Jack: Injury won’t end my sports life
Only five months after Jack O’Driscoll was left paralysed in a freak accident during Storm Emma, the Corkman already has his sights set on returning to sport as a paralympian.
While the GAA and soccer player continues to recover from crushing his C5 vertebrae, he remains determined not to let this injury affect his love and desire for sport.
“Any sport I take up at home, wheelchair or not, I am going to take it as competitively as I can. I am not going to try and leave people beat me,” he told the Evening Echo.
“I hope to remain involved (in sport). I know it is not possible for the next couple of months, but eventually, I hope to be helping out with the kids and being around and going to all the matches, being on the sideline with the lads.”
You have to be amazed at the bravery shown by people like Jack O'Driscoll who suffered a life-changing injury during this year's snowstorm.
— Alan Healy (@AlanHealy) August 8, 2018
He gave a great interview to @Journo_lady about his recovery and plans for getting back into sport. https://t.co/rOHxdvKUDS
Jack’s life changed drastically on March 1. While the then 19-year-old was playing around in the heavy snow, he and his friends began to jump from a 90cm-high fence around a local pitch in Mayfield.
In what seemed to be a harmless activity, the first-year Cork IT student landed awkwardly, and instantly knew there was something seriously wrong.
“Whatever way I landed, I landed on my head and cracked my neck and I was face down in the snow with my legs wrapped underneath me.
“I was trying to get up and my breathing was a bit heavy. I knew straight away that I was paralysed.”
Jack was taken to Cork University Hospital by an ambulance, and the day after, he embarked on an excruciating journey from CUH to Dublin’s Mater Hospital while Storm Emma was in full flow, a trip Jack will never forget.
“The trip took about five-and-a-half hours to get there and it was one of the worst five-and-a-half hours of my life. The pain in my neck was unbelievable, I thought we were never going to get there.”
Jack arrived at the Mater Hospital on March 3, and the damaged C5 vertebrae was removed while the C4 and C6 were fused to stabilise his neck, and so Jack’s painful road to recovery began.
“I was in the Mater Hospital for two months. I was in ICU first. That was a bit intense with the medication: morphine and things like that.
“Mentally it was nothing like I had ever gone through. It was terrible.”
Three months on from leaving the Mater, Jack continues his recovery in the National Rehabilitation Centre in Dún Laoghaire, and the athlete’s competitiveness and fighting spirit is shining as bright as ever, fixated on not letting his injury define him.
“I want to be in a class with someone a level down from me and I want to be doing what he or she is doing, and if I am lifting a weight half a kg less than he is, I want to be doing the same as him.
“I want to be the same or better person as the person beside me.”
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