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- Herausgeber: The O'Brien Press
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
'Victory is a life well lived or a day enjoyed.' Limerick man Frank O'Mara had the athletics career most only dream of, competing for Ireland in three Olympic Games and breaking Irish and world records. After his retirement from running, he settled in the US with his family and made his way to the top of the telecoms industry. Then at age forty-eight, his life changed forever when he was diagnosed with early onset Parkinson's disease. The progression was rapid, causing severe muscle cramps, tremors, and eventually the inability to walk and at times even speak. In this inspiring memoir, Frank recounts his battle with Parkinson's. At first in denial, he eventually found the strength that made him successful as an athlete and in business – using determination, and humour to weather the worst phases of the disease. He learned to face each hurdle as he came to it: to bend, but not break. One man's life-affirming story of facing adversity with grace and courage.
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2‘I truly enjoyed this book – what a rollercoaster of emotions. Frank faces up to Parkinson’s by calling on every challenge he has had on the running track and in life. If you can rise to a challenge in one area, then you have a greater chance of dealing with any others that come your way. He accepts adversity head-on, always finding a way forward. We all need a stabiliser in life and Frank has shown throughout his life that when the ship’s about to keel over you need to take a deep breath and lean the other way.’
SONIA O’SULLIVAN, Olympic silver medallist, Irish middle-distance runner
‘His bravery, his fight to survive and the manner in which he’s dealt with adversity is simply awe-inspiring.’
EAMONN COGHLAN, Three-time Olympian, Irish middle-distance runner
‘Frank’s will and determination is parallel to our small, great nation, which continually punches above its weight. It takes an exceptional individual, coming from a tiny nation on the western periphery of Europe, to excel as a world-class middle-distance runner, as it’s a brutal and hard-fought field.
And if that wasn’t a superhuman effort enough, Frank’s resilience is tested once again when he is diagnosed with early onset Parkinson’s disease at just forty-eight years of age. His truly remarkable and humbling account of his struggles with Parkinson’s, and his undying will not to let it define him, make this a compelling read.’
SEÁN ÓG Ó hAILPÍN, Cork All-Ireland winning hurler and inter-county footballer
3‘I found it almost impossible to put down, beautifully written.’
STEVE OVETT, Olympic gold medallist, British middle-distance runner
‘Bend, Don’t Break is an inspirational book, the story of a man making the most of a life sentence. The hours I spent reading about [Frank’s] experience were up there with the best use of my time [this year].’
DAVID WALSH, The Sunday Times
‘I thoroughly recommend Frank’s book. As a fellow Parkinson’s sufferer, diagnosed in 1995, I learned a lot from Frank’s journey and perspective. Compelling reading.’
JOHN WALKER, Olympic gold medallist, New Zealand middle-distance runner
‘I loved Bend, Don’t Break. I appreciated Frank’s resilience, unqualified courage and servant leadership. This book was both life changing and reaffirming.’
KEVIN WHITE, Former Athletic Director of Notre Dame and Duke Universities
‘Frank O’Mara’s story is amazing, and he tells it with candour, humour and nuggets of wisdom we all can use.’
KATHY SULLIVAN, Scientist, astronaut, explorer
7Dedication
I wish I had never met a single neurologist or neurosurgeon, but fourteen years into this saga, I have the contact details for many. This book is dedicated to all those from whom I have received treatment or counsel, but especially to Drs Lee Archer, Erika Petersen and Rohit Dhall at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) in Little Rock, Arkansas and Dr Kendall Lee at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Without your care many of us would not have the tools to cope.8
Contents
Prologue
Sometimes you have to accept the unbelievable
The event that finally forced me to face reality didn’t happen in a doctor’s office or a hospital.
I didn’t feel the true weight of my diagnosis until my friend Gary Taylor came over to check on us at home.
Gary was aware that I’d been struggling with some sort of malady for months. He’d followed my effort to treat my issue as a sports injury. When my sports medicine specialist said it might be a little more complicated than that, I saw a spine-doctor to rule out spinal stenosis. Next up, the neurologist.
Gary knew I’d seen a neurologist earlier that week, but he didn’t know what, if anything, we’d learned.
The doctor had performed what seemed to be perfunctory tests, nothing elaborate: routine hand motions, finger tapping, foot stomping, and basic balance and gait tests. The exam only lasted about ten minutes. The doctor’s response had been quick and precise. ‘I’ve seen this often enough to recognise it. There is a slowness in your movement on the left side. I’m sorry to 12have to tell you this. You have Parkinson’s disease.’
