Photo: Juliette Lacome // YouTube
Everyone, at some point, endures the helpless feeling that your body is failing you. Whether from age, injury, or sickness, it’s unavoidable to eventually be confronted with not only one’s physical limits, but also your own mortality.
French surfer Juliette Lacome recently had such a brush with fate, after the 21-year-old from Biarritz underwent surgery to remove a bone tumor. The procedure, and subsequent recovery, has put her through the wringer both physically and emotionally, as she explored in a recent edit, posted to her YouTube channel.
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Lacome first mentioned the tumor in an Instagram post in July of last year. “Two weeks ago I woke up with a terrible pain in my right leg and it was really hard to walk or do any other activities,” she wrote. “After a couple x-rays, we found out that the pain was due to a benign bone tumor growing on my knee into my thigh muscle.” As she narrated in the recent edit, this led to making a decision any professional athlete would dread. “The tumor was pretty big and growing into muscles,” she explains. “I was like, ‘I can’t avoid surgery right now, because it’s just getting worse and worse.’”
After undergoing the surgery, she went into a three-week-long limbo, as she waited to find out if the tumor was cancerous. “I don’t know, I feel like I was at that point in my life where I was already accepting a lot of things and I just accepted it,” she describes. “I told myself that whatever happens, I’ll just try and give my best to just come back in the water.” In the end, the growth did turn out to be benign, though it still kept her out of the water for six weeks.
She seems to have emerged from the experience stronger. “I feel like I’ve learned a lot about myself, about life too,” continues the narration. “I can handle things a little bit more after going through these type of things. Physically, I’m definitely not the same and I’m working on just getting back to that, but, at the end of the day, I’m just happy to be back in the water, doing what I love.”
