When everything changes
By Ewan McKenna

Mark McGovern is finally back at home in Fermanagh, having almost lost his life playing Gaelic football in America. But the 23-year-old’s tale is not one with a storybook happy ending.

“On a future without football...

Football was such a big part of my life and it was taken away from me. When championship comes around and I can’t play and I can’t train with the Belcoo team, I don’t know what way I’ll be. Maybe then I’ll go outside and scream at the top of my voice.
Football was a huge part of Mark McGovern’s life prior to his injury: ‘I stopped nights out and holidays with my girlfriend to play football, and that’s gone forever.’

In the blink of an eye, they’d decided. It was one of those bleak, January evenings where damp and darkness pours into every crevasse and there’s no escaping the sense that there must be something better out there. Little wonder then, that they managed to convince each other they’d had enough of Ireland and Fermanagh and Belcoo, for a while at least. It would take quite a chunk of organising but the idea of a summer playing GAA in America got them through the rut of the months that followed. Best friends in their roaring 20s without a ball or chain between them, there were only looking forward.

Mark McGovern had lined out for his county in the McKenna Cup but there wasn’t enough playing time to stop him seeing the world. Besides, he’d got a taste for the exotic after a few months spent in Boston and now his friends, Emmet Scollan and Ciarán Flaherty, wanted in on that life too. They tested the waters in New York but having already lived on the east coast, McGovern aimed to fulfil an ambition and tick by on Pacific time.

By June, what began as a harebrained idea in the depths of winter saw the three of them pull on the yellow jerseys of the Ulster club in a dressing room in San Francisco.

So common is it that story, that it could be your nephew, your brother, your son, you. Consider that for a moment because in blink of an eye, McGovern was cleaned out off the ball. Within two bleak days his entire family were at his bedside, wishing for nothing more than the blink of his eye to let them know there was life still in him as he lay in a coma.

For five weeks they prayed something was going on in his head but all he knew were the dreams. Later he was told most people who’ve come out of comas admit to seeing sharks but he had other recollections too. One was of him on a ferry from Thailand to the States. For days he seemed to be stuck in Paris trying to get to his family above on deck but he was trapped in a car in the hold of the ship along with a nurse. Another saw him buy a dog in Jollyes pet shop in Enniskillen. When he tried to walk out the door having been handed two animals in a bag, the owner told him he couldn’t leave and threw him into a giant kennel. Again, he was trapped.

Now, six months on, and it’s another of those bleak evenings, just like the one when McGovern made a call that changed everything. He’s sitting on the couch back home, surrounded by his sisters Grace, Connie and Helen and his parents Danny and Josie. He could tell the public what they want to hear. That it’s all in the past. That everything is back to normal. That the miracle story has a happy ending and you can clap the book closed and put it back on the shelf, safe in the knowledge that things always work out for the best.

Problem is, they don’t. That he’s alive is remarkable but there are times when he doesn’t feel like the good news story he’s been portrayed as.

"I wished Christmas could be skipped because it’s never going to be like it used to be," he says, his frustration hidden behind a cushion-soft voice. "A few weeks ago I was at a family occasion and I had to go home early because of the disco lights. Its small things like that, only they aren’t small because I’m a 23-year-old. And it’s difficult for my family to see the way I am.

"Then there’s football. Not so long ago it was my life. I stopped nights out and holidays with my girlfriend to play football and that’s gone forever. I can’t take care of my body like I used to. I was supposed to come back and go to England looking for a job because I’d done my degree. I wanted to work there and I feel now that aim is gone.

"Sometimes I wonder what’ll happen. I get into dazes. Once my eye catches something I’ll spend three or four minutes staring at it before I snap out of it. I tell myself to stop but that doesn’t work. I think I actually enjoy it sometimes. When I’m talking, a word won’t come and I’ll have to use four or five words to explain it. It could be something so simple and I end up relying on the person beside me to think of it. I need to take a nap in the day.

"So I’m worried about finding a company that will take me on and give me a fair shot. At times I feel lost even though I know I’m lucky to still be here."

Sometimes the most traumatic begins with the most mundane. In the early hours of June 26, just feet from where we now sit, the phone in the hall started to ring. The house was unusually full. Connie’s fiancé was on a stag so her and sister Grace had decided to spend the day looking at wedding dresses and the night back home with their parents. It was Connie that got up to answer and she’d a feeling it was America calling.

"I thought they’d be out having a few drinks, decided to get in touch and see what the craic was, not thinking of the time difference. So I knew it was him." But in truth she knew nothing.

