‘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.

The nurses were upstairs in the man’s bedroom in Artane when the attack occurred. Two gardaí were waiting downstairs to escort the patient back to hospital.

“He stabbed me five times, and had a direct hit on my lung. It collapsed,” said Kevin from Malahide, Co Dublin. “Luckily, we were near Beaumont Hospital. I had to have a thoracotomy, an operation to open the chest.”

One of Kevin’s colleagues was stabbed in the heart and another in the arm. All three were out of work for some time, and one has since retired prematurely.

Kevin, who was in his 30s at the time, spent more than three weeks in hospital and it took him a year before he felt fully fit again. He returned to work after five months, because, psychologically, he felt able. He still gets flashbacks. Last Thursday’s incident in St Anne’s Psychiatric Day Care Centre in Limerick, where a psychiatric patient stabbed two doctors, brought it all back.

“It was typical of the type of unexpected situation where these type of attacks can occur. You would expect patients that are attending a day care centre to be less volatile than in an acute admissions unit, but when it comes to a patient who is in a psychotic state, nothing is predictable.”

The Psychiatric Nurses Association fought for the payment of the nurses’ full salary while they were on sick leave but, 14 years on, they have not received a penny in compensation. Controversially, Sean Croke, the patient who stabbed them, is the only person to gain financially. He brought a case — following his involuntary detention — to the European Court of Human Rights where the Government conceded existing mental health legislation did not provide for an independent formal review of such detentions, contrary to its obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights. It agreed to pay an undisclosed sum to Mr Croke.

Kevin is hopeful the Artane case will now be dealt with following the Government’s sanctioning yesterday of a compensation scheme for psychiatric nurses.