The skill of a surgeon is determined not only by their dexterity with the knife, but also by their ability to recognize when there is a sense of urgency, when something needs doing straight away. Years later, Professor Miles would tell me himself that even highly qualified neurosurgeons sometimes lack the constitution to do this, for one simple reason: it requires them to take chances. But it is this ability – this courage – to make these decisions that saves lives. And when I look back, there is no doubt about it – Professor Miles not only had the brains to save my life, he had the stomach.
And so another phone call was made, this time from Professor Miles to Professor Rosalind Mitchell, who was on site at The Walton Centre. It was under Professor Mitchell’s supervision that I was prepped for emergency brain surgery. My hair was cut, the right side of my head was shaved, and the points where the incisions would be made to cut open my head were marked out by tiny coloured dots.
I was in the operating theatre throughout the night of 2 May. During this time, the surgeons separated my scalp, made little holes in my skull with a sawing wire, and cut between the holes. Then, they lifted the bone flap. Much like one opens a hinged door, one side was lifted while the other side remained attached to the temporal muscles. Once the doorway into my head was created, they had the access they needed to go in and suck away my clots.
The scans showed the position of the clots clearly. The first one lay between my skull and the dura – the outermost, toughest and most fibrous of the three membranes covering the brain and spinal cord.
The second, more dangerous, clot was inside the dura, against my brain.
Source: BrainLine.org
Because of the position of the clots, it was inevitable that I would suffer significant nerve damage during the course of the operation. But it was the clots that Professor Miles and his team chose to focus their attention on – everything else became collateral damage, the unavoidable casualties of war; the clots were the enemy. So, a split-second decision was made to keep me alive at the risk of damaging the nerves, knowing that it was a near certainty that this would leave me paralysed and partially blind.
The dura duly opened up, the two incriminating blood clots inside my head were suctioned out; first the outer, then the inner. Before signing off, several tubes were placed inside my head to allow for drainage in case any new blood vessels had ruptured as a consequence of the operation – if left unattended, these could take me back to square one, creating new clots, which in turn could cause my brain to swell. There wasn’t a single wasted moment nor a single wasted movement; once the job was done, my head was sewn back up. The operation was over. Now the waiting game began.
While all of this was happening inside the theatre, there was another, equally dramatic scene unfolding outside. After several hours of receiving non-committal responses to fairly direct questions, such as ‘Is he going to live?’, my family was given the prognosis. If I survived the three hours immediately following my operation, I had a 50:50 chance of living. I had suffered a direct impact to the frontal right position of my head, which had sent cracks across the bone; my base-of-skull was fractured in twelve places. The proximity of the cranial nerves, especially my optic nerve, posed a grave danger to me – the doctors thought I might lose my hearing, have impaired speech and were almost certain that I would lose vision completely in my right eye.
All of this, of course, was only pertinent if my brain would react. If it didn’t, we’d have to, in medical slang, C/C – ‘Cancel Christmas’ (dead). In other words:
a) My chances of surviving even three hours were speculative, at best.
b) If I was still alive in 181 minutes, whether I’d be able to sustain that for much longer was a coin flip.
c) Heads or tails? If the coin landed the right way up, there were no bets on the degree of normalcy of the physical or mental state in which I would be left.
d) In fact, it appeared a foregone conclusion that I would be severely impaired in some capacity or another. After all, my head had been cut open; they had tampered with my brain.
And so the ‘good’ news was that if I lived, I would be brain-damaged.
It was no wonder that the atmosphere inside the hospital was as grey as the linoleum floors that lined its endlessly long corridors. Even in the fluorescent silver-blue glow of the overhead lights, the faces of the nurses appeared dark and serious. If anyone holding out hope for me was looking for a glimmer of optimism from the medical team, they didn’t get it. Perhaps the team was trained to be like that; perhaps it was simply their way of setting expectations.
It seemed to work. Not many thought I’d make it. But everyone stayed anyway.
There was a deluge of support at the hospital. Joanna, Barney Curley and Chrissy Hills, Joanna’s friend and wife of jockey Michael Hills, were among the first to arrive, having flown in on a private plane that had been organized for them. My brother Laurence and sister Geraldine had flown in from Ireland. My brother Pat had driven up from Bristol and Eamon had driven from Findon, with fellow jockey Philip Hide and Ray Watson, who was travelling head lad to Josh Gifford. My brother Michael came up from London, and my sister Maureen from Wales. The two men who used to drive me to my races, Yarmi and Jim Hogan, were both at Haydock Park and followed the ambulance to Warrington and then later from Warrington to Walton. Reputed never to really agree with each other’s strong opinions, they banded together when disaster hit someone they were both tremendously – and equally – loyal to. Neither man left my bedside.
The next forty-eight to ninety-six hours would see many others coming and going, including Joanna’s father, Robert Park; her grandparents Peter and Pauline Chase; racing photographer Colin Turner; TV presenter and my neighbour in Newmarket, Derek Thompson; trainer Josh Gifford; jockeys Michael and Richard Hills. All in all, the waiting room of The Walton Centre saw jockeys, trainers, agents and other ‘horse people’ congregate on its worn black leather sofas in a glorious display of comradeship. The press gathered patiently outside, a constant presence. When I was in hospital, they wrote about me every day, sometimes several times a day. Most of it, like the tone inside, was bleak.