I took his assessment with a degree of scepticism.
‘What baffles me is, I came in with a running problem and I’m leaving with an old person’s neurological disease,’ I said.
The doctor just shook his head, but I pressed on. ‘I’m only forty-eight years old.’
The doctor had then proposed a way I might postpone reality a little longer. ‘I suggest that you take a drug called Sinemet, which is used to treat the symptoms of the disease,’ he said. ‘If you see an improvement, then you know you have Parkinson’s. If you don’t, then you know I’m wrong.’
I didn’t know Dr Archer very well at that point, but I appreciated that he refrained from adding, ‘I think you’ll find that I am right.’ Since then, I have given him many opportunities to say, ‘I told you so,’ but he never has.
On my way home from the neurologist, I had called my wife, Patty, and rattled on about having no visible symptoms, so what improvement would I even look for? She humoured me, which only served as reinforcement in my confused mind. As I saw it, I was just trying to get to the bottom of a chronic injury that prevented me from running and was now beginning to interfere with my walking.
‘I don’t have a single symptom the doctor could point to,’ I persisted. ‘I don’t even have a tremor!’
As usual, Patty gave wise counsel. ‘Why don’t I pick up the medicine this afternoon, and you can give it a go like he’s suggested?’ she said. ‘Why don’t you try it?’
It was a few days later that Gary came by. I was upstairs when I heard him knock on the front door. I looked out the window and saw his truck parked out front. I thought he’d come by to discuss the startup of a running 13store. I wasn’t a great fan of retail, so I was a little anxious about the conversation. It took me a few minutes to finish what I was doing, then I headed down to the kitchen.
As I descended the stairs, I heard voices and what sounded like sobbing. I stopped for a moment to listen and heard Gary’s voice above my wife’s muffled crying. I listened a little while longer, but their hushed voices were indecipherable. I continued down to the landing and turned the corner into the kitchen. Neither Gary nor Patty had heard me coming and my sudden appearance surprised them.
I felt like I’d crashed the party. The look on both their faces said it all. I could tell they were guilty of some deceit. Gary had his arm around Patty. If I hadn’t known them both so well, I would have thought they were about to admit to a clandestine affair. I almost excused myself for interrupting. Confused, uncertain what emotion to deploy, I just peered at them. I will never forget the stricken looks on their faces.
Gary saw my perplexed stare and broke the silence. ‘God, I am so sorry, Frank!’
It was then I realised what they were trying to hide from me. Patty had told Gary about my doctor’s visit earlier in the week.
‘So, you heard the news, did you?’ I blurted out.
‘I did, and I feel awful for both of you,’ Gary replied.
Then he hugged me. It was one of those long hugs, the kind given when no words are readily available. Gary clinched tighter before he released me.
‘You’re strong,’ he said. ‘You got this.’
I wanted to impress on him my disbelief, to tell him how wrong the doctor must have been, how little evidence there was to support the diagnosis. After all, Gary was a runner and should know about injuries. But 14there was a firmness in his eyes and a resolve in his voice that caused me to repress the urge.
There was nothing else to do except cry. We sobbed.
Their faces shocked me to my core. It was especially horrifying to see my beautiful wife look so worried. She had accepted my disbelief because she knew it might take time to accept, let alone digest the news. On the other hand, she had no reason to disbelieve the doctor. That was the moment I knew I was facing a monstrous challenge. I couldn’t keep reality at bay any longer.
I had early onset Parkinson’s disease at the age of forty-eight.
Chapter 1
Come and get your love
Such is the all-consuming nature of this odious disease that it tries to define your life. Today, I am first and foremost a Parkinson’s warrior. My everyday schedule consists of one task above all others: do battle with the disease and slow its progression.
Before PD, I’d have described myself in the simplest terms as an athlete and a businessman, with a wonderful wife, three beloved sons – Jack, Colin and Harry – and friends all over the world.
