too. I miss that dressing room vibe more than anything else in football, the moments with the boys who won the lot. Everything.

I miss it more than any money, the games, the goals. It’s those lads slaughtering me because they said I was a bad trainer 20 years ago. It’s not even true, I had the rare off day, but you simply can’t defend yourself when they start. You just have to wait for the storm to move on, for Gary Neville to start getting abuse instead because the harder he trained, the worse he became in training!

I’m smiling again thinking about the dressing room, but I wasn’t smiling when the game started on Saturday and I wanted to be out on the pitch.

But I can’t, not at the moment. And I’ll try and get on with my life in as normal a way as possible, even though things are anything but normal at the moment, both for me and the rest of the world.