Her brother had arrived in San Francisco just five days earlier and spent his time settling in. He bought sheets for his bed, towels for the bathroom and went to Safeway with six flatmates to stock up on supplies. On Tuesday and Thursday there was training. On Friday he played golf with his football manager. On Saturday he went to the newly refurbished Treasure Island GAA grounds for his debut.

"We bought loads of beer for the Saturday night because we knew we’d be going out and the holiday would truly begin," he says.

"I couldn’t wait because the match was going so well. I was getting forward from wing-back all the time. But at half-time the manager said to go to midfield."

There he was picked up by Patrick Power, an American with an Irish father, who from the off "was getting stuck in and having a few words. Next thing the half was only four minutes old and we got the ball and broke out of defence. I was looking to get into space and was running up the side of the pitch all by myself. After that I don’t remember. Not a thing. It’s just a blur."

Later in interviews, Professor Shirley Stiver, a neurosurgeon at San Francisco General Hospital suggested: "The kind of injury that Mark has is deep inside the brain. It’s the kind of injury that we see when someone has a high speed motor vehicle accident, like crashing at 60-miles an hour and the car rolls over. Many times similar patients with a very similar neurological exam or x-ray picture would have died on the scene."

His friend and clubmate Emmet Scollan saw a player go down but wasn’t sure until he trotted over to his manager. "Big Mark took a blow," was the news on the line but no one realised how bad it was.

"I ran over and he kept going into seizures and there was blood frothing at his mouth," says Scollan.

"He was like that for about 20 minutes and a nurse came down from the crowd and an ambulance came. It was scary and obvious it was more than someone being knocked out. Next thing I was in the front of the ambulance in the boots and all and I looked in the back to see, because I kept thinking the paramedics would know what to do and they’d bring him around no bother.

"But they didn’t. They were cutting up his jersey and I thought they were getting a defibrillator out. When we got to the hospital, a social worker was asking questions about him and getting details. The doctors said it was bad, worse than what we thought, that he might not make it through the night. An Irish nurse there, she told me to ring his home. That was daunting. No one answered first time, so I tried again and Connie picked up."

Connie recalled: "He was saying, ‘It’s alright, it’s alright, Mark’s had an accident but you need to come over as soon as possible’.

"I went out to the patio and was walking around and around but something came over me and I said ‘You need to be calm, you need to think positive, this child is going to be fine’. At that stage Grace had taken the phone off me because I was trying to keep Mammy calm. We were scared to wake Daddy up because we thought he’d have a heart attack. Mammy is bad, if you get a cut on your finger she’ll tell you to get white bread and hot water because you could get gangrene. But Daddy is worse again when it comes to us."

When Grace saw her sister looping in lost circles, she knew something and someone was wrong. But she didn’t know who and presumed it was bad news about Connie’s fiancé on the stag do.

"She told me, ‘No, it’s the child’," says Grace. "I took the phone and spoke to Emmet, the priest, the doctor. We had to ring our cousin to get her up here to stay with Mammy because she was rocking, literally, saying ‘No, no, no, no, no’. Then I rang Helen and Mark’s girlfriend. The house was full at seven in the morning. The cars were lined up like it was a removal."

At that moment, the chances were there’d be one before long.

At times like that it’s easy to forget the little details but Grace went straight for the computer. "Don’t even go there," she smiles now when you ask about flights. With company clearance needed for large credit card transactions, and with bookings to America unattainable within 24 hours of take-off, it took half a day of phone calls to get Connie and their parents on a flight that evening from Belfast via London while the rest of them left the next day with New York as an extra stop.

"I don’t really remember the flight," says Mark’s mother, Josie. "But when we landed we were asked to go to the rear of the plane and there was a police escort. They brought us through immigration to the hospital. And there he was lying. He looked normal, his face was tanned."

Connie interjected: "Except they had to shave the side of his head and put a brain monitor on it.

"There was this big tube sticking out of his head, like an antenna. It was scary, but to look at his wee face, it was like he was himself."

He wasn’t. An experienced radiologist even asked what blunt object he’d been struck with. "But I think the low point for all of us was that day we got the MRI results," recalls his father, Danny. "The only two sentences I can remember are, ‘He’ll never be the same again’ and ‘He may never get home’."

But for every trough there was a peak and it was leading neurosurgeon Geoff Manley, who had previously worked on congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords after a failed assassination attempt, that provided the greatest cause for optimism.

