Animals have a survival instinct, but we have a deeper consciousness – we know that we are alive, we ponder the meaning of life, and we know that one day we will die. And so we have an energy, an enthusiasm, a spark to live life to its fullest. Unlike animals, we have the power of perspective, of self-reflection. We have the power to take that leap of faith to step outside of our bodies and see ourselves from a parallel perspective. We have the power to look within our core. We have the power to understand our deepest traumas. And we have the power to overcome them.
Medication, for me, was the equivalent of that rubber pipe. This is what medication does. It neutralizes your senses because it is trying to kill the pain, but in killing the pain, it also kills a lot more. As long as they kept me on the drugs, I would have existed in a zombie-like state of induced normality. But in the process, they would have extinguished the spark within me, swiftly and silently, like a gust of wind extinguishes a burning flame. And when the drugs stopped – when that rubber pipe fell out – and I emerged from this unnatural, sedated state, I’m convinced I would have never recovered. My spirit would have been broken. The fight within me would have been quenched. They would have had to put me down.
So, my second act after emerging from my coma was to get off the medication. I had been kicked in the head by a racehorse at speed, I had almost died, my skull had been cut open, my mind had been badly traumatized, I had lost my memory, I had no feeling in my feet, I had no feeling in my hands, I had no feeling in my fingers, but none of that compared with being numbed of emotion. Of standing by helplessly while the drugs slowly and silently stamped out the life-force within me. So, just as if I had stayed on in hospital, if I had stayed on the drugs, I am certain that I would have never recovered.
Joanna understood this.
When I stopped the medication, Joanna never asked why. She never questioned it, she never told anyone, she simply supported me. In hindsight, her compliance could well have been perceived as a great irresponsibility on her part, because despite what I thought I was capable of, I could well have been proved wrong. That had to be a brave call for anybody to make. And so, to have the strength of character to believe in me when I was at my most vulnerable – that showed the kind of woman she was.
In her mind, it was less important what I actually could or could not do. What was more important was that other people never got the chance to underestimate what I could do. She played up the strength within me; she protected me from everybody.
So while the will to recover was ultimately my own, it was Joanna who gave me the initial push towards hope, towards possibility. It was Joanna who kick-started my mind, who fuelled my belief, who made me feel invincible. She was the lynchpin of my faith. Without her, I may have forever been lost.
When I look back, I think how easy it would have been for me to give up. Everything I knew had been taken from me. It had taken three seconds precisely from horse hitting hurdle to hoof hitting head. Three seconds to end it all. I didn’t know if I would walk again. I didn’t know if I would ride again. I didn’t know if I would remember again. I didn’t know if I would love again. I didn’t know if I would live again. So, yes, it would have been easy to give up. But I couldn’t accept that. Most people who went through what I did are not alive to tell their stories, so I had a different cross to bear. I had been spared my life. Now, I had to save it.
This I learnt from the most unexpected of teachers, in the most unexpected of ways. Thank you, Mr Turpin and the Grey Stallion. Thank you for your infinite wisdom. You didn’t say a word, but you taught me all I needed to know. You showed me the way; out of the tunnel of darkness, and into the light.
Light
Coping with your own death, when you are not yet dead, is a strange thing.
When I look back, I realize that the hardest thing for me wasn’t learning to walk again, it wasn’t living with the dent on my head where the surgeon had cut out a part of my skull, it wasn’t the lack of sensation in my fingers or my feet, it wasn’t the blinding headaches, or the blank phases that would come upon me suddenly and take me into black pools of isolation.
It was English grammar. Semantics. When people spoke to me they would say:
‘You were a great jockey.’
‘You were such an articulate man.’
‘You were the most stylish of riders.’
Wonderful, kind words, meant from the heart. But the grammar was all wrong. Everything was in the past tense.
I was. I was. I was.
But here I am.
There was a fire within my soul. I was determined to get my life back. To meet these expectations that other people seemed to have of me. To be referred to once again as a ‘now’, not a ‘then’.
I was hanging off the edge of a cliff, with fingers I couldn’t even feel. And I could either hoist myself up to safety or fall into the dark, cavernous mouth of the valley below. Above me in the sky glowed a rainbow, its vivid, multicoloured hues beckoning me. I knew I had to crawl towards it, towards the light.
I had to heal.
Bit by bit.
Part by part.
Body, mind, soul.
Perhaps it seems too complicated to think this way, to try to isolate the intricate, conjoined workings of a human being in the way that I did – body, mind, soul. But I had damaged each one and I had to repair each one.
Bit by bit.
Part by part.
I had to break it down.
I had to step outside my physical self and analyse things from outside in. I had to simplify. Otherwise, the red rocks of the earth would have opened up before me and I would have found myself falling … falling … falling …
But there, just there, was the rainbow, waiting for me.
