THE last time Kevin McCloy’s heart stopped was the first time he’d been awake to experience it since the night he collapsed on the pitch at Owenbeg.
August 13, 2014 - seven years ago tomorrow. Witnessing it once was plenty. Experiencing it once was once too often.
But in the time that has passed since, McCloy has had five further cardiac arrests.
For the first four years, nothing. And for the last year-and-a-half, nothing again. But in the 18 months that coincided with building the new family home, the 2007 Allstar full-back’s implanted defibrillator and pacemaker were called upon to save his life five times.
The last time, he could feel it happening.
“I said to Cathy [his wife] ‘I’m away here’. I could feel my eyes starting to spin. Down I go on the sofa.
“When the defib brought me around, her and my father-in-law were shaking me. It takes a certain time to charge to give you the shock.
“That’s a year-and-a-half ago. I was just finishing building the house at the time. I had five cardiac arrests in the space of building the house, over that year-and-a-half.”
The other four happened when he was asleep. The first time, he woke up in a sweat and thought something was wrong, but put it down to a bad dream.
“I got the phonecall that morning I went down to set the first footing block on the foundation. I couldn’t believe it. We’d set it, took the photograph and gone back up the lane when I got the phonecall to tell me to come straight to the Royal.
“It was nearly like going through the whole thing again. I had to go into hospital for a substantial amount of time, to see what had set it off. That can be fairly sore on the head to go through it all again.
“When it happens, you’re gone for about 30 seconds and the defib brings you around.
“You sort of get used to it and get on with life again. You learn to live with it, let’s say.”
It’s all a very different experience now than that first night in Owenbeg.
For almost eight minutes, sisters Kathryn and Niamh Monaghan, Magherafelt doctors there to watch their brother Jared in opposition to McCloy, along with Ronan Keogh, another physician who married into Lavey, performed vital, equally life-saving CPR on him.
The first defibrillator, which had come in an ambulance that was present from the start of the game, didn’t work.
The second one that effectively brought him back to life was there courtesy of the Cormac Trust, a foundation set up in memory of late Tyrone captain Cormac McAnallen and which has helped save so many lives since then.
For half an hour after the former Derry captain dropped to the ground while taking a free-kick for Lavey, four thousand people sat in a surreal silence. Nobody moved. Nobody made a sound louder than a quiet prayer to themselves until he was stretchered into an ambulance with his life in the balance.
It took almost four-and-a-half years for doctors to understand why it happened.
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By then, Kevin McCloy’s attentions had turned to a potential heart transplant. Three years after the original incident, he’d begin to feel unwell again and booked a scan at the Royal Victoria Hospital.
“I knew by the woman’s face,” he recalls.
“When we went in to see the consultant, he told us to go and have a cup of tea, get something to eat and come back to see him. We sat eating and never spoke.
“On the way back up in the lift, I just said to my wife: ‘Get ready for this when we go back in here, we’re heading to Newcastle’.
“That’s basically what he said when we went in through the door, that there’s still hope and there are ways, but I could be looking at a heart transplant.”
The Freeman Hospital in the north-eastern city is the only transplant centre in the UK to offer heart transplants for adults with complex congenital heart disease.
Doctors knew they were treating his heart but they didn’t know exactly why and what for.
Different treatments, different medications, different tests, none of them provided the answers they were looking for.
That was until his scans were put to a European forum of consultants and Professor James Moon, a cardiology specialist in London, spotted what he believed was a sarcoid.
Cardiac sarcoidosis is an accumulation of immune cells within the heart muscle itself that causes clumps of tissue called granulomas.
Achieving a diagnosis wasn’t just that simple. After three trips to London for scans, it required another biopsy on the heart. The doctors in Belfast were reluctant to take the chance.
“I just asked ‘what’s the risks here?’ Basically I’ve two wires going down into my heart that gives me the shock any time I need them, and the consultant said if he went in and hit them, he’d have to take the whole box out – and taking the wires out is very dangerous, so he said it was my risk to take.
“And I asked ‘what happens if I have got sarcoid and it’s not diagnosed?’ ‘Well that’s a big risk as well’, he said.