After showing some mettle as a schoolboy runner in Limerick, Ireland, I earned a track and field scholarship to the University of Arkansas in 1978, part of a wave of Irish runners recruited by schools in the United States during the 1970s and 1980s. I took full advantage of the opportunity. My college track coach was a fellow Irishman, John McDonnell. John’s teams won forty-two National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) team titles, and he became the winningest coach in NCAA history. Back in 1979, he had yet to have a top-ten finish, but I can assure you that he was no less determined then than he was during the subsequent halcyon years. The expectation is that scholarship athletes perform at a superior level, but I took some time to hit my stride. I suffered from the oppressive heat when I arrived in Arkansas. That fall I ran straight into my first Indian summer. 16
Three weeks after our arrival in Fayetteville, fellow freshman Dave Taylor and I were especially struggling. It was boiling hot that afternoon and we were trailing home, a long way behind the others. We had been dripping wet, but strangely our skin began to dry up; we had learned over the last few weeks that dehydration meant trouble. By now we were walking, close to staggering, when suddenly we saw a sign for Malkowski Beverages. We were convinced it was a mirage, so we approached in disbelief. It turned out to be real. We could hear muffled voices and the hum of a forklift truck. There was activity – good. We stuck our heads through the open loading doors and were approached by a puzzled foreman. They found our accents difficult, and with slurry speech from dehydration, we were especially hard to follow. Fortunately, our body language said it all, and he rushed off to fetch us a cold drink.
Apparently, water could not be found; he returned instead with two cans of beer. We were in a beverage company alright, an alcoholic beverage company. What choice did we have? We happily drank the beer. It was liquid, and it was cold. Employees gathered around these two foreigners in nylon running shorts, shirts long ago discarded, allegedly speaking English. We must have been quite a sight. After a short rest and two empty cans, we began a slow, laborious slog back to campus. We may not have been inebriated, but we were close, and I have no doubt we appeared that way. Anyone who saw us in the last mile should have pulled over and checked on us. But runners were not a regular sight in Fayetteville in the seventies, let alone two semi-clad drunken runners.
Eventually, we appeared back in the locker room totally spent. Our teammates, showered and dressed, laughed and guffawed as we staggered straight into cold showers. We took our shoes off, but that was all. 17
I continued to struggle to establish momentum in my college athletics career for the first year, but I ultimately became the first University of Arkansas athlete to win an NCAA outdoor title during Coach McDonnell’s era and second ever after Clyde Scott, who won the 110-metre hurdles way back in 1948. I don’t know exactly why it was such a battle at first, other than that I was overworked the first few years and more than a little overwhelmed. But I kept plugging away and never lost my conviction.
My friends like to say I ‘retired’ from Arkansas in 1994, after eleven years in the classroom, with degrees in engineering, business and law. In my defence, I was a professional athlete; I had time on my hands.
Truth is, while I loved being an athlete and enjoyed a fair share of athletic success, I also faced an equal measure of disappointment. When I look back on my athletic career, I often think of the regrets, all the ‘could haves’ and ‘would haves’ that torment me. If I had only stayed closer to the leader at the Europeans in Stuttgart or if I had taken the lead from John Ngugi at the World Championships in Rome.
My fellow countrywoman and good friend, Sonia O’Sullivan, has asserted that it takes balance to be good, but you need to be unbalanced to be great. I think she means that your entire life must be devoted to sport. To be the best ever, you need a crazed application, a ‘nothingelse matters’ approach. I spent much of my athletic prime in the classroom. I didn’t feel at the time I was hedging my bets, but in hindsight it likely demonstrates that I wasn’t one hundred per cent committed. That would have required every waking hour to be dedicated to athletics. That wasn’t the case with me; I had exams to take and papers to write. Sonia asserts that the imbalance in her life made her the force she became. She reached the pinnacle of achievement and stayed there for the best part of a decade. I worked really 18hard and sacrificed more than most, but I knew there was a ton of living after athletics was over. I guess I had balance.
In my case, that dream was racing around a track anti-clockwise for four laps as quickly as possible. I had some great results over my career. I ran a mile in 3:51.06 in 1986 and I won two World Championships. But any sense of achievement was tarnished by the failures, many caused by injury.
In a sport measured absolutely by time, mine began to run out. Like many high-level athletes, in the end it was injuries – and all the wear and tear on the body – that gave me no choice but to retire.
So, I turned toward a career in long pants.
Fortunately, I was prepared, not only with a master’s in business administration (MBA) and a Juris Doctor (JD) degree in law, but also with an appetite for commercial enterprise. Business was in my DNA.
My father had been a serial entrepreneur who owned many small businesses. His last venture was a successful soft-drinks business, which he owned and operated in my hometown in the southwest of Ireland. I was brought up working holidays and weekends in the bottling plant. Initially, I fed the massive glass-bottle washing machine, a particularly arduous task. I graduated to driving the forklift, which I found easier than standing in front of the giant mouth of a washer as it ingested a dozen bottles at a time and disgorged steam at skin-sizzling temperatures. Eventually, I made sales calls in a pickup truck. On occasion, I made collections calls as well. I became well-versed in the vagaries of business.
