‘Am I going to be able to live normally?’ – Ex-Sunderland man details terrifying brain injury after shock retirement
Former Sunderland defender Denver Hume has opened up on the frightening brain injury which changed his life and ultimately forced him to retire at just 28
Denver Hume had spent almost his entire life worrying about football. He joined Sunderland at eight, progressed through the Academy of Light and eventually made 84 first-team appearances for the club he had grown up representing.
Injuries had been part of that journey too. Hume tore his ACL at 15 and later dealt with several other setbacks during his senior career, but the process had always been broadly the same: recover, get fit and find a way back onto a football pitch. Then came one Fleetwood Town training session which changed everything.
The impact that changed everything
“I can remember a lot of it,” Hume told The Echo. “A big diagonal ball got played across the field, and I've jumped up and headed the ball. The other lad, with no intention to hurt me, has jumped up to try and control the ball and his whole knee has connected with the left side of my head.
“I remember hitting the ground, and I must have been quite concussed after that. There were a lot of medical staff running onto the pitch because I think everyone knew the severity of the impact. All I really remember is repeating myself a number of times, saying that the ringing in my ear was constant.”
At that point, Hume still thought in the way professional footballers are almost programmed to think. Something had happened; he was clearly injured, but the immediate question was how much football he would miss. The answer he received the following day was considerably more serious.
“It was a very scary time because initially I thought, yes, it's a serious injury, but it's one of those where you think it might keep you out for a week or two from playing,” Hume said. “Then the following day I went for the scan and sat down with the physio, and he shared the news with me that I'd fractured my skull and had a bleed on the brain.”
Hume spent the next couple of days in hospital being monitored. Surgery was initially considered because of the location of the fracture and bleed, although subsequent scans showed that the injury could be allowed to heal naturally. For somebody who had previously measured injuries in games missed and rehabilitation schedules, the conversations were now very different.
“I've suffered numerous injuries in the past, but when it's a head injury, and it's involving the brain as well, I think that highlights the severity of it,” Hume said. |You sit down with doctors and specialists who specialise in that kind of injury, and you realise the severity of it.
“That's when you probably think more about your overall life rather than just your playing career. The weeks following the injury were really tough. I was probably in a place where I wasn't even thinking about football. It was just: how do I recover from this? Am I going to be able to carry on with my daily life?”
Hume had been inside professional football since childhood. For him, that last question says more than almost anything else about the seriousness of what happened. Hume was 28. His career had already taken him from Sunderland’s academy into their first team and beyond. Yet football had suddenly become secondary to something far more basic.
When normal life became the target
The weeks immediately after the collision offered little certainty. “For the first six weeks, it wasn't nice at all,” Hume said. “I had really bad headaches. Even little things like going for a walk, which would normally feel pretty normal, would bring on headaches. It took me a while to get over that, even from not doing anything really physical.”
There were other symptoms too. Hume experienced persistent ringing in his left ear for several weeks and eventually required another specialist appointment. “The headaches, the ringing in the ear and then overall just not really feeling like myself were the main things,” he said. “I was very run down and didn't have the energy to do normal things that I usually do.”
That period brought a different perspective. Hume had spent years dealing with the physical demands of professional football, but there was no training programme or return date to focus on this time. Slowly, the symptoms began to ease. “I'm happy, and I'm probably lucky to be in a place now where I have recovered from that side of things, and I am able to do normal things,” Hume said. “That's something I'm really grateful for.”
The people around him became particularly important during those early weeks. Fleetwood’s medical department helped Hume through appointments and conversations with specialists, while his partner and family were alongside him as he tried to understand what recovery might look like.
“The physio at the club was top drawer really, and then my missus and my family came down to support me and be by my side,” he said. “The few weeks after that were scary, to be honest. There was a lot of uncertainty around what the next steps were.”
The point retirement became real
There was no immediate decision to stop playing. Hume had spent too much of his career overcoming injuries to accept straight away that this one might be different. For several months, the possibility of another comeback remained. As time passed, though, the conversation started to change.
“I probably got to a stage after maybe the five or six-month mark where I realised the severity of it and the potential of not being able to return to play,” Hume said. It's been a really tough time. I've had a lot of time to process what happened and the potential outcomes of that.”
More than 10 months after the collision, Hume announced his retirement from professional football at the age of just 28. There is something particularly cruel about the way his career has ended because Hume had already experienced, and beaten, the sort of setback which could easily have stopped it before it properly began.
He tore his ACL at 15 and missed a full year of football while still trying to establish himself in Sunderland’s academy. He recovered, earned professional terms and eventually played more than 80 times for the club he had represented since childhood. There had always been another target. Get through rehabilitation. Get back into training. Get into the team. Earn another contract. Find another club.
This time there was no comeback to chase. Hume felt his career had been moving in the right direction before the collision at Fleetwood and, at 28, there should have been plenty of football ahead of him. Coming to terms with losing that has understandably taken time. Yet listening to Hume speak, there is also gratitude among the disappointment.
The injury which ultimately ended his career also forced football into perspective in a way few professional players ever have to experience. In those first weeks, thoughts of another appearance, another contract or another season disappeared.
What mattered was being able to go for a walk without suffering a headache. Feeling like himself again. Being able to live normally. That is why the story of Hume’s retirement is about considerably more than the premature end of a football career.
He joined Sunderland as an eight-year-old, came through the academy and achieved something thousands of young players dream about without ever managing. He represented his boyhood club 84 times and went on to build a career in the professional game. He would unquestionably have wanted more.
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But after a training-ground collision left him sitting in front of specialists discussing a fractured skull and a bleed on the brain, the things which once seemed so important inevitably started to look very different. Hume can go about his normal life again now. He can look back on the career he built, rather than worrying about what the next scan might reveal.
At just 28, accepting that he will never play professionally again remains desperately difficult. For a frightening period after that collision, though, whether he would play football again was no longer the question that mattered. Suddenly, football became unimportant.