'I'm in awe of her every day': Life taught Wicklow's Dean Healy there's no pressure on the pitch

In 2023, Dean Healy's partner Jennifer was diagnosed with Hodgkin's Lymphoma while pregnant. 

Football has been a vital release for Wicklow's Dean Healy during a testing time over the last two years. Pic: ©INPHO/Dan Sheridan

Life, death and football. Dean Healy could write you a book on it all and still have more for a sequel.

He's Wicklow's longest serving player, beginning his county career in 2011 under Mick O'Dwyer who passed away last month.

In February, Healy's Wicklow colleague Malachy Stone tragically lost his younger brother, Brendan.

Healy had already been thinking a lot about mortality, life's bigger picture and how insignificant football really is.

Wicklow will play Offaly today in the Tailteann Cup and after beating Longford and pushing Dublin harder than most expected in the Leinster championship, there's talk of a possible upset in Tullamore.

But even if they do leave Mickey Harte and his Division 3 champions sickened and defeated, the world will keep on turning.

And the St Vincent's Hospital ward in Dublin, where Healy spent every second Thursday with his ill partner Jennifer during her spell of chemotherapy treatment in 2023, will still keep going about its life-saving business.

Those were difficult times, the very hardest, and 33-year-old Healy has one particularly remarkable story to recount. It was the Thursday night before they played Limerick in the 2023 Tailteann Cup, early June, and he rang Jennifer on his way home.

He'd been considering retirement but felt energised that evening and told her he might go again with Wicklow in 2024. She told him to wait until he got home.

"When I arrived home, she was pregnant and there was an immense joy," recalled Healy. "And just as it transpired, she was due in Vincent's the next day to get a lump that she had in her neck biopsied."

The diagnosis turned out to be grim.

"The tests showed that she had Hodgkin's Lymphoma and that potentially we would have to terminate the child given how early it was," he said.

A couple of years on, Healy is a proud father of two now. He watched four-year-old Fiadh recently in her first ballet show at the Mermaid theatre in Bray while one-year-old Aifric is a testament to both good fortune and the resilience of Healy's partner Jennifer who did eventually give birth and, thankfully, completed her own course of treatment.

"What I saw from my partner over the last year and a half, starting the situation that she found herself in, still having a little girl to look after and still obviously looking to carry (a pregnancy)," said Healy, pausing to consider it. "Like, you think you love someone and then you see how strong a person can be and it just goes to show...like, I'm in awe of her every day."

It's wrong, of course, to say that football doesn't matter. It's been a vital release for Healy throughout, though he is aware of its true significance too. He has had some brilliant games for Wicklow in recent seasons, masterminding last year's provincial championship win over Westmeath and starring against Dublin just last month. But he doesn't get too high up or low down nowadays about any of it.

"I'm extremely aware of the fortunate position I'm in, I just feel like the last two years, it's almost like a free pass in terms of there's no pressure with anything," he said. "Whatever is going on in your life, you park it at the door for two or three hours that you're there training."