The way I viewed it, I had two challenges to overcome, woven together by a gossamer thread, complex, fragile: one, the damage to my physical self and, two, the damage to my mental self. At the core of all this, at the heart of the web, lay my memory loss – the four years that had been snatched from me. Those four years and everything that came with them – the battles won and lost, the triumphs, the disappointments, the laughter, the tears, the memories, the magic – were gone for ever; I would never get them back. I simply had no choice but to accept this. But alongside it all came another reality, much harder to accept – the fact that I couldn’t remember my most recent self. I found myself wrestling with the most basic of concepts: self-awareness, self-image, self-knowledge, self-identity. I didn’t know who I was, who I was meant to be. Inside me was a stranger I needed to befriend but I didn’t know where to begin. Allow me to replay the conversation I would so often have with myself.
Me, to me:
Who am I? Who am I supposed to be?
They say I used to race horses.
So maybe if I can race horses again, I’ll become me again? But how can I race horses when I can’t even walk?
Suppose I learnt to walk? Suppose I learnt to ride? Suppose I learnt to race?
Would that then make me, me?
So, I thought, rightly or wrongly, that if I could get myself physically back to the man I had been, it would help me regain my sense of self. Or at least, some part of it.
In any case, the physical recovery was easier to tackle and that’s where I started. Here’s what I was contending with:
Before Haydock Park
Height: 5’10”
Weight: 66 kg
Body fat: 8%
The stuff they said: ‘He didn’t need to work at riding, it just happened. The rest of us had to work at it, we were ordinary – he was just good. And anyway, he wouldn’t have had the time to work at it, he spent all day in front of the mirror, combing his blond hair, trying to look good. And to be fair, he did look good. He was a strong athlete, full of muscle, strong shoulders, strong chest … a supremely stylish rider. Declan just seemed to be cut from a different cloth. He wanted to ride better than anybody else; he wanted to look better than anybody else – and he did.’
After Haydock Park
Height: 5’10”
Weight: 36 kg
Body fat: What body?
The stuff they said: ‘He looked like a little old man, so frail, sitting in an armchair that he usually perfectly filled. Now he was sitting like a ragdoll, taking up about a third of the chair. He was always so strong and to see this sort of strong body reduced to looking like a shirt on a clothes hanger was a great shock. His face had become completely gaunt, his head was shaved, all the muscle was gone, his whole diaphragm was gone; it was just skin on bone, his clothes were hanging off him, like they were draped there. He was just a decrepit old man and a pair of sticks.’
It was hard.
It was simple.
It was impossible.
It’s never impossible.
I had to turn back time.
I had to discard my ‘after’ and regain my ‘before’ as quickly as it had worked in reverse.
I had to take control of my own destiny. And I had to do it now. Carpe diem.
But there was a paradox: even in my impatience, I was in no mad rush. There is a saying in Spanish, ‘Vísteme despacio que tengo prisa’, that translates roughly to ‘Dress me slowly because I’m in a hurry’. I was completely patient despite my hurry. I didn’t intend to jump headlong into my recovery. Just like I never jumped headlong into my races. Ride the race to suit the horse and not the horse to suit the race. I was the horse, the prize was my life; the race would determine how I got it back.
I made a game plan. Actually it was more like a battle plan. I was going to approach this slowly and patiently, step by step, as if preparing for battle. And I was going to win. I made lists in my head and I went over them again and again and again. What I could do, what I couldn’t do, what I wanted to do. What I had lost for ever, what I could potentially get back.
I consider myself a man of faith. As children we were taught the Serenity Prayer, we would recite it every morning at school. We would say it by rote, mechanically, as children do, not stopping to think about the words or what they meant. Now, it served as my salvation. I asked Joanna to copy it out and tape it to the wall facing my bed, so it was the first thing I’d see in the morning and the last thing I’d see at night. She wrote it out in bold green ink on a sheet of white card, in her typically neat, slightly slanting cursive. It said:
God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.
Did I have this wisdom? I don’t know.
All I wanted to do was walk again. No, I lie. What I really wanted to do was ride again. I’m still lying, because what I truly wanted was to race again, and if you really want to know the truth – what I wanted, more than anything, was to win again.
There are jockeys who will tell you that racing horses is all they’ve ever wanted to do. I’m not one of them. I became a jockey by circumstance and it so happened that I made a success of it. But it was always just that. It was what I did, not who I was. And yet, at this moment in my life, I wanted nothing more than to be a jockey, if only to regain some semblance of control, to prove to myself that, despite everything, I was still me.
The first step of my battle plan was to walk again.
There was a porter at The Walton Centre called Tony. His job was to wheel me around in my wheelchair, just to get me out of my room, just for a change of scene. All day long, he’d wheel people like me around. I rack my brains to this day and I cannot think of a job more giving of oneself than that which Tony dedicated his time to doing. Day in and day out he’d walk the same routes, along the same dreary corridors, wheeling people who were sick or injured or damaged. Sometimes these people were afraid. Sometimes they were angry. Sometimes they were just in pain.
And really, if you look beyond the physical act of pushing wheelchairs around, Tony’s real role was to lift people from their lowest lows and make them feel better about themselves. I cannot think of a greatness, more great. The memorable thing about him – the thing which endures – was that he never treated me like a patient. He laughed with me, he joked with me, he asked me questions about my old life – who comes up with names for horses, which one was my favourite horse, did my back hurt bent over like that all the time, did all jockeys have pretty girlfriends like I did? And in doing so, he created a sense of lightness in my being. Because he did something I yearned for, as one yearns for the first blush of colour after the stark whiteness of winter – he treated me like an ordinary man.
