Maria Weller had to cope with the death of her husband René Weller last year. Shortly afterwards, she also began to worry about her own life.
Maria and René Weller were a couple for around 20 years and married since 2013. Last year, the ex-professional boxer died at the age of 69 after suffering from long-term dementia. Shortly after his death, Maria Weller suffered the next shock: she was diagnosed with skin cancer – but she gave the all-clear.
The widow of the former world boxing champion had a skin check during which a malignant non-melanoma skin cancer was found on her back. “For a long time I had an uneven spot on my back that I couldn’t see but could feel. Sometimes it itched. I didn’t think anything of it,” the 72-year-old told the Bild newspaper. The spot turned out to be a basal cell carcinoma, a malignant tumor, but it was discovered in time and operated on on Wednesday. “I was given a second life,” said Maria Weller.
After she received the diagnosis, she initially collapsed: “I was mentally exhausted.” Her first thought was: “René wants me. He wanted to get me. He longs for me. But I don’t want to yet. I want to live.” She believes “that he doesn’t want to be up there in heaven without me and that the cancer was an attempt to bring me to him.”
As she reports, her treating doctor once discovered black skin cancer in her husband René Weller and was able to remove it in time. When she was undergoing surgery herself, she noticed her late partner’s autographed boxing gloves, which were lying on a shelf in the practice and made her emotional: “I immediately cried.”