"He was so relaxed," says Connie. "Our uncle Bernard said there’s one question we all wanted to ask but were afraid to. ‘Is he on death’s doorstep?’ But Manley was really reassuring. He said, ‘Right now, no. He is in an induced coma. He is going to get pneumonia. But we have the technology and expertise. We have a lot of pluses already because he’s young, fit, strong and he’s never abused his body. It’s going to be an emotional rollercoaster for you, a medical one for him. But he’s in the best place and you’ll just have to wait’."

And they did wait. For five weeks they lived out of San Francisco General, rarely bothering to head for a house they’d rented 20 minutes away. It’s a sign of what they were going through that Grace calling off her October wedding seemed no bigger a deal than the meals they ate day and night in the hospital canteen. Hardly a great surprise though when you consider that at one stage Mark was put on 90% oxygen just to keep him alive. He had liver trouble. A heart murmur. The pneumonia Manley said would be inevitable. Indeed, weeks into the ordeal staff reckoned he was 95% gone and there was a debate whether or not to introduce his body to a Rotaprone bed.

"The ICU team did not want to put him on this because they said it would cause more damage to his brain," remembers Grace. "But this Professor Shirley Stiver, she said he needs it because he’ll be 100% gone very soon. Some people take to it, others don’t. They had to strap him in upside-down for seven hours at a time and they’d rotate him. And he was getting better, they were saying how well he could oxygenate on his own.

"But for me that bed was the scariest of the lot. He got blisters all over his body. He was on it for 10 days and whilst upside-down I went to rub his shoulder one time and his lip was inches long. So swollen. His eyes. His face. When they turned him back up they put ice all over him to keep the swelling down, so much that we couldn’t actually see him properly. It was just horrible but those days were crucial because at one point we were told he was the sickest patient in the hospital."

There’s no eureka moment when you wake from a coma and wonder where you are and what happened. Instead, there’s a day when a finger moves. Then there’s a day when a toe comes back to life. Eventually the McGovern family noticed that if you looked closely at Mark’s eyes, they were trying to follow people around the room. All he can remember is that at first he thought he came out of an operation but no one wanted to tell him the full story. In fact the closest he got was when some teammates from the Ulster club visited and said he’d picked up an injury in the game but he was on the mend.

Step by step is an exaggeration. For a while it was blink by blink. Seven weeks after the off-the-ball tackle, two nurses came into his room and sat him up.

"His head just dropped, he couldn’t even hold it up," says Helen. "Later he was lying there, and there was a jersey hanging up and he clawed at it. And then pulled at his nighty to get it off him. We put the jersey on him. He was improving but a few days on, he took two steps but his entire side was described to us by doctors as being like a stroke patient."

Grace added: "It’s a simple thing but when he first went into rehab he couldn’t lift his toothbrush.

"Two weeks later he could do that himself. It was all about little victories. We had to feed him for a while. The fork would just fall with the shake in his hand. But there were so many wee, small treats. He lifted the yoghurt spoon one day, took too much and wiped the excess off on the carton. That was amazing to see."

His voice was the last to come back. When he started to make ‘uh’ and ‘ah’ noises, therapists told him he could use his voice so do use it.

"Up to that," laughs Connie, "I’d come in and say, ‘It’s alright Mark, you’d a wee tube down your throat and your vocal chords are scarred. They’re waiting for them to heal’. When he did come around he said, ‘It was so annoying, I was mad to tell you that I didn’t have a sore throat’."

Mark said: "But there were times I just couldn’t talk. It was getting to the stage where I didn’t know what was happening. It was seriously frustrating because I had to signal when I wanted a drink. The family used to leave about 10 because they had to get everyone out of ICU. I was in the place on my own and I couldn’t go to sleep.

"When they left I was staring at the roof. I couldn’t even ask the nurse for their contact numbers because I couldn’t talk. I had to wake up at six for a nurse coming to take my vitals and I could never get back to sleep so I’d be waiting for them to come. One morning I just broke down crying. I didn’t want the nurses to see me so I tried to hide it under my pillow. My girlfriend Jessica came in that morning and I broke down."

Then one evening Grace told her brother that they were going and he whispered. "Can I’ve your telephone number?" "Do you want us to stay." "Yes." And after that the hospital made exceptions when it came to visiting hours.

"But not being able to walk was worse," continues Mark. "The toilet was only about four steps away but the nurse always had to help me. Then they were leaving bottles in the bed for me to go in and there were mornings I’d wake up and the bed was wet.

"There was a time Jessica was there with me. I told her I wanted to go to the toilet but I didn’t want any nurse to come in. So she took me. I was missing the toilet and I got tissues and I wanted to clean it all up. Next thing I slipped and my head hit off the wall and I was lying there on the ground. She was roaring ‘nurse, nurse’. These two nurses burst through the door and I’m there with my pyjamas around my ankles and I just thought, ‘Ah God’."

