AGAINST ALL ODDS
“MY PROSTHETICS HAVE GIVEN ME BACK MY GOLF GAME”
– ISSA NLAREB AMANG
Before I lost both my legs and almost all my fingers due to bacterial meningitis, I was playing some of the best golf of my life. My doctors think I actually contracted the virus when I won the Senegal Open in January 2018, but I only started feeling the effects when I flew to play in the Ein Bay Open in Egypt a month later. I remember trying to sleep the day before the tournament and feeling like my body was in the freezer. Eventually I lost consciousness, went into septic shock and I spent the next five days in a coma.
When I woke up, I realised I couldn’t move. The doctors told me I would recover, but nothing changed for one month. It was only when they transferred me to a hospital in Cameroon that they did some tests which showed I had no life left in my fingers or feet. That’s when they decided to move me to Belgium so they could amputate both legs, all the fingers on my left hand and three on my right.
It was such a terrible thing to hear because no one knew if I would be able to play golf any more. I struggled to accept it at first but after 12 weeks of non-stop pain and crying, I realised it was my only choice.
One of the worst things was having to spend nine months away from my family. It was so hard because my wife doesn’t have a job and my kids had to stop going to school for two years. We don’t have any health insurance either, and the only reason I could have the operation was because of the generosity of the Alps Tour (a third-tier pro Tour that plays events through France, Italy, Austria and Switzerland), my friends and everyone at