“So it was the lesser of the two evils and I told him to go in, and that’s whenever they caught it.”
The reason it had gone undiagnosed for so long was the absence of any further cardiac arrest in the four years after that night in 2014. Cardiac sarcoidosis is more commonly associated with more frequent episodes.
McCloy’s five subsequent cardiac arrests have come since the diagnosis.
A father-of-two when he collapsed in Owenbeg, he’s now a father-of-four. Three boys and a Daddy’s girl who fusses over him, making sure he’s feeling ok after exercise and telling the boys to be quiet when he’s taking a lie-down.
His job as a civil engineer with ESB, mostly working at windfarms, isn’t physically intensive but there are still a lot of days he tires quickly and needs to lie down.
“Everybody sees me now and Cathy would say people think I’m as healthy as a horse but they don’t see me having to go and lie down for an hour in the middle of the day.
“From day-to-day, I normally cope alright. Days you be tired, morning time can be tight enough going, but after you get up and going I wouldn’t be somebody that would lie down too quickly.”
The left side of his heart operates at around 30 per cent. On Tuesday, on holiday in Donegal, he played a round of golf. To do that, he’d have to mind himself the day before and the day after.
It all seems, looks, feels so alien to the man-mountain who bore the number three shirt for Derry with such distinction. The man who drove Dublin’s Mark Vaughan halfway into the Canal End with a shoulder that nailed down his Allstar in the 2007 All-Ireland quarter-final.
The diagnosis of the sarcoid condition has changed things. It doesn’t, and won’t, stop further arrests from happening, but it allows him to understand them and to know better how to try and avoid them.
* * * * *
HE was down in Baldy’s Bar for a few pints and to take in Kerry’s mauling of Tyrone when his phone started to vibrate ferociously.
‘Thinking of you’ was the general gist of the flood of messages, none of which explained what had happened. He had half an idea but had to get the barman to flick a TV over to see the scenes in Parken as Christian Eriksen lay stricken on the ground.
The Danish playmaker had collapsed while receiving the ball from a throw-in, much the way McCloy fell out of the blue in Owenbeg. The same silence, the same disbelief. Thankfully, too, the same outcome.
“It would put the hair up on the back of your neck. It wasn’t for a couple days that it actually hit and you realise again how lucky you were that evening to come through it.”
But McCloy recognises the increase of better fortune from such unforeseeable events.
Locally, both former Tyrone star Conor Gormley and current Antrim hurler Neil McManus have spoken in recent years about how access to a local defibrillator saved the lives of both their athers.
Even in 2010, Seaghan Kearney was playing five-a-side in Dublin when he collapsed. He was clinically dead for somewhere between four and five minutes.
In each case, a defibrillator was on-hand within minutes. There’s no guarantee that it will always save a life, but it doesn’t bear thinking what would have happened if there hadn’t been a defib in the locality.
“It’s very seldom now you’ll hear of a club that hasn’t got one,” says the 2008 National League winning Derry skipper.
“It’s just a mortal sin if something happened at your pitch and somebody wasn’t saved for the value of what the defib does. It’s the same as if it hadn’t been there that evening for me, I would have been gone.”
Still, on average two people in Ireland die every day from Sudden Adult Death Syndrome (SADS).
Kevin McCloy has been an ambassador for The Cormac Trust now for several years. Along with Conor Gormley, they’re organising a Golf Classic that will take place in Omagh on September 17 to support vital research by the foundation.
Since January 2019, the trust has been funding two research projects, one of which is genetic research into Long QT Syndrome – the condition that Cormac is understood to have lost his life to.
Scientists in NUI Galway, researchers across Ireland both north and south, and in the Mayo Clinic in America have been working on improving their understanding of the most serious, life-threatening SADS conditions.
It is truly invaluable, life-saving work. None of us know when we might feel its benefit.
Kevin McCloy had absolutely no idea this day seven years ago. Thirty-six hours later, a club, a county, a province, a country and above all a family were praying he’d make it out the other side.
That we lost Cormac McAnallen was a tragedy.
That others continue to be saved in his name is a rich legacy.
