‘Horror leg break nearly killed me’
In it, surrounded by anxious players and officials, Thomas Cahill of Fr Casey’s Abbeyfeale lay on his stomach gulping down oxygen in an effort to relieve the excruciating pain that followed a horrific leg break.
For most of us, that’s the end of this story. Up and down the country, in all sports, players are injured, taken away, and that’s it — out of sight, out of mind. There will be the occasional enquiry, ‘how’s your man doing, when will he be back’ – but there will be very little thought given to the pain, suffering and the frustration.
Well, in his own matter-of-fact words, told as though he was merely itemising a day’s events from his normal farming duties, this is Thomas Cahill’s story.
“It was about five minutes into the second half, the score was five points each. They got a kick-out, I was on my own at wing-back. I went to meet the ball and one of my own team-mates came across from my blind side. We got entangled, he fell down on my leg, and I could hear the break. I looked back and saw the angle of it — I knew anyway from the reactions of people who walked up to me, then turned away. The pain was intense, terrible.”
Team trainer Tom Fitzgerald was one of the first on scene: “There was no doctor there but we knew he shouldn’t be touched, so we left him as he was. We knew of a lad in Abbeyfeale recently who broke his leg playing soccer and was moved. He ended up having four operations, plastic surgery and everything.”
All the while Cahill lay crumbled on the ground in agony. “Our physio, PJ O’Mahony, was very good, he took control. I was on the ground for about half an hour or more in terrible pain, but when the ambulance came I was given oxygen which helped. I got to the hospital, they had foil over the leg and they took it off — I could see it clearly now, and it wasn’t pretty. Then the doctor came and started straightening it up, no painkillers or anything…”
Fitzgerald admitted he had to leave: “I couldn’t take any more, couldn’t bear to watch, and the roaring…”
“I was really roaring!,” Cahill recalled “The pain was incredible! They put splints on it to keep it in place and I was taken down to be x-rayed. After that it had to be adjusted again, and this time they turned me around to fix the back of it also. The pain was unbelievable; I couldn’t sleep, and I couldn’t get morphine because of the surgery next morning.”
The operation lasted almost four hours. Cahill continued: “They opened the leg up, came in at an angle and put in plates to help knit the bones. Those plates will be there forever. After the surgery I was brought back to the ward and that evening I felt I was coming round.”
Then things became serious.
“That night my stats went a way down, I was getting caught for breathing and was totally out of it. I had a morphine button to kill the pain but I was in out of sleep and couldn’t settle.
“At about one in the morning I got a bad turn, was transferred to intensive care, and they rang my parents to come in.
“There were lots of complications. I’d wake up freezing, get back to sleep eventually, wake up again and they’d be changing the sheets, drowned with sweat.
“Then I got pneumonia — and bone marrow had got into my lungs. They had me on oxygen again but it wasn’t working, I was still in trouble; they put me on something else, that didn’t work either, and then I was put on the C-PAP, a mask, blowing air down to my lungs to keep them open.
“That seemed to work, and I was on that for five days. During that time though I couldn’t eat – you had to take the mask off to put the food in your mouth and the buzzers kept going off! I was waking up at night getting sick, puking up blood, in clots, but that was fine – I was clearing out the system. By Wednesday (four days later) I was coming round but I got another turn that night. The pneumonia was back again.”
A second bad turn, but how serious was it? “Bad enough. I didn’t think it was, but I asked the nurses, and they told me that if I hadn’t been as strong and as fit and as toned as I was, it would have killed me.
“I knew I was fairly sick, but Jim O’Donovan (Limerick team-mate) came by one day — he’s a doctor here — and he was close to tears and said ‘what are you doing in here?’ I couldn’t answer him, I was too weak.
“Stephen Lucey (another doctor, another Limerick team-mate) was in as well, himself and Jim met to see what they could do for me, and they were a great help. Jim was filling in my parents, keeping them up to date. But I got great support from everyone, from the lads on the team, from the lads on Drom-Broadford – everyone, and I’d like to thank them all.
“They pulled a trick or two too, but that’s what you do when a man is down, isn’t it? A few of them came in one day, I was in bed, couldn’t move, and as they were leaving they said ‘Here, we brought you something,’ threw it on the bed. I went off to sleep, woke up in the morning, and all the nurses and doctors were around the bed, smiling – ‘You didn’t need any painkillers last night, Tom!’ they said, ‘Nothing wrong with your leg last night!’ I needn’t tell you what was on the bed – a few dodgy magazines, and I hadn’t even glanced at them! And I thought, ‘Thanks lads!’”
Cahill is on the mend now back home in the loving care of his mother, and given his attitude will soon have the power and muscle back on that massive frame. He’s determined to play football again, to get back onto that horse at the earliest opportunity, and we wish him well.
In the meantime, and for the next several weeks in the lead-up to Christmas, he’ll be hobbling around Abbeyfeale on crutches, his time filled with reading. He already has the Brian Cody autobiography, is looking forward to that, wouldn’t mind a copy of the other big GAA books currently in the news either (Kennelly and Cusack, for those who’d like to know), keep his mind occupied. In the meantime, however, perhaps those of us on the sidelines, should occupy our own minds with a thought or two for the likes of Thomas Cahill.
And the next time we feel like hurling abuse in their direction for some missed play, a second thought wouldn’t go astray.
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