Facing repeated risks to her life from kidney failure, Ottilie Quince is determined to keep bouncing back – on and off her bike
There are times while listening to Ottilie Quince’s story that it seems just too surreal to be true. It’s as if the world has conspired against her for most of her adult life. “Sometimes when I tell people my story, they say, ‘It sounds like madeup bullshit ’,” she says, “but I promise you it isn’t.”
The lively, fast-speaking and outgoing 41-year-old would not be alive today were it not for her mother’s donated k idney, transplanted 17 years ago. Then again, that very same transplanted organ has twice almost killed her after the cocktail of medication required daily provoked cancerous growths. On both occasions, Quince has survived – but cancer could come again at any time.
Throughout it all, she has become an 11-time world, eight-time European and 18-time British transplant cycling champion, while also running her own bike shop, guiding business and physiotherapy clinic in her adopted home of Majorca, Spain. As she recounts every dramatic twist, turn and sucker-punch to me, she does so with striking exuberance. “I feel like I was made to deal with all of this s**t,” she says. “I’m happy it’s all happened. It’s changed my life, but I’m resilient.”
Devastating diagnosis
The youngest of four siblings, and the only girl, Quince was born in Luton in 1982. “My parents always wanted a girl to dress in pink but I wanted to be one of the boys. Football was how I was dragged up.” As a schoolk id, Quince played in the boys’ football teams, and then represented Luton Town Ladies for four years. “If women’s football had been as developed then as it is now, I think I could have gone quite far.” Between 2007 and 2010, she was also the Luton men’s team’s physio. “I was Luton obsessed. It was my home, my life,” she says.
In December 2006, Quince, 24 at the time, went to the doctor’s for a sixmonth contraceptive pill check-up. W hen the doctor took her blood pressure, “the reading was ridiculous – 220 over 100.” Normal is anything below 120/80mmHg, and follow-up tests were ordered. Soon after, while teaching PE in the same sixth-form college she herself had attended, Quince got the results. “Stage five out of five chronic k idney failure. Reflux nephropathy was the proper term, meaning my k idneys were damaged by the backward flow of urine into the k idney. They also told me I had 12% k idney function, and that I had been born with a maximum of 20%. I’d no idea that I had been symptomatic [see boxout]. They told me I had three choices: death within half a year, dialysis within six months, or a k idney transplant.” There was more heartbreaking news: “I was told I’d never play football again.”
WHAT TO LOOK FOR
Chronic kidney disease (CKD)
