There were moments where there was a real chance that Fine Kula thought he was never coming out of hospital.
When the Sharks prospect was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2020, his family feared the worst.
“(The doctors) thought Fine would never walk out of Westmead Hospital. The doctor says he is clear, there is nothing to talk about. No tumor, no cancer, bone marrow clean, organs clean. Blood count it’s clear. We just couldn’t believe it,” his father, Solomon said in September.
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Yesterday on his Instagram page, the 22-year-old announced he was officially in remission and that he had beaten cancer.
“This has been a journey. But I’m happy to say it ends today. I go into remission so my battle with cancer is officially over,” he wrote on Monday night.
Kula was all smiles at the Sharks Academy fields today.
“The chemo is finished and they’ve taken me off all my medication,” he said on the club’s website.
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“They will take the shunt out of my chest soon but the one in my head will stay for a while. That will need surgery to take it out but I’ll wait a while before having that done.”
Kula enjoyed a promising junior rugby league career, where he earned the NSWRL Matthews Cup Player of the Year award in 2015 and was part of the Sharks championship-winning Jersey Flegg team in 2018.
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He will now work as a forwards coach for the Matthews Cup, SG Ball and Tarsha Gale Cup teams.
“He told me [that he had beaten cancer] when we he arrived for junior rep training and we both got a bit emotional,” Sharks’ development and pathways manager Glenn Brailey said.
“I told him how fantastic the news was and now we’re going to put plenty of time and energy into making him a coach.”
Kula was training full-time with the first grade team in the summer of 2020 when he was medulloblastoma, a rare and aggressive form of cancer. But after months in hospital and nearly a year of chemotherapy, he’ll finally get a fresh shot at life.
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