‘We never thought we’d be fighting for a doctor’

TWO mothers. Between them they have three children with special needs; two in wheelchairs, one tube-fed - all desperately dependent on their doctor who is about to depart.

If it sounds like a tragedy, it is. Not just for Mary O’Flynn and her six-year-old son Ricky, or for his cousins, 12-year-old Mary Rose and 14-year-old Christopher Wyse, but for the parents of 12,000 other children with learning and developmental disabilities.

All are dependent on the services of Dr David Coghlan, consultant paediatrician specialising in children with special needs at Mercy University Hospital (MUH) in Cork.

And all are reeling from the shock announcement that he is quitting his job to move to Dublin.

Ricky, who has cerebral palsy and microcephaly (small head and brain), suffers from epilepsy and the service Dr Coghlan provides at MUH has in the past saved his life.

“One minute he’ll be fine and the next he is running a high temperature; getting seizures - he can get up to 500 a day. If he goes into prolonged seizures I bring him straight into hospital, but without Dr Coghlan we are totally knocked out of sorts,” Mary says.

He looked after her son when he was hospitalised with pneumonia for three months earlier this year. He was due to take over the care of her son’s cousins, Christopher and Mary Rose, following the retirement of their own consultant, Dr Brendan Watson, two weeks ago.

Mary Rose suffers from tubular sclerosis, a condition which requires her to be fed via feeding tube. Every six weeks the tube must be checked to make sure it is not blocked. Christopher is one of 17 children on the island who suffer from Rubenstein-Taybi Syndrome. The condition leaves a child short in stature and prone to developing a hunchback, as Christopher is. He needs steel rods fitted to help his condition. Both the Wyse children, from Churchfield Avenue in Cork city, need to use wheelchairs.

“Dr Coghlan ordered the wheelchairs for the children, but everything he’s got, he had to fight tooth-and-nail for,” Mary says.

Ricky, from Youghal, Co Cork, is also in need of a new wheelchair which he has outgrown, but because the department will only supply a new one every two years, he will have to wait until September to get a replacement, Mary says.

“Dr Coghlan was our man to have here, the man to fight for our rights. Not only that, but the service he provided to special needs children meant if Ricky needed to be hospitalised, I need only travel to Cork. If Dr Coghlan leaves, and the service he provides ends, Ricky will have to travel to Dublin.

“He won’t last the trip. It’s his life we’re talking about and he wouldn’t be alive but for Dr Coghlan.”

Mary says the point she, and Rose, and other mothers with special needs children are trying to make is that “we have to fight for everything, be it wheelchairs, splints, even Mary Rose’s feeding tube”.

“But we never thought we’d be fighting for a doctor.”