“I will die. But God has not yet decided when God will take me,” said the 52-year-old German to “Bild am Sonntag”. “The whole mess was discovered during a routine examination. I wasn’t feeling so well before and my blood values were noticeably bad,” said the former professional soccer goalie.
During his career, Koch played at Fortuna Düsseldorf, Arminia Bielefeld, 1. FC Kaiserslautern, Energie Cottbus and MSV Duisburg as well as abroad at PSV Eindhoven, Dinamo Zagreb and Rapid. In 2008 he played seven times for Hütteldorfer in the Bundesliga and twice in the Champions League qualification. His last game was on August 24, 2008 in the Vienna derby. The goalie fell to the ground in the 6th minute following a firecracker thrown from the Austria sector behind exploded near him. The German suffered hearing trauma with deafening and a circulatory collapse.
“Complaining doesn’t help and has never been my thing”
Now he is going through an even more difficult time. “It’s bittersweet when you’re going through your hair and suddenly you’re holding a whole clump of hair in your hands,” said Koch. “It now takes me half a minute to do things that you used to do in five seconds. But I have to come to terms with the illness. Complaining doesn’t help and has never been my thing.”
There are “these phases” in which he wonders why it happened to him. “But once you’ve been to a cancer ward yourself and you see how much misery there is and that it also affects small children and young people, then I can classify it differently and come to the conclusion: I had a great life! “, said Koch, who stated that he was “currently being treated with medication from the USA”: “I just mightn’t stand the misery in the cancer wards anymore, it was destroying me.”
Koch most recently worked in football as a goalie coach and later as a team manager at Viktoria Cologne. Last year the club announced that Koch was withdrawing for personal reasons.
