Roy Williams recovering after surgery

CHAPEL HILL — Roy Williams continues to recover from the surgery he underwent in September to remove a tumor from his kidney but, he said on Thursday, “I don’t think I’m 100 percent.”
Then again, Williams said, “I don’t have to be.”

“I’m not jumping and running and rebounding and blocking out and things like that,” he said. “But I’m trying to be very cautious, because we have six games in a 13-day period. And [doctors] want to make sure that I don’t get run down and do something crazy and all of a sudden have a setback.”

After experiencing discomfort in early September, Williams made an appointment with a doctor. Tests discovered tumors on both of his kidneys, and he had the one on his right kidney removed during a procedure at UNC Hospitals.

Doctors determined the tumor to be benign, and a biopsy determined the tumor on his left kidney to be the same. When UNC began practice last month, Williams experienced discomfort at times – especially when he became more animated while during teaching moments.

But these days, Williams said, “Even when I’ve gone wacko it hasn’t been something that’s hurt me.”
Williams said doctors last Wednesday cleared him to resume exercising. They told him to “take it easy for quite a while,” Williams said. And so he has been trying.

“Those are the kind of things that they’re more concerned about,” Williams said of strenuously exercising. “I haven’t taken my jacket off in practice and thrown it or anything like that, either. So hopefully I don’t have to do something like that.”

--Andrew Carter