That was the first day he ever felt frustration towards Patrick Power.

But as August fluttered by, there were others. When Grace and Connie took him around the wards to see daylight in a wheelchair he demanded he go back to the solitude of his room. People seeing him that way made him feel subhuman. The next week the nurses arrived with a Zimmer frame.

"When I got out of hospital and into intensive rehab, it was just more frustration. They gave me a ball and asked me to solo it after finding out the essential skills of football. I threw the ball up and it bounced off my foot and ran away. They asked me to kick it and it just rolled on the ground.

"This American girl was showing me what to do and I was thinking, ‘Hold on a minute, an American is soloing it in front of me and I can barely hold onto a ball’."

Yet, by October, he was in a local park with Grace and Helen and asked to go for a jog. They agreed, but he took off ahead of them and when they finally caught up with him, he was on the ground doing pushups. He was ready to come home.

Some things you should know. Had it not been for what they’d gone through across the summer, the journey back to Belcoo might have seemed an ordeal. With the full affects of cabin pressure on brain injuries still not totally understood, they took no risks. So Mark, Jessica, Emmet, Grace, Helen, Danny and Josie got a four-day train from San Francisco to New York with just one five-hour stop in Chicago along the way. From there they took a boat for seven days to Southampton, followed by a train to London, then onto Holyhead, a ferry to Dublin before a drive back to Fermanagh. There waiting at the door was Connie.

She’d left in August, but only after asking her brother for permission, because there was so much to sort out. Little things they took for granted before, like the fact there was a bath tub in their toilet which had to be converted into a wet room for safety. When she saw her brother standing there she broke down crying.

"It was strange," remembers Mark. "At one stage I thought I’d never see the front door or small things like the garden."

There are other things you should know too. Having missed his birthday, Mark’s mother made an exception and finally allowed him to get a dog. She’s only a couple of months old but is called Shirley after the professor who helped save his life. As for the support, it’s been immense. Martin McGuinness visited the family in America and Ulster Unionist leader Tom Elliot wrote them a latter. Mickey Harte and Stephen O’Neill called. Neil Lennon and Usain Bolt tweeted. Rory McIlroy and Graeme McDowell sent memorabilia. Signed jerseys arrived from Dublin and Kildare, Tyrone and Crossmaglen, from Setanta Ó hAilpín in Australia and Neill McGinn and Patrick McCourt at Celtic. Glasgow Rangers sent a signed jersey.

Yet, if there’s an element of this that’s sits almost as uneasy as the incident itself, it’s this.

Right now, the family are $1.1m (€840,000) in debt and it’s little wonder when you consider that the Rotaprone bed that saved Mark’s life cost $14,000 (€10,700) a day. His father Danny sits forward to talk.

"In the end the GAA helped us out as regards financial assistance but before that they never contacted us for the first four to five weeks," he sighs. "Also, had the BBC not come over and done a story would you have changed the rules regarding insurance?"

There are issues too regarding the fact the maximum ban that could be handed down to Power — who is at the centre of an ongoing police investigation in California — was 96 weeks.

"You give an official a slap in the arse, you are gone for life," says Mark. "I was nearly killed and he gets 96 weeks. I’m good at moving on but I’ll stand in front of those changing rooms if they let him play again. I don’t want him to touch an O’Neill’s ball again. Football was such a big part of my life and it was taken away from me."

It’s hardly a surprise that McGovern’s family struggle to forgive Patrick Power for what he’s put them through, but you ask Mark himself about it and there’s a refreshing answer.

"The position I’m in now, other than him playing football again, I feel nothing against him really. I feel sorry for him being that type of person and he’s now in a far worse position than me. I’m back on my feet and he has to live with this.

"But when championship comes around and I can’t play and I can’t train with the Belcoo team, I don’t know what way I’ll be. Maybe then I’ll go outside and scream at the top of my voice. When I can’t do stuff that I could before, it will hurt but I have to forgive him."

Those words cause his sisters to smile because in the blink of an eye, Mark McGovern is just like the brother they used to know before all of this. "That says an awful lot about him," concludes Grace. "He’s so strong and this will never get the better of him. Ever."

To assist Mark McGovern and his family, you can make a donation by contacting the following address: The Mark McGovern Support Fund, Belcoo, Co Fermanagh.

This appeared in the printed version of the Irish Examiner Saturday, December 31, 2011