You’d struggle to fill a telephone box with the number of men who gave up playing junior club rugby in their mid-20s and decided to return to the game in their mid-30s. Yes, there would be a fair few who are dragged out of retirement having played at senior level to feature on a “dream team” down the ranks, but if you were trundling along at junior level and you stopped, then you stayed stopped.
Not Ciarán McCarthy. Having folded his rugby tent as a student in UCD in the early-90s he suddenly pitched it again, 10 years later, at the behest of legal pals in the Four Courts, where he still works as a business manager of a publishing company. It was not high stakes stuff: Dublin barristers versus Belfast barristers on the morning of a November international where Ireland were playing New Zealand, in 2001.
It went well. So well in fact he decided to give rugby another go. Why not? So he joined his local junior club, CYM in Terenure, and prepared to get stuck in again. McCarthy had gone to Terenure College and was on the panel of their Leinster Schools Cup winning side in 1984. He was handy and quick, but it didn’t propel him into senior rugby when he left school.
Just two months into his revived rugby career with CYM, on a cold and dirty January day, he found himself on a bog in Co Offaly. At least it felt that way: a pitch that was barely playable, the sort of scene where you’d question if this really could be classed as recreation.
It was a miserable slog, darkened further by the prospect of the long drive home, and work the next morning. McCarthy never took that journey however, for while his team-mates were making their way back to Dublin he was on the flat of his back in Tullamore Hospital. Half an hour into the game he had attempted a tackle, lost his footing in the mud, and ended up at an awkward angle when his opponent fell on him. The collision caused an incomplete spinal cord injury. His life had just changed.
Shortly after the doctor on duty had painted the bleak picture, the CYM club president handed McCarthy his mobile phone to call home. It’s hard to conceive of a more heart-rending scene: ringing your mother from a hospital trolley to tell her your return to rugby was ending in a wheelchair. His parents’ lives had just changed as well.
That’s when the next conversation in his head kicked off. For most of us surely that would have been all about the unfathomable cruelty of what had unfolded. By the time he was transferred to the spinal unit in the Mater hospital he was over that bit and working on what would happen next.
“Yes it was freakish, but my attitude was it could happen to anybody, so why not me?” McCarthy asks. “Okay it was me, so do I get bitter and be a bitter auld bollocks for the rest of my days? Or do I respond as positively as I can? So how do I do that? Physio. Stick to the programme. Lead the way. Just keep going.
“The decision I made for myself was: ‘I’m going to respond; I’m not just going to let this rule me; I’m going to rule it as much as I possibly can.’ I felt better psychologically. I felt better physically with that attitude. In other words, fight back in the best way you possibly can.”
He clung to the fact his spinal cord injury was incomplete, as opposed to complete. He chose to focus on that light at the end of the tunnel being a way out rather than an oncoming train. Effectively, he refused to live the life he had just been assigned.
He wrote a book about the whole experience. Reading I Will Walk Alone you’d be screaming at him to stitch it into the few people who left their bedside manner at the door. Without naming names, he manages to convey the inner rage at being spoken about as if he were not in the room, and uninvolved in his own future. He wasn’t having that. So he drove on, head down and focused on tiny gains through massive effort, but there were complications.
For those with spinal cord injuries, infection can become a stalker. The immune system can get holed beneath the water line when the spinal cord is damaged. Sepsis has knocked on McCarthy’s door a few times. Experience has taught him to recognise its symptoms when it threatens.
“I understand it now, inside out,” he says. “It’s like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. It just hits me: temperature rises, the heart rate shoots up, the breathing becomes shallow and rapid, and the shakes – the rigours – set in. Those are the four signs.”
Very early in this story McCarthy says he was visited by an Irish Rugby Football Union (IRFU) representative. The man was on a mission of containment. He reassured the patient that, while clearly this was a dreadful situation at least money was coming, so no need to fret on that front, or indeed to make any fuss in public.
“No more than two sentences out of his mouth and I said ‘No – I don’t want anything to do with the Charitable Trust whatsoever’. Basically what he said was: ‘Oh yeah, we’ll financially support you but you don’t need to advertise or promote or discuss the simple fact that you became a paraplegic as a consequence of playing rugby’. That was 22 years ago. Now there has been a total cultural change [in the IRFU] – a different way of thinking, feeling and acting, which is great.”
There are 36 former players across the country – all male, all amateur – who are victims of catastrophic injury through rugby. The IRFU Charitable Trust has evolved dramatically from its early days, especially since Dr Cliff Beirne became its first chair of care in 2011. In 2019, they initiated funding for research by the Royal College of Surgeons (RCSI) into spinal cord injury. Subsequently this was elevated to Patient and Public Involvement (PPI) status, with added funding coming from Science Foundation Ireland’s AMBER (Advanced Materials and Bioengineering Research) facility in Trinity College Dublin.
More than 22 years on from the incident, McCarthy’s belief in a breakthrough is undiminished. He keeps his end of the bargain by collaborating with the researchers and sticking to an arduous physio regime the way professional players would follow their gym programmes. He understood from the outset it would be a long haul.
There are two sides to this stretch of road: the grim reality is that finding a solution is laborious and painstaking, and a long shot; the sunnier side is that in laboratories around the world scientists are working hard to discover how to repair the damage done.
Two of those labs are in Dublin: at RCSI and the school of medicine in UCD. For Dr Eimear Smith, a leading consultant in rehabilitation medicine who sits on the IRFU Charitable Trust committee, this is a huge leap given as recently as 2017, when the International Spinal Cord Society held its conference in Dublin, there wasn’t a local lab scientist available to contribute.
“We had to go overseas to get one to speak, even though we were hosting the meeting,” Dr Smith says. “Now we have two really good labs who are collaborating on this. That’s a brilliant development. The collaboration is important because they’re competing for the same funding. Ultimately we need collaboration because I don’t think one lab is going to find a cure for all of this.”
At its simplest, the damage done to a spinal cord is a crash site. The ultimate aim is to repair this damage with an implant, 3D-designed to match the specific case, and promote the growth of healthy cells.
“It’s what we call a combinatorial approach and ultimately if we are going to get somewhere that’s what’s going to make the difference,” Dr Smith says. “It’s not going to be one thing. So that’s all positive. It’s brilliant work but we’ve got to be realistic as well. Will this come to fruition in the next five years? I don’t think so. It’s really, really slow.”
McCarthy gets this. He doesn’t expect to be jogging down the quays to work anytime soon. He understands that for all the moving parts to sync would be a unique scientific breakthrough with global impact. It’s not going to fall into place overnight. But neither is it crystal ball stuff. It is structured and ordered and scientific.
“I ground my hope on that,” he says. “That work – as well as my own determination to see things through. It’s not a false hope – it’s a genuine hope. And that’s important. The work they are doing is real. It’s impactful. It’s just a question of when.”
He is prepared to wait.
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