In January of 1997, I joined Alltel, a wireline company founded in 1946 as Allied Telephone Company in Little Rock, Arkansas. My tenure began when the wireless industry was in its infancy. Over the next decade, Alltel became one of the largest wireless, or mobile network, carriers in the United 19States, with nearly fourteen million customers and $10 billion in annual revenue. In two years, I was a corporate officer leading the human resources team. Eventually, I found myself in charge of the customer service, sales, and marketing teams.
The wireless mobile network industry in the 2000s turned out to be a great outlet for someone hoping to keep his competitive juices flowing. I was soon swept up in a dogfight as Alltel took on the emerging players in the field. We drove hard to acquire new customers, launch new devices, and lower our customer churn rate. Every day, there were deadlines and sales quotas to meet, network parameters to account for, new technologies to review and select. It was a constant battle, with our successes and failures publicly reported quarterly to the markets. A poor result would rile analysts and shareholders and could have devastating consequences for share prices, much more catastrophic than losing a race.
6 May 2006. Ringing the Opening Bell on the NYSE to celebrate Alltel’s new logo.
20I enjoyed seeing our team ranked against the other players in the field, much like rankings in sports. I especially loved that Alltel wasn’t afraid to tussle with its bigger rivals, and that I wasn’t, either. When I’m honest about my athletics career, there were a couple of times when I may have shied away from challenging the biggest dogs. Not so in my business career.
And then, at the height of our success in the wireless industry, my life – the life I’d wanted, for the most part, and the life I’d made for myself – suddenly came under attack.
I’d like to tell you that I immediately identified my new challenge and faced it head on. That’s not what happened. Mine was a slow turning, a reluctant capitulation to reality.
My new life really began when I took that first dose of artificial dopamine, Sinemet. Even then, my Parkinson’s journey remained full of disbelief and distrust as I grasped at alternate theories, looking for an escape hatch. At times, I shut off common sense, wilfully ignored conventional wisdom, and disregarded the competence of others. Against hard evidence, I refused to accept my burden, my ever-growing list of disabilities. I would bend, but not break.
It has taken me a while to find some peace.
But I have found peace. And acceptance. I’ve found hope, tasted success, felt joy. I have also come to recognise the many important lessons I’d already learned from my life’s experiences before PD. What I had once seen as failures, especially my athletic disappointments, I have come to see in a very different light as a Parkinson’s warrior. Beyond the track, my experiences as a son and sibling, husband and father, employer and employee, strengthen my resolve and sharpen my focus against Parkinson’s daily. Skills developed before PD have become essential weapons in my current struggle. 21
Through Parkinson’s, I learned to have gratitude for the person I was, as well as the person I am becoming. The disease is now a big part of my life’s narrative, but it is not the only part. I came into this fight with the ability to focus on the process, to compartmentalise and not worry about the unknown, to never let despondency get a foothold.
The story of how I acquired those abilities and how I’ve applied them throughout my life is clearer to me now than ever before. And, in spite of Parkinson’s, my story isn’t finished yet.
The first indication that something nefarious had invaded my body appeared on 9 January 2009, the day after Verizon Wireless completed its purchase of Alltel Wireless, the largest mobile phone provider gobbling up the fifth largest. I should have taken heed of those early signs, but I was preoccupied with what I thought was a more imminent threat.
The team I worked with had done a tremendous job keeping Alltel relevant against the behemoths, AT&T and Verizon, whose advertising budgets were well over a billion dollars a year. We were a gritty underdog who wouldn’t stop nipping at their heels. We poked fun at the big guys in award-winning creative. And everything was going swimmingly. The Alltel sponsored Number 12 Dodge had won NASCAR’s biggest prize, the Daytona 500, the previous February. We had hosted Superbowl 39 at Alltel Stadium in Jacksonville, Florida. We were a national player in the industry.
Then, suddenly, the big guy took the ball, and the game was over. Our teams and our almost fourteen million customers were now part of Verizon Wireless. Mind you, it cost Verizon the princely sum of $28.1 billion.
I was the Chief Commercial Officer at Alltel, a job I relished. Unfortunately, Verizon already had more than one of me. I understood that the wireless giant preferred its own people. Still, I was disappointed with the 22treatment I received when my team and I visited the Verizon campus in New Jersey to brief the acquirers about operations. My onetime rivals could at least have feigned interest, but instead they displayed the touch of a blacksmith. After introductions and a brief overview of each department, we broke into smaller groups to discuss deal-related synergies. I was left with no peer, nobody to talk to. My counterparts just vanished.
