Stella Doyle lost her right leg in a car crash four years ago. From that day on, the minutiae of her daily life became a thousand private ordeals, she tells Ruadhán Mac Cormaic
Those final minutes are etched on a reel that spins easily through her mind, the frames well-worn but still as vivid as they were on an uncannily bright Sunday afternoon in November four years ago.
Even then, says Stella Doyle, the light was what stood out. "The sun was beautiful, a real sunny afternoon; and in November, which was strange, because it was like a summer's day. It was so calm, even."
The flight that brought them back to Dublin airport from Brussels had been in good time that morning, and now they made their unhurried way back to Co Wexford and home - her husband Jimmy in the driver's seat, Stella alongside him and Betty O'Brien, one of her husband's friends from the office, in the back seat.
Traffic was light and the road ran clear before them. Just before reaching Bunclody, Stella picked up the mobile and called home. It was Jamie's birthday; their only daughter was 19 that day.
"We'll be home in 20 minutes," Stella said. It was 2.30pm. Jimmy drove on.
"We had come to, not a bend, but a kind of slight swerve on the road. Next thing we saw this car just coming from the swerve and right towards us. On our side of the road. And I just said, 'F**k, Jimmy, there's another car,' I said, 'coming this way'. We couldn't do anything about it. Jimmy swerved to try and avoid him. He had seen it, but he didn't, you know . . . " Here the sequence falters, the reel snaps loose and Stella Doyle remembers no more.
Five days had passed when she woke up in St Vincent's hospital, her family gathered round the bed. Her first thought was: how are the others? The driver of the second car, a 38-year-old from Marshalstown, Co Wexford, had died from serious head injuries. Jimmy had suffered relatively minor injuries to his legs and chest, Stella learned, and Betty was left with a ruptured spleen. Stella's side of the car had taken the brunt of the impact; there were large gashes just above her eye and her legs had been badly crushed. It would take time to assess how badly, and so operation followed operation until, after a seventh attempt to put it right, Stella was told what she half-expected anyway: she would lose her right leg from above the knee.
"I wasn't in the right frame of mind when I lost it. If I had been in the frame of mind I am now back then, I'd say I probably would have reacted differently. The first thing that hit me was: Jesus, I'll never dance again."
We sit in the light-filled kitchen at the bungalow on the outskirts of Wexford town where Stella lives with her husband and two children: Adam (17), who is to sit his Leaving Cert this month, and Jamie (22), who works in town. Stella's sister and carer, Grace, potters around us, filling our cups, clearing the last of the breakfast dishes, helping Stella fill the odd gap in memory. After the crash, the family had to move from their home of 14 years into somewhere more suitable, more spacious. The bungalow is immaculately kept, with widened doorways and plenty of open floor space, the front rooms giving a clean view of the nicely-tended garden out front.
After seven weeks in St Vincent's, Stella was moved to the National Rehabilitation Hospital in Dún Laoghaire, where she would spend the next 17 weeks. She was 43, but even the thought of what lay ahead left her feeling defeated.
"I hated it. I hated every minute of it. They're fantastic up there, the work they do. They're so determined and helpful. Everyone should go up there and have a good look around and see the damage caused from car crashes.
"Unbelievable. A lot of young chaps; it's frightening to see them. I'm in a bad way, but they're worse - they've lost the whole use of their heads, maybe. Frightening. I just felt, well, I'm too young to be in here. I just feel so old and weary. My life is over now: I used to think like that when I was there."
A routine imposed itself: for each of those 17 weeks she would spend five days in Dún Laoghaire and return to Wexford for the weekend, each car journey an ordeal she could hardly bear. "I used to cry my eyes out every Sunday going back, and I'd literally cry all the way up there. I'd be praying in the car all the way up and rubbing the rosary beads. I'd be saying to Jimmy, 'Go easy, go easy', even though he wouldn't be going fast."
Stella's recovery was complicated by the damage to her remaining leg; its femur had broken and extensive nerve damage meant that she was constantly in pain, unable to shunt her weight onto the left. The nerve damage might heal, or it might not. As we speak, she props her leg on the chair in front to ease the visible discomfort.
Slowly, certainly, some confidence was restored. On the day they fitted her first prosthetic leg, she remembers, it brought her to tears, but also to the realisation that walking again was no longer simply an aspiration. She left hospital. And new problems arose.
"When you're walking around up there, you don't have to go up the stairs or anything. It's only when you get home, you realise all the obstacles that are against you." The minutiae of daily life became a thousand private ordeals. The stairs, the television, the door handle, the fridge, the garden step; all were approached as if for the first time. Often she would wake up in the morning and make to swing her legs out of the bed, before remembering herself and sinking back into the pillow. Other times there would be pain where her leg had been. The balance that she had first mastered as a child had to be relearned.
