Shane Mullins's world fell apart after a car crash seven years ago. Now that he has pieced his life back together, he tells JOHN HEARNE, he wants to help other people face up to seemingly impossible challenges
AT 1.45AM ON OCTOBER 16th, 2005, Shane Mullins left a pub in Abbeyknockmoy, Co Galway, with a friend. They had been drinking since 7pm the previous day. The 17-year-old got into his car and they set off towards home, in Monivea. Though not driving particularly fast, Mullins soon lost control.
The car hit a ditch and rolled into a field that was empty except for a stone pillar near the road. By a stroke of bad luck the car smashed into the pillar, and Mullins hit his head against the stone. As his friend climbed unscathed from the wreck to raise the alarm, Mullins slipped into a coma from which he would not emerge for four days.
At the hospital his parents were told to prepare for the worst, and asked if they would be willing to allow Mullins’s organs to be donated. “Luckily,” says Mullins, “they wouldn’t let them go.”
His sense of humour is one of the few parts of him not damaged by the accident. “We used to have a laugh in the worst of times,” he says. “When I find myself bored at home, I walk into stuff, just to make my sisters laugh.”
Mullins spent three months in hospital in Galway and three more at the National Rehabilitation Hospital, in Dún Laoghaire, Co Dublin. He’s now blind in one eye, has limited co-ordination and mobility, and suffers from many of the cognitive impairments that go with acquired brain injury. Over the past seven years he has endured a relentless physical and mental ordeal as he has tried to come to terms with what happened to him.
Today Mullins is touring the country, talking at schools and colleges about his experiences since that night. He has developed a programme, which he calls D’mess – for determination, motivation, emotional support and social life – to try to help young people face and fight their own demons.
On a recent rainy morning Mullins is at Galway Technical Institute, talking to a group of student nurses, who laugh as he puts a humorous spin on his story. “This is all about d’mess you’ve got yourself into and d’mess you can get yourself out of. Each letter stands for a word which you use in life to get off your fat arse and do something,” he tells them.
Mullins discusses each D’mess heading in turn, explaining how he used his system to bring himself back from depression and alcohol dependency. “This worked for me. I know it will work for other people. This is what I want to get the word out about.”
He awoke from his coma barely able to function, with symptoms he describes as “strokelike”. Although he continued to have sensations in his right side, he could not move his right hand or leg. After three days on the ward he caught an MRSA infection. He could not breathe on his own for two weeks and could not eat for two and a half months. “I had to wear tights in bed so I wouldn’t get blood clots. My heart goes out to you girls who have to wear tights: they’re the most annoying things ever.”
He explains that, because his blood was not circulating properly, each time he was hoisted from his bed to a wheelchair the pain in his back was unbearable. Though he couldn’t eat, he still felt hunger. Cooking smells would drive him crazy.
When he left Galway for the rehabilitation hospital he was determined to make a full recovery. “My determination is so good I could give away 50 per cent of it and still have 100 per cent left,” he says.
Counsellors in Dún Laoghaire worked with him on his goals, and in parallel he worked hard to recover his balance and get his right side working again.
But it was when his progress started to level off that his real problems began. He could not accept that a full recovery was out of the question. “I hated being told that I had a brain injury. I absolutely hated people coming up to me and saying, ‘Are you all right?’ Putting the arm around you, making you sit down,” he says. “I hated that with a passion, and it sent me into a deep depression.”
After the crash he had been warned about the danger of drinking with a brain injury, but by the time he got home he no longer cared. “I was drinking more than I was eating. People used to call me the wibbly-wobbly wonder. I’d wibble into the pub, I’d wobble out, and they’d wonder how I got home.” He says his father would frequently get a call from whatever pub Mullins was in to come and get him. “He’d have to carry me out of the pub.”
When Mullins hit rock bottom, his family brought him to the psychiatric unit at Portiuncula Hospital, in Ballinasloe. It was at this point that he began to turn things around.
“It was a time for me to get away and think about what had to be done . . . I was depressed and I wanted to change my whole life. I wanted to change so badly that I finally accepted the medicine and the counselling,” he says. “In Ballinasloe I finally accepted that a brain injury is for life.”
When he signed up for a media-studies course at Galway Technical Institute, his teacher Anne Jennings was so moved by his story that she encouraged him to tell others about it. And so D’mess was born. “People have reacted hugely positively to him,” she says.
Mullins made his first presentation to a soccer team at the college – “I have never seen them so completely floored and silent.” He’s particularly keen to emphasise the importance of sharing problems and expressing emotion. “Lads go round with big depressed heads on them because they think they can sort things out themselves. They cannot. There’s no way any human in this room can do anything on their own; I’ve learned that. I can manage my physical health on my own, but no way can I manage mental health; that’s what I try to get across. Learn to talk to people. It doesn’t make you a wimp.”
He has a driving licence again and is back on the road, playing golf and darts and doing as much nightclubbing as he ever did, only this time sober.
That doesn’t stop him having frequent run-ins with the Garda. Because his balance is still poor, he can give the impression of being very drunk. “The guards must have pulled me over 1,000 times. ‘Were you drinking?’ No, I say. ‘Well, it looks like you were.’ I just have the crack with them. I could be there for half an hour before I tell them the story, and then they’re there, ‘Why didn’t you tell me first? You’re wasting Garda time.’ ”
Mullins plans to complete his studies at the college and make a career based on the programme he has created. “Getting off the disability, that’s my main aim, because I don’t want it any more,” he says. “I’ve found what I love to do.”