So, I spent the day wandering around the venerable old campus, the former headquarters of AT&T.
Some months later in early January, the deal closed. A few of us were notified that our use-by date had expired, and we should pack up and exit. It was not easy strolling the floors that we once hurried on, saying goodbye to colleagues who had poured their heart and soul into the enterprise.
The day after I discovered time was up on my Alltel sojourn, I met a couple of friends, Mark Andersen and Gary Taylor, for a five-mile run on the river trail in Little Rock. The conversation was routine that morning. We chatted about the usual stuff: family and sport. Abruptly, Mark asked, ‘What’s going on with you this morning, Frank?’
Based on an assumption that he’d missed the Verizon news, my response was surly. ‘You don’t know about the Verizon deal closing? What rock have you been under?’
‘Of course I know about that,’ Mark replied, running a step or two behind me. ‘Wasn’t it in this morning’s paper? I was wondering what’s up with your leg?’
‘My leg? There’s nothing wrong with my leg.’
‘It looks like your left leg is about to catch your right calf; the swing-through seems to be catching in the hip area.’
He motioned to Gary to slow down and get behind me. 23
‘Gary, get back here and check this out.’
He obliged. I humoured them, still more distracted by the ramifications of the Verizon acquisition than concerned about a critique of what had been, after all, a serviceable running stride. They concurred that something was amiss, but said so gingerly. One didn’t need a PhD in psychology to determine I was irritable that morning.
A mile later, PD struck its first memorable blow. As my left leg moved forward, my left foot clashed with my right calf and almost brought me crashing down. It happened a couple of more times in quick succession. One of my companions, looking for a reprieve from a not exactly torrid pace, suggested that we stop and stretch. It seemed a realistic accommodation.
Although I was in my own little world, focused mostly on my uncooperative leg, I remember watching my friends’ warm breath being expelled into the crisp, frosty air. A minute later, the body heat from their shoulders and upper backs created the same effect. It was a gorgeous Saturday morning, typical of January in Arkansas, when cold weather from the north challenges warm weather from the gulf. A sharp bite of chilly weather battled a full sun, the sun doomed to suffer defeat. We returned to the run before conditions worsened.
My companions weren’t thrilled when my malady returned less than half a mile later. I requested another time out. They had to endure two further stops in the last kilometre. It reminded me of NASCAR, when a race car is forced to make a stop in the closing laps for a splash of gas.
‘That looks like a problem that you need to address,’ Mark said, when we arrived back at the parking lot.
‘It’s probably nothing,’ I responded. 24
We were all beginning to shiver as we stood there, barely sheltered from the icy wind by a minivan. I was in no frame of mind to indulge anyone’s proclivity for worry. With only the intention of ending the conversation so we could get in our cars and crank up the seat warmers, I added, ‘I’ll go see a physical therapist on Monday.’
As I drove off, I noticed that Gary and Mark were huddled together. Gary was sitting against the driver’s seat with the door open and his feet on the ground. He was giving Mark a proper listening to. Mark appeared animated, and there was no doubt he was doing the talking. Many years later, Gary told me that Mark had raised the spectre of a neurological cause to my just-revealed injury.
Mark is an MD whose advice I am inclined to heed; but on the topic of overuse injuries, I considered myself an expert. When I was competing, it seemed like I was recovering from or working around an injury most of the time – it’s part of a runner’s life. So, this issue just seemed like more of the same. I regarded it more as an inconvenience than a true injury. I saw a massage therapist every week. The problem persisted, introducing itself earlier and earlier in runs as time passed by. One day in early spring, it showed up when Patty and I were out walking not far from our home in Little Rock.
There was a clear sky that morning, a clear sky that might last another week or so, before the earth and every living thing would be covered in a grimy layer of yellow, menacing pollen. There were times when you could see clouds of it billowing through the air. Anything that is stationary for even a moment will be doused in this sneeze-inducing stuff, rendering outside activity next to impossible for the majority of April. The cleanup from this mess must cost households millions across the South. It certainly keeps 25the car washes busy.
Patty could have been a professional walker. She sets an enviable pace, one that requires a degree of effort. It’s exercise to her, not leisure. If you’re not careful, she’ll gain a step on you … and then a step becomes two. About halfway through our walk, I fell two steps behind her … and then three. That’s when it struck: the identical sensation I had experienced in my runs. My left leg refused to play its role, to operate within the plane of motion required. As a result, my left foot hit my right calf when that leg was pulling through and my right leg was planted.
I stopped and called to Patty, ‘Give me a moment to see if I can stretch this problem out.’ Patty slowed to a stop and waited.