Then, just like Superman in disguise, arrived a saviour. Tommy Stack – distinctive and iconic – proceeded to pick up the shreds of despair from those grey linoleum floors and rebuild hope. According to Tommy Stack, I was going to be dancing by the weekend! The Irish trainer and former jockey was familiar with The Walton Centre, having spent four months there on account of a broken back. As such, he knew the area very well and used his familiarity to lighten the mood of several anxious people and inject some much-needed cheer and positivity into an otherwise grim environment. Tommy Stack cracked jokes, made people laugh, invited them out to the local Chinese and really got everyone’s spirits up. ‘This one’s going to live,’ he would walk around proclaiming with great authority; he even got the nurses to smile. But that’s Tommy Stack for you.
In the darkest of times come the most unexpected of surprises – for me, one of them was definitely Tommy Stack. I always knew he cared about me. I just didn’t realize how much.
Tuesday, 3 May 1994
At 7.30 a.m. I was seen being wheeled out of the theatre and into the Intensive Care Unit.
I was told that I came to, briefly, at the end of the operation, but I was so confused, disorientated and irrational that I was considered a risk to myself. The doctors couldn’t guarantee that I would be able to breathe on my own. More importantly, they couldn’t guarantee that I wasn’t going to pull my tubes out, get out of bed and rejoin the race that I had been forced to abandon.
‘I want Strawberry,’ I had murmured in my semi-conscious daze. ‘Get my horse here and let me go.’ And then I’d fallen back into that deep, bottomless, chemical sleep.
‘Did he want a strawberry?’ they had asked each other later, amongst themselves.
And so they agreed to wait and see before they made any further decisions. I remained in the ICU where I was induced in
to a deeper medical coma, hooked up to a life support machine and left there until inside me, somewhere, something flickered.
Wednesday, 4 May 1994
Joanna was talking to me. I could hear the words. Her voice. Sometimes it was soft, a whisper; sometimes it was loud, way too loud – did she think I was hard of hearing?
Sometimes I understood what she was saying, sometimes I didn’t. Sometimes I fell asleep while trying to understand. But when I woke, she was still there, talking to me. Just talking to me. It warmed me from the inside to know she was there. Always there.
She sounded very cheerful and happy. That was good. Joanna smiled when she was happy and she was beautiful when she smiled.
She kept referring to the things we would do when I woke up. ‘When you’re awake, we’ll discuss our offer on Oaktree House. When you’re awake, we mustn’t forget to call Louise about the car. When you’re awake, we will go to The Plough for that cheesecake you love.’
I wondered when I’d be awake.
Thursday, 5 May 1994
They decide to try to disconnect me from the ventilator. From the life support machine. Life Support. Those words. If you break those words down. Something supporting someone’s life. Something supporting my life. Now they felt that it didn’t need support any more, my life. That it was ready to go at it on its own. Or not.
I could hear Joanna’s voice, fading in and out, loud and soft and loud again.
There was a man’s voice, too. He was talking to Joanna. Their voices sounded distant and distorted. I could hear them, the words they were saying, but I couldn’t understand them, what it all meant.
He was saying, ‘What we’re going to do is, we’re going to take the ventilator away, and hopefully Declan is going to breathe by himself.’
Joanna was saying, ‘Hopefully? How hopeful are we? What if he doesn’t? Are you going to put it back on again?’
The man was saying, ‘Don’t worry. It’s just a trial. If he can’t do it, we will try again later. That’s why it’s called a sink-or-swim trial.’
The words echoed in my head: sink-or-swim, sink-or-swim, sink-or-swim.
Joanna sounded scared. The man sounded completely matter-of-fact.
Strange as it seems, I felt glad that I was the one lying there, waiting to be ‘disconnected’. Because no matter how terrifying it was, it couldn’t have been worse than standing in that room and witnessing the violence of how they tried to bring me out of my coma.
And then they did it. Just like that. In a two-step process. Step one, they disconnected my breathing tube from the ventilator and, step two, they connected it to the wall oxygen.
Suddenly, there were voices everywhere. Joanna’s. And the man’s. And other people’s I didn’t recognize.
And they were all yelling at me. ‘Declan, wake up,’ they were screaming. ‘Declan, it’s time to wake up now.’ Then, ‘You can do it, come on, you can do it.’
I have never been in a delivery room, but I imagine the whole environment is similar. Nurses hovering over the bed, a doctor, the screams of encouragement in those final, frenzied moments before a baby is born. Push, push. Breathe. Breathe. I suppose in a bizarre way, I was being born again. Giving birth, giving life. So similar, so different.
The voices grew louder. More urgent. They were shouting in unison now, like a deranged choir:
‘DECLAN!’
‘WAKE UP!’
‘BREATHE, BREATHE!’
They were shaking me vigorously, all these people. Shaking me. Screaming.
‘DECLAN!’
