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Eartha Cumings tells Katie Whyatt how, through a fog of pain, she kept dreams of playing football alive
Through the fug of the morphine, Eartha Cumings heard the voice of a surgeon warning her that she may lose both legs. She was 17, in her final year at school in Edinburgh, and now, aged 20, pulls up her trousers to tell for the first time the story involving skin grafts, staples, a Zimmer frame, 10 operations – including three back-to-back and eight days in intensive care – and four scars, each 15cm long and a centimetre wide, crawling across her lower legs.
Cumings, the Bristol City goalkeeper, recounts the details of her compartment syndrome, and the operation for an underlying medical condition that left her legs deprived of oxygen. Compartments are groups of muscle tissue, blood vessels and nerves in arms and legs, enclosed in a “big white onesie”, in Cumings’s words, called fascia. Fascia cannot stretch. “So if your muscles swell up, they’ve nowhere to go,” she says, “like blowing up a water bottle.” The pressure cuts off blood flow. Muscles break down. Cells die.
This was the longest night of Cumings’s life. Her first operation had ended at 10pm when she woke to an “excruciating pain in my legs”. Operation two commenced at 3am, the third at 9am. Parts are blurry, others are vivid: the pressure gauge jabbing into her leg, the doctor thrusting forward a consent form.
“I was in so much pain, and he said: ‘You need to give us permission to amputate your legs. You’ve got compartment syndrome. We need to operate straight away.’ I was just terrified. Why is this happening? What’s going on? You’re groggy, recovering from the anaesthetic, but you can process the pain and I was afraid – super, super afraid.
“So much was happening, but I was crying: ‘You can’t cut off my legs.’ It kind of didn’t feel real. I thought, they’re not going to do it. Looking back, it was a real possibility. I’m lucky they got it in time.”
Doctors cut through the fascia to relieve the pressure, then took skin grafts from Cumings’s thighs, stapling and meshing the skin over the wounds.
“My leg was hanging open and I could wobble it,” Cumings says. “They’re big chunks of flesh and look like chicken skin. When I’d walk around the street, I’d see people looking at them. People I didn’t know would ask, and it felt like an intrusion: who are you to ask me that? But I enjoy telling people I know about my scars, and I wouldn’t recognise my legs without them. It was something pretty impressive that my body overcame, and I like that.”
She has had operations to remove the skin grafts, operations to repair her scars, to add fat. “The scar tissue gets tethered to the muscles,” she says, “because there’s no fat separating them. If I was to tense my leg, you can see it [the scar] buckles.”
The first thing she would ask doctors is whether she would play football again. “They were always, like, ‘We won’t know until later what your mobility will be like and if your muscles can get back to where they were’,” Cumings says. “There is lasting impact. The nerve endings in the top of my foot have been badly damaged, so every time I kick a ball, it feels like a slap. It’s like when you’re on the beach and you strike a wet, sandy ball with bare feet. I’ve lost sensation up the front of my right shin and the flexibility in my ankle is massively hindered.”
She did not walk for a month, lying prone in her hospital bed, walking three steps a day with a Zimmer frame. “The muscles were like little Twiglets,” she says. “Being someone who was physically fit, [then] unable to cross a room on your own – it was crazy, feeling completely awkward on your own feet, learning the processes again. I would make progress, then I’d have another operation and it would feel like I was right back to the beginning.”
It took months to learn to walk normally. Her eyes are glassy as she recalls the first time she kicked a ball in the garden with her brother, the searing stab shooting up her leg and the panic that, after coming this far, she may never play again. She cried until her mother discovered, on the internet, socks for people with foot injuries. “They’ve got rubbery plastic on top, and that takes the impact, so
I don’t feel it. It still felt normal and natural to kick a ball, but recovering in normal life is quite different to recovery in football. This showed me that I could have to live my life without football. For that to be gone in an instant – I thought, it can’t be over. “I always felt, even at the moment they warned they might have to amputate my legs, that
I was going to be fine. I got pretty lucky. None of it’s been too serious that I haven’t been able to play.” She applied to Bristol University to study ancient history and joined Bristol City the same summer. Eighteen months later, she signed her first professional contract. She dropped out of the course – “Football has a timespan on it, if football doesn’t work out, I can go back” – but lives with students fretting over essays. It is a reminder of what could have been – but Cumings knew anyway. “The point where football was nearly gone made me realise what life would be like without it,” she says.