‘Do you think this is the same issue you have running?’ she asked.
This was worrisome. The problem had progressed in my running and was now manifest in my walking.
‘Maybe it’s a fluke,’ I replied. ‘If it returns after this stretch, we’ll know it’s not a fluke.’
Patty will have been my wife for thirty-three years come October. She says our anniversary is October 6 or 7. I can’t remember. I consider the exact date to be irrelevant: we chose the first Saturday in October as our wedding day, so we should observe the first Saturday as the day. It’s far easier to remember and celebrate. Thankfully, we can disagree without irritating one another.
I first saw Patty in church, while we were both undergraduates at the University of Arkansas. Jokingly, a friend had volunteered me to be an altar boy. It was sheer providence that Patty was in church that day and saw me on the altar. Although I had no idea who she was or how to meet her, I remained keenly interested from afar. Then, with approximately a week of 26school remaining, I spotted her walking into a sorority house on campus. I immediately called a classmate, Molly Inhofe, who was a member of that sorority and asked if she knew the mystery girl. Not only did Molly know her, they were roommates.
16 October 1985. With Patty Olberts shortly after we began dating.
With an introduction from Molly, I asked Patty out that weekend. She demurred; said she was all booked. The only time she could fit me in was Thursday … for lunch. There’d be no primetime airing for me.
I thought we had a great time at lunch, convinced that I’d met the woman I would marry. Patty didn’t leap to the same conclusion. That evening, I went to a Razorback baseball game, only to see my future wife out on a date. She caught my eye for a second and immediately turned away without even a hint of a smile.
But I was not discouraged. I wrote to her numerous times from various countries that summer. I even sent her a postcard from Iceland in a vain 27attempt to woo her. She was impressed enough to respond, once. Still, I wasn’t discouraged.
The next fall, Patty, Molly, and I were all in business school together. Finally, with Molly’s endorsement, I charmed Patty into dating me. I know she has loved me unconditionally since, albeit with me fifth in line after our three sons and our Goldendoodle.
I would need several volumes more to enumerate all the things I love about Patty, but here are an important few: I love how pragmatic she is, and how devoted she is to family. She is amazingly even-keeled and seems not to suffer mood swings. She doesn’t play games or keep score.
Once, when my Alltel team and I were choosing an advertising agency, one of the competing agencies submitted an idea centred on the theme of love. It went something like, ‘We so love our customers that we provide them (insert a relevant value proposition) and in return our customers love us.’ The agency suggested we license the seventies hit song by Redbone called ‘Come and Get Your Love.’ Of all the ideas the agencies pitched, this was the one favoured by the marketing team. I was sceptical, however. I felt that the term ‘love’ was overused, particularly in the United States. I noted, for example, that people use ‘love you’ as a salutation at the end of phone calls, rendering the words, in most contexts, almost meaningless.
When several of us met to choose the winning agency, someone challenged me to call my wife and end the call with, ‘Love you.’ I was up for the challenge. I needed to rid myself of doubt about the favoured campaign, get over my reticence. So, I hit #1 on speed dial and within three rings, Patty picked up. I made some small talk, tried to sound casual, but the other people in the room could tell I was labouring. I had to talk long enough to make ‘Love you’ sound like a throwaway comment. I made up something 28innocuous about a scheduling issue, then said, ‘I have to run.’
‘Alright. See you tonight then,’ Patty responded.
After a long, awkward pause, I tried to recover, adding, ‘hmmm, well, there’s one more thing I want to tell you …’
‘Go on then.’
‘Love you,’ I suddenly blurted out.
‘Is there something wrong with you?’ Patty replied, sounding more annoyed than perplexed.
‘No, nothing wrong, I was just thinking … I’ll just tell you tonight.’
‘Alright, see you tonight.’
‘Bye.’
I looked around the room. ‘That went about how I expected,’ I said, as my colleagues shook their heads. My teammates still favoured the Redbone idea, and I was wise enough to discount my own perspective. We chose the Love campaign, which turned out to be wildly successful.
Maybe Patty and I weren’t the proper test sample to gauge the efficacy of an ad campaign, but we have always been a team. We are united, without conflict or agenda. We don’t take each other’s affection for granted. I love Patty more today than when I first met her, cherishing every moment we have spent together.
Given our understanding, when Patty witnessed my problem walking that early spring day, her concern began to heighten my own sense of alarm. Patty is also an exercise fiend, always has been. I knew that she understood the nature of injuries and the attendant frustrations of trying to play through them. The problem flared up at least twice more on that walk. Each time, Patty expressed her concern.
