So while he and his wife took care of me, he got me involved with an Alexandrian team called El Olympi, coached by one of his former players. And it wasn’t about the money any more, I didn’t care about that. The big thing was being normal again. I had a check-up before I started playing and I found that that fortnight without food had killed my body. Being a professional athlete, my body was used to a high-calorie diet.
My liver was messed up, my lungs were bad, my blood was not right. But I played anyway. El Olympi wanted me to help them make the playoffs, but we ended up winning 13 games in a row and taking the championship. It was amazin That decision to play the rest of the season in Egypt was a lot for my mum and my girlfriend to take, though.
When I went home and saw my father again I shed tears. He was in a diabetic coma. Had he gone into this coma because I didn’t want to come home, his youngest son’ I felt very, very guilty. I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. I would shut myself at home for 15 hours with the blinds closed. I didn’t shower.
My girlfriend, Alexis, would come home and find me like that and it took a toll on our relationship. I got a lot of treatment, a lot of therapy. But I was raised in the Catholic church, and I found going back to church was a way back to my regular self. As for my old team-mates in Benghazi, there was nowhere for them to go, no way for them to escape. A lot of them had to fight in the war.
I am still in touch with one of them and with Moustapha, who I speak to about once a fortnight. I saw him last summer and gave him the biggest hug in the world. We’re partners for life. I have tried very hard to get in touch with that girl who lived across the hallway from me in Benghazi. I’ve found nothing, just nothing. I was trying to forget about everything that had happened to me.
But my family convinced me that I needed to get my story out there, so I wrote a memoir, Qaddafi’s Point Guard. Doing that was hard – there were a lot of tears. I don’t regret going to Libya.