"It does affect your life in every way. The first wedding that came up, everyone was there - it was a summery wedding and I wasn't long out of hospital - and everyone was there with their little sandals and their toenails painted. God, I started roaring again. 'I should be like that,' I thought. Lovely dresses and skirts and tanned legs. It's really heartbreaking, you know."
The physical torment of the past few years is only part of the story Stella tells. Thinking back over it, what happened on that clear Sunday afternoon in 2002 has come to stand as a breach between two lives, and some of the common threads elude her still.
"[ Before], everything was going hunky-dory for us. I was working, Jimmy was out working, Adam was in school, Jamie was away in college. I had a very active life; every weekend, we were out, dancing or whatever. I'd run ragged around anyone. We were really comfortably off. Then all of a sudden, bang, your whole world is turned completely upside down and inside out and back to front."
Stella's hardship coincided with a time of unthinkable suffering for her family. In the four years since the crash, her sister died of breast cancer, her uncle passed away, her father broke his hip, her cousin also lost a leg and she twice contracted MRSA. Two days after we spoke, the company where her husband had worked for 31 years closed its doors, not to reopen.
The years have been tough on the children, too, she thinks. Adam's grades fell after the crash, but rose again when his mother returned home, and he did well in the Junior Cert the following year.
There were differences she noticed in how they reacted to her; Adam constantly reassuring, offering help, Jamie unsure how to react, what to say, where to look. "I remember, the first weekend I came home from rehab; I didn't have my prosthetic at the time, and I'd come in in the wheelchair. I'd go from the wheelchair to the sofa. Jimmy was out getting the dinner, I was sitting chatting with Jamie. And I just went to cross my legs. 'Ah, I can't even cross my legs now,' I said. I just burst out crying. I couldn't even cross my bloody legs. I burst out crying, and she just sat there. She wasn't able to cope with me. She just said, 'Are you all right, Mam? I'll get Daddy for you'. She was probably scared.
"Even the kids [ nieces and nephews] were scared of me, and that really used to get to me.Any of the kids who saw me in the wheelchair wouldn't come near me. My nephew Richard - he was only four or five - he'd come over and he'd touch my stump. 'Why you have no leg?' he'd say. And I'd say I lost it. 'Where did you lose it?' Kids, they change completely. I thought, 'The kids don't even love me now. I'm a freak to them'. They'd touch the leg and go like that [ recoils]."
The Doyle family home is still being adapted to Stella's needs: a new kitchen is next on the agenda, with better-placed presses and an oven that Stella can reach without bending. Husband and wife have joined a local leisure centre, where Stella can indulge a new-found passion for swimming ("the only time that I feel normal"), managing up to 100 lengths of the pool on the better mornings. A sophisticated new prosthesis - fitted with a microchip that anticipates her falling - has given her better balance and greater confidence. But insecurities linger.
"I'm very conscious of myself and how I look. I wonder are people thinking, 'God, look at the size of her', that way. People do think like that; people do say these things: 'You get over it eventually'. Well, you don't get over it; you learn to live with it. Men seem to accept it more; they don't seem to bother. But it's different for a woman. It's not that I can't wear a skirt - 'Sure,' people say, 'Look at Heather Mills, she wears them'. 'Yeah,' I say, 'and look at the money she has.' This leg alone cost €25,000.
"When you're in a wheelchair, people are looking at you. Or they're not looking at you, they're looking at the chair. And they talk to the person who is pushing you, they don't talk to you. Every day I meet people and they say, 'It's great to see you out again. I haven't seen you in ages.' And I say, 'Well I wouldn't be out as much as I used to be.' They're saying, 'How are you keeping, you're looking great.' And I say: 'If only I felt as well as I looked.' 'Sure, aren't you alive,' they'd say to you. And I say: 'Yeah, thank God, I'm alive.' But sometimes I wish I was dead, because of what I have to cope with."
The new house, the new leg; both have eased the burden and allowed her the chance to think ahead again. She marvels at the tireless, unquestioning support of her husband Jimmy, her sister and carer Grace and the rest of the family. But progress comes at its own pace, and her moods remain at the mercy of the smallest ebbs and flows: a doctor's appointment, the sight of a friend out walking, a stranger's double-take.
"You get to the stage where you get so fed up. You get so ratty. It's getting to me now. And the summer really gets to me, when I see everyone out walking and I want to be out walking with them. I love the outdoors life, I really do. It's just very hard when you see people.
And yet she seems unshakeably determined. "You have to be a strong person. Sometimes I say I'm not strong. But obviously I am. People say to me, 'Aren't you great? I admire you so much. You're a great person.' And I say, 'No I'm not. I just have to.' I have to do it. Why would I be great for doing something I have to do? I've no choice."
• Monday: Fergus McCormack on living with permanent brain damage since being knocked down at the age of nine