Popular pundit and ex-player Chris Kamara has recalled how his heart palpitated when he had to deliver a live report on Soccer Saturday while struggling with the symptoms of speech apraxia.
Kamara disclosed his diagnosis in March 2022 after roughly two years struggling with his speech. The condition, which he first thought was the start of Alzheimer’s disease, made his voice croaky, his words jumbled, and his balance off.
At first he tried to hide it from those close to him. “I was clever,” he told The Guardian in a recent interview. “I would talk in soundbites, short stuff. Getting involved in lengthy conversations was a no-no. When my voice was really croaky I'd keep my mouth shut, then talk when it came back.”
Kamara's approach was put under pressure when he returned to TV during the coronavirus pandemic. In his new book, Kammy: My Unbelievable Life, he recalls the fear he felt when expected to deliver a live report.
“My tongue felt as if it had swelled to double its size and was hanging out of my mouth,” he writes. “The famous Kammy smile had disappeared. I was sweating profusely. Hot, prickly heat spread on my back.”
“My heart palpitated,” he elaborated to the Guardian. “I'd never known anything like it. It felt as if it was coming out of my chest. And I couldn’t get my tongue around the words. It was so difficult. Jeff [Stelling] came to me and a goal was scored and I kept the commentary as short as possible.”
Kamara’s symptoms got worse as he continued to hide his condition from friends and the public eye. He appeared live on TV and struggled with his speech more noticeably towards the end of 2021, remembering a Christmas show with Paddy McGuinness in which he “sounded like somebody who’d had 10 pints.
“People were talking about it [as if he had]. I thought: ‘That’s fine, I don’t mind that.' Rather than them thinking I’ve got a speech defect, I'll take that.
“It was playing with my mind. You go crazy. The first thing [you think] when you wake up is: can I speak today? If the delivery man comes to the door, can I talk to him? The old me used to have a laugh and a joke with him. Now I’m a bumbling old man who can't get his words out. My self-esteem was at its lowest ever point and that’s when you think of crazy stuff in your head.
“I was ashamed I couldn’t cope properly any more, and now I apologise to every single person in the world who has speech problems or neurological problems because I understand it doesn’t define who you are.”
Kamara revealed that he began to have suicidal thoughts, saying: “If anything happened, I wouldn’t be upset about it.”
But he agreed to see a doctor, who diagnosed him with an underactive thyroid, then apraxia of speech.
When he chose to discuss the condition publicly – having not wanted people’s sympathy previously – he says “it was the best day of my life from then on.”
Now, he campaigns for others with similar conditions. “I was of the opinion the game was up. I could hardly string a sentence together. The passage from the brain to the mouth wouldn’t work. I'd think of the words, but they wouldn’t come up. Now that flow, that fluency, is there.
“I want to talk about apraxia, make people aware of the condition and show sufferers that they can still live a good life, whatever struggles they face.”
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