As you might have guessed, over the course of the coming months, my 29walking deteriorated in a similar gradual manner to my loss of running function. The more trouble I had, the more Patty urged me to see a doctor. Specifically, she suggested that I see a spine specialist.
Through sheer bull headedness and lots of delusion, I ignored all advice and continued to treat the issue as a soft tissue injury. Meanwhile, I lived on the hope that, when I got home to Ireland that summer, the Irish athletics medical staff would finally sort this thing out, just as they’d always done.
Chapter 2
Play the role as scripted
We arrived in Ireland in late June. I made a beeline for my friend Gerard Hartmann’s home.
Gerard is a therapist of some renown, having participated as a member of the Irish and British medical staffs at six Olympic Games. In addition to amazingly powerful hands and a propensity for digging into muscle tissue to such a degree that I always wished I’d had a wooden spoon to bite down on, he also has an uncanny sixth sense.
In my running career, Gerard rescued my season on numerous occasions. When the time came, his opinion deeply influenced my decision to retire. Despite having achieved the qualifying time for the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, I suffered from chronic leg pain on the left side caused by disc degeneration. By then I had run more than fifty thousand miles and the constant compression had worn out the lumbar vertebrae. When Gerard saw my MRI and discussed my skeletal system with orthopaedic doctors at the University of Florida, he gave it to me straight, recommending retirement.
Gerard and I have known each other since we were rivals in underage athletics in Ireland, then college students together at the University of Arkansas. We have both suffered through many injuries; together, we’ve 31tried all sorts of crazy schemes to get better, no matter how harebrained.
The maddest treatment Ger and I ever embraced was under the hands of a German therapist living on a lake in County Galway. We were home on Christmas break, both of us with knee injuries – the overuse kind that, no matter what you do, seem to take six to eight weeks to remedy. You could probably do nothing and get the same results, but you feel better about yourself if you’re doing something – even if it only resembles therapy.
Ger discovered the German first, made the trip to Galway and reported when he got back.
‘I went to Galway to see this therapist on Friday,’ his pitch began.
‘Well, what did you make of him?’
‘You’ll have to keep an open mind, but he may be onto something.’
‘Why? What does he do that’s so interesting?’
I should have read between the lines, but you cling to hope that the oddest treatment can be super effective.
‘It’s a bit strange. He does underwater massage, and he uses the tip of a drumstick,’ Ger said. He sounded tentative.
‘Is it worth my while driving up there? Have you seen any improvement?’
‘You definitely should give him a shot.’ Before I could respond, he added, ‘I booked you an hour after my session on Monday.’
Monday arrived and Ger picked me up in his father’s car. He had been cross-training that morning, as had I: he in the pool; me risking the country roads on a bicycle. Ger replayed the goings-on from the previous Friday visit to the German as we drove.
As I listened, any seed of doubt should have germinated; instead, wildflowers of hope bloomed: this could be just crazy enough to work!
We pulled into a drive, the gravel crunching under our tyres. There were 32a few dogs at the German’s, and each inspired fear – particularly one who had been asleep under an upturned sailboat in the yard. We rolled to a stop. Only then could we appreciate the panic-inducing quality of their barks. Fortunately, the dogs’ exultations alerted the German, who came to the side door and motioned us to come on in. He had that look that all owners of vicious dogs have, one that says, ‘my dog is friendly’, never mind the scary snarling.
I rolled down the window and asked, ‘Can you put the dogs up, please?’
He said something in broken English with a thick-as-treacle German accent. I grasped the final statement: ‘Alles GUT.’
I turned to Ger. Before I could complain, he said, ‘They will jump on you, but you’ll be fine.’
‘Easy for you to say. You have German shepherds at home.’ Finally, the doctor’s wife appeared and coaxed the excited creatures into the house. What a relief!
The doctor was friendly, eager to be of assistance. He quickly divined that I had patellar tendonitis – sometimes known as ‘jumper’s knee’, this is an overuse injury resulting in inflammation of the tendon that connects the knee to the shin. Pretty standard to this point; then it took a turn toward strangeness. He asked me to sit on the treatment table, reached into a drawer and extracted a polished, wooden drumstick from a wide selection. He inspected the tip. He discarded his first selection and instead chose a stick with a broader tip and smiled ruefully. The German directed me to sit back on the table with my leg extended and he slowly applied the end of the drum to the lower quad muscles, especially the V-shaped muscle, vastus intermedius, between the vastus lateralis and vastus medialis. He went after it hard, pushing the unforgiving, sharp end of the drumstick 33deep into the tissue.
