Aberdeen star Graeme Shinnie has enjoyed a top level career in football but admitted there were dark times when he feared Crohn’s Disease would deny him that opportunity.
The 32-year-old has lifted the Scottish Cup with Inverness, won six Scotland caps and been a top performer for the Dons over two spells. Throughout that time, the midfielder has had to manage his condition and admitted the real low point was at Inverness. He had an emergency operation, spent 11 hours in surgery and had part of his colon and bowel removed and three abscesses drained.
Shinnie recalled: “The game where we beat Morton in the Scottish Cup was the final straw. The pain was too much for me. I had to have a bath almost every hour to relieve the pain. I went into hospital and within a matter of days I had a big op, I think it was 11 hours in the end.
“They took part of my bowel away, part of my colon and I had three abscesses I didn’t know about that needed to be drained. The operation was the best thing that happened to me.”
Shinnie didn’t realise the full extent of things until after he had come through his successful surgery. He said: “These were the small goals I was setting for myself with the doctors around me and it was the fear of, ‘I can’t even walk, how am I going to be able to run, especially the way I run around the football pitch?
“How am I going to get back to that level?’ That was tough to deal with.
“Immediately after my op, my health was the most important thing. Football was never in my mind at that point. It was touch and go whether my career was going to go ahead or not; whether it could get back to where I was.”
Shinnie has to self-inject every couple of weeks and to rest and recover to remain on top of his condition. He had been battling it since he was a teenager.
He said: “I spent a couple of weeks in hospital and they diagnosed me with Crohn’s Disease and I was on a feeding tube from my nose into my stomach. It was tough as a 12-year-old boy being at school having a tube coming out of my nose.
“People, obviously, were staring and wondering what had been going on. I had been fighting it discreetly in my own way because I didn’t want to give into it. I wanted to be playing football.”
Shinnie, speaking to Sky Sports News, added: “Some days are okay and some days it hits me like a steam train. When you’re at Aberdeen, there is a massive demand to play well every game and there is a massive demand for me to be at the top of my game every week. That can be tough when you are carrying an illness like Crohn’s but I’ve managed to deal with it pretty well.”