‘WAKE UP!’
‘YOU CAN DO IT!’
I opened my mouth.
There was no air.
I gulped frantically.
Nothing.
My throat seized.
My lungs burned.
‘YOU CAN DO IT, DECLAN, YOU CAN DO IT!’
I couldn’t do it.
I felt like I was being smothered.
Like my lungs were filling with water.
Sink-or-swim, sink-or-swim, sink-or-swim.
I wasn’t swimming.
I was sinking.
Panic raged through my lifeless body. I opened my mouth to let in the air. But instead I let out a desperate, strangled gasp.
The voices faded to blackness. And then I felt terror. Pure and unadulterated. Until they reattached the ventilator.
Again.
Because what I didn’t know at the time was that this had been the third failed attempt to revive me.
Friday, 6 May 1994
Four days.
Three attempts.
Two choices.
One decision.
After four days and three separate attempts at trying – and failing – to get me off the ventilator, the doctors considered switching off the life support machine.
At this point, the hospital issued a formal report to the press, stating that my condition had deteriorated to critical. After that, the relaying of any further information on my condition stopped.
That afternoon, Father Patsy Foley, later to become a close personal friend, was brought in to read me my last rites. With this, the press outside the hospital took their cue. They made frenzied calls to superiors: Should they wait? Should they go to print? Was it too early? But they couldn’t afford to be too late! Was I dead? Or not quite yet?
The London edition of the Racing Post made the first bold move by preparing an unambiguous headline. It read, simply, ‘DECLAN MURPHY DIES IN HORROR FALL’.
And that, as they say, would have been that.
If not for the strange twists and turns of a creature called Fate.
In the initial aftermath of the accident, my brothers and sisters hadn’t allowed my parents to come over to England – they felt it was too dramatic a scene for them to witness until there was more clarity on my prognosis. As a matter of fact, my parents hadn’t even been fully briefed on the severity of my injuries – it was a deliberate omission by my siblings to protect them from the harshness of the reality that they now all collectively faced. When my brother Pat called home to relay the news on the night of my accident, he had rehearsed two separate versions of the truth. He told my sister Geraldine how it really was: ‘He’s bad,’ he had said, ‘he’s bad. I don’t know if he’ll make it.’ But he had chosen to shield our mother from the trauma: ‘He’s bad,’ he had said, ‘he’s bad. But he’ll make it.’
Ninety-six hours later, when the rain had become a torrent, they had no choice but to wrench the umbrella from above their heads. Because when the doctors considered switching off the life support machine, my sister Geraldine baulked. My parents had to be told, she said to the others – after all, the decision to take one’s child off life support remains solely a parent’s prerogative. And so, the call was taken to ask my parents to make their way to the Intensive Care Unit of The Walton Centre where a medical professional would seek their blessings to end my life.
They say Truth is stranger than Fiction.
What happened next is the sort of stuff that would make Fiction go pale in the face.
My brother Pat called home to duly amend his story and tell my parents that they were needed at the hospital. Unbeknownst to him, my parents had already started to make plans between themselves, because hours before Pat had rung them, a reporter from a news channel had arrived at their house to get their reaction to my death, before I had even died. And so they had started – after days of denial – to finally prepare themselves for an undertaking that no parent imagines they will ever have to partake in.
Notwithstanding the dire circumstances, my father refused to fly. He had always had an irrational fear of flying and his phobia clouded all else. And so, instead of the one-hour flight from Ireland to England, my parents opted instead to come by boat – an eight-hour journey including the long drives on either side.
Ah, Providence. Oh, Destiny. Ah, Dramatic Irony.
The decision to turn off the machines was delayed by the differential of s
even hours. And in that precise window of time – created inadvertently by two scared people choosing ferry over flight to cross the Irish Sea – I regained consciousness.
I woke. I breathed. I survived.
I was back.
Or so it seemed.
There is a part of a shadow that sits between complete darkness and total illumination; it is here in the penumbra, this uncertain space of partial eclipse, that I now lay. I found myself flitting between two worlds, of consciousness and unconsciousness, of half-sleep and wakefulness, swimming upwards to the surface through a black hole of oblivion. It was muddled together in the black hole, past and present, time and space, day and night. I didn’t understand it, any of it.
Because when I finally woke, they spoke to me like I was a baby. Slowly. Very loudly. Enunciating every word. And I spoke back in the same manner. In the manner of a child. For the simple reason that when I woke, that is who I was – I was a child.
And Fiction gathered up her skirts and ran.
Twelve
I am eight years old.
I go to Presentation De La Salle, the Christian Brothers school in the village.
Many of the boys take lunchboxes to school, but I come home for lunch every day, because I can – my school is only about half a mile away from home.
So every lunchtime I run home.
I run at full speed.
Until I get to the last cottage on the street before the road turns a corner.
The cottage is painted a pale magnolia.
There is a drainpipe that runs along the length of the magnolia-coloured wall of this cottage.
When I run, I pace myself up to the drainpipe.
But I’m not running (in my head).
I am riding (in my head).
And as I’m riding, I’m doing racing commentaries (in my head).
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