This modality was either revolutionary or highly foolish. But when you have been injured as often as I have been, desperation can take hold. When you watch your peers compete in your absence, you are prepared to endure a certain degree of pain to get back to competition.
Turns out, the German had more madness in store for me. He asked me to enter his hydro treatment room. This steamy room, with windows clouded in perspiration, was the centrepiece of the treatment protocol. Amid the dense fog hanging over the room, a large, raised hot tub held water that would hardly qualify as lukewarm. It was downright cool. The German instructed me to climb in the tub, then produced what looked like a firehose – a two-inch thick, not-your-garden-variety type hose – and attached it to a huge tap, the likes of which I’d never seen. Then he placed the hose in the tub, while adjusting the volume on the massive tap.
Suddenly, he applied the powerful stream of water to my quad. The fierce pressure from the hose pinned my leg to the bottom of the tub. He adjusted the impact by moving the mouth of the hose further away from my skin, all the time using a massage-type motion. I constantly had to brace myself or I would tumble around like clothes in a dryer. The pressure left my skin with an irritated sensation.
This was invasive treatment, I thought: just unusual enough that it may work. So, when the German suggested I make another appointment, I gladly acquiesced. Both Gerard and I returned on a couple of occasions but, sadly, saw little improvement. The episode illustrates how desperate we runners get as the weeks of injury and not training spin by.
Now, years past my athletic prime and facing new physical challenges, I took great comfort knowing I was in the hands of someone who understood 34the tribulations of injury and the paucity of treatment options. Gerard gave me quite a going-over that morning. When he completed the evaluation, he instructed me to get dressed and said he would be right back. In a short time, he returned, carrying two cups of tea. We sat down at a small table in his therapy room. Small, but tidy. Gerard is fastidious about organisation. He then offered the following, ‘I see nothing wrong with your soft tissue. Plenty of flaccidity.’
‘What about a hip impingement or spinal issues? Remember, I had that L4 and L5 issue when I ran,’ I replied.
It was Gerard, after all, who had diagnosed the disc issue in my lower spine that led ultimately to my retirement from athletics. But here, he saw no connection.
‘In my opinion there is nothing wrong with your skeletal or muscular systems. It’s probably neurological. I’ll send you to a sports specialist at the Santry Sports Surgery Clinic.’
This was the first mention of a neurological possibility.
Two weeks later, I found myself walking around Ireland’s capital in a haze, dejected, with the sports doctor’s concise verdict playing over and over in my mind, ‘You have a serious issue in the basal ganglia area.’
The doctor had focused primarily on my balance. He instructed me to perform one-legged sitting squats, with my back against a wall. As I slid up and down the wall, my weight-bearing leg began to quiver. The quivering gradually spread to my unloaded leg, then to my arms. Before long, my body was shaking as if I were on an Irish beach in summer. The doctor made no comment, but ordered an MRI and sent me to the imaging department. After reviewing the images, he made his declaration: something neurological, involving the basal ganglia family. 35
When the words came out of the doctor’s mouth, they initially didn’t mean much to me. At that stage of my life, I was still unfamiliar with the geography of the brain, so I asked, ‘What kind of conditions are associated with the basal … whatever you called it?’
His response described a range of scary possibilities: ‘It could be anything from Tourette’s Syndrome to ALS – motor neurone disease.’
Anchored at one end by certain death, and at the other end of the range of possibilities – a lifetime of embarrassing tics and inappropriate comments – seemed like a walk in the park. And of course, there were the wide-open plains in between …
The doctor couldn’t be more precise. Although he was one of the most highly respected exercise and sports medicine physicians in the world, he was not a neurologist. I had hedged my bets a little, purposely choosing a sports doctor in a foolhardy effort to either delay a bad diagnosis or, more incredibly, influence the diagnosis itself. So badly had I wanted to avoid anything more serious than simple tendonitis.
I never saw that doctor again, save a few glimpses of him on television, treating members of the Irish rugby team. It’s odd how strangers can play such pivotal roles in our lives.
I left his office bewildered. My train back to Limerick departed at 5:40, but instead of heading in the direction of Heuston Station, I wandered around Dublin aimlessly. I was alone and I was afraid. Truth is, no matter who cares about you, a battle for your health is very personal, and often lonely. To be sure, you would be absolutely lost without people who love you, many of whom would willingly swap places, but the struggle is ultimately yours and yours alone.
So, I meandered around the Fair City until I found myself sitting on the 36
