‘He stabbed me five times and had a direct hit on my lung’

KEVIN KELLY’S abiding memory from the moment he was stabbed was the feeling that death would have been preferable to the pain caused by the knife.

He was one of three psychiatric nurses stabbed by a patient as they tried to coax him to return to St Ita’s Hospital in Portrane on July 9, 1993. The patient had gone AWOL.

“At the time it took about 20 seconds for the pain to kick in. It was so excruciating I would have happily died,” he said, recalling the incident that kept him out of work for almost five months.