March 5, 2016
7.30am: “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
- Sonia McKenna’s diary entry
AS Friday’s rush hour bounded for home, Odhrán McKenna was heading the other way to start work.
He had to get to Tesco in Antrim, while his twin brother CJ was starting at the Crumlin superstore at the same time.
That day sticks fresh in CJ’s memory. February 26, 2016.
The pair had played for St John’s footballers against Glen in the Ulster U21 club tournament a week earlier. They’d both just passed their driving test and their mother Sonia was off work for the day. She threw them the car keys.
They took friends to school at St Mary’s CBGS and at lunchtime, headed out for their first ever burritos over beside Casement Park.
That’s the last bit Odhrán remembers.
Having completed the Friday evening teenage ritual of turfing their uniforms on the floor of the front hall, they discover a block of Raspberry Ripple and a box of wafers waiting for them.
It all leaves them tight for time. With CJ delivered, Odhrán had to make his own hurried way back to Antrim for a 5pm start.
The text that would ordinarily let his sibling know he had made it to work ok never arrived.
“I just got a wile bad feeling, like he was hurt. When Mummy was ringing me, I just knew straight away. I had a bad feeling when he was leaving me off…” recalls CJ.
Born two minutes apart on July 22, 1998 - Odhrán the elder – they don’t subscribe fully to the telepathy of twins but acknowledge there are many sentences one could finish for the other before they’ve even started.
Their elder brother Peter, who worked with CJ in Crumlin, fielded the call around 5.30pm. They were at the scene on the narrow Killead Road within minutes, expecting something minor.
What they found was their mother’s car practically crushed on the driver’s side, where all the impact had been taken.
Odhrán had hit a tree so hard that when paramedics reached him, they found him in the passenger seat.
The Crumlin fire crew with which their father served was called out.
For 90 minutes, Odhrán was worked on at the side of the road.
Paramedics conducted a Glasgow Coma Scale test, which looks for signs of life. It’s scored in three parts and your total ranges from 3 to 15.
A total score of three is completely unresponsive – to all intents and purposes, dead.
Odhrán McKenna scored four.
Pure good fortune saved his life, although it wouldn’t be apparent for over a week whether he would actually pull through.
A Rapid Response Car with a HEMS team on board just so happened to be doing a trial at Moira when they heard the call come through.
Dr Jonathan Dawson was in the car. It was felt they could do very little but they went across anyway.
By the time they made it to the scene, Odhrán was “getting packaged up to go to the morgue,” as he puts it from what others have relayed to him.
Dr Dawson decided to intubate the teenager, a process of inserting a pipe through his mouth and into the windpipe to allow him to breathe and relieve pressure on the brain.
But even when he was brought to the Resuscitation Unit in the Royal, doctors told the family their hopes for the next 24 hours were virtually non-existent.
He was sent to the ICU and sedated to be kept alive for 24 hours, but the family had been primed for the worst.
“We were told he was basically going to the ICU to die,” is how their mother recalls that night.
But the first day passed. Then the second, and third. Fully sedated still and while no news wasn’t necessarily good, it was better than what they feared.
Over the next week, he would be visited by everything and everyone from Mickey Harte and DJ Carey to the Papal Hat that’s not supposed to leave Clonard Monastery. His school friends lined the corridors of the ICU.
Doctors tended to him night and day, and his mother – who is the Staff Manager for Northern Ireland Clinical Research Network – didn’t leave his side for eight straight days.
The last rites were said “two or three times”. Odhrán would suffer bleeds on the brain and haemorrhages. He would contract pneumonia and a chest infection on day six, leaving doctors with little option but remove him from the ventilator soon afterwards.
Every time they tried to extubate him, he reacted badly. For seven-and-a-half days, the family had no idea if would live or if he did, what his quality of life would be.
The second stroke of luck was the arrival of Dr Aveen McGarvey. Her medical expertise was vital, but the McKennas remain equally indebted and in awe of the way she handled the whole situation.
“When CJ gets anxious or nervous, he asks about 3,000 questions in five minutes. I can only imagine how many questions he was asking of Aveen, and she didn’t lose the rag with him or tell him to go away, she made him feel he was helping and he was part of my recovery,” says Odhrán.
Early on the Saturday morning, it was decided to take him out of sedation. If it didn’t go well, they’d intubate him again and see where to go from there.
But at 7.15am, he opened his eyes.
At 7.30am, he spoke, only to say ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me’.
Fifteen minutes later, he said ‘Mum’. Within an hour, he’d eaten two slices of toast and was looking to go home.
Sonia called CJ, who was on the top deck of the Metro bus with his friend Peter McCallin, with whom he’d stayed since