His role was small, but his heart was big. When we speak of angels on Earth, these are them.
Before I learnt to walk again, I had to learn to stand.
It’s hard to believe sometimes the stuff life throws at you. Yesterday I had been a twenty-eight-year-old hugely successful jockey. And now, I was teaching myself how to stand.
Tony helped me. He would hold my arms above my elbows and support me off the seat. No, it wasn’t support, really; what he’d do was haul me off the seat because I had no sensation in my legs. Even though I willed myself to, I couldn’t do much work. So I’d dangle there, my body in Tony’s hands, just trying to balance myself, just trying to get the movement going.
We did this every day, sometimes several times a day. Sometimes my legs would give way and I’d collapse back down within seconds. On these days, he would get emotional, tell me to go away and rest. I think he did this when the shadows of doubt crossed his mind, but he didn’t want me to see them.
I was unrelenting. Sometimes I’d be able to take a step or two. On these days, he would laugh and I would laugh with him. Because you have to laugh. These were the great days. When I took ten steps off the wheelchair for the first time, Tony still holding me, his arms doing the work of my legs, he let out a whoop of joy. ‘My God,’ he laughed. ‘The race-rider is walking.’
It was a start but it was not enough. I could stand. Now I wanted to walk. Fuck, I wanted to walk.
It was harder than I thought.
The house we were renting at the time in Newmarket was on Hamilton Hill, a private road with speed ramps along the length of it. I was taken for walks every day by Joanna, supporting me, holding my two arms while I attempted to balance myself on my walking sticks. We started off going for five-minute walks. By four minutes, I would feel shattered. Joanna begged me to be patient, to slow down, but I insisted on pushing myself, on doing more than I could. Sometimes, when family would come to visit, I would go for walks with them. My brother Eamon remembers having to physically lift my legs, one at a time, over each speed ramp – I couldn’t even get my foot that high. This was three months after the accident.
One time, I was on my walk with Joanna, and as we were approaching one of the ramps, about 100 metres away from the house, I looked up and saw a car coming towards us. In reality, perhaps the car was travelling a little faster than it should have been, not slowing down far enough in advance of the speed ramp, but certainly nothing too out of the ordinary. However, so damaged was my perception of distance, so damaged was my brain, that I thought the car was coming straight at me, that it was going to run me over, and I panicked.
My brain was signalling frantically and my body was failing to react. I wanted to move, but I couldn’t.
I had spent my entire professional life controlling an animal ten times my body weight, an animal that could bolt at any given moment. I had trained it to gallop at 35 mph, jump six feet in the air, clear a ditch, and control my balance through it all. And I had done this mostly with my legs.
Those same legs now gave way. I collapsed to the ground. I tried to muster the strength to lift myself up, but I couldn’t. Instead, I sat down on the kerb. Joanna sat next to me in silence, neither of us having the courage to speak. After what seemed like an endless stretch of time, she supported me back to the house. I lay on the bed, where my body started to vibrate, such was the shock to my brain as it realized just how incapable it
was of facilitating the faculties of my body. I needed to be sedated by a doctor, and worse, I was confined to my bed for two weeks.
But I wasn’t going to be scared off. I wanted to push everything to the limit. And beyond. The minute I could get myself up and out, I did. But this time, I wanted to go alone.
My plan was to slip out unnoticed when Joanna was out of sight. So I picked up my sticks and had barely taken one step forward when my legs buckled and I fell to the floor. It took some serious manoeuvring to pick myself up off the ground and on to my bed, and when I finally did, I was gasping from the exhaustion of it all.
I told nobody what had happened, but if anything was going to shake me up, this did. I was clutching to the belief that I could do whatever I wanted, but this was unforgiving stuff. And suddenly I realized – in cold, hard fact – exactly where I stood in this game I was playing. Who was I fooling? I was a twenty-eight-year-old brain-damaged man who couldn’t walk.
But there is soul in my story. And it wouldn’t give up. You do not give in to fear. If I was fooling myself, I would continue to fool myself. It was better than giving up. I was convinced that the next time I would do it.
Two days later, I told Joanna that I wanted to rest, and when she went outside my room and closed the door behind her, I got myself out of bed. I picked up my two sticks and with them, I picked up all the broken-down will I could muster. I slipped out the back door and into the fresh morning air. And with nobody holding my hands, I did it.
Ten weeks after my operation, fifteen months ahead of schedule, I did it.
I trumped FEAR with BELIEF.
I walked fifty yards. Fifty yards – just me and my sticks.
Then I stopped. Not from fear, but from hope. And I looked up at that perfectly blue sky and, for the first time since my accident, I saw light. That rainbow? It was mine.
My next step was getting off my medication. Strange as it might sound, instead of making me feel well, the drugs were making me feel unwell. They were shutting off my brain at a time when I wanted nothing more than to feel. It almost didn’t matter what I felt, I just wanted to feel. With the medication I felt nothing.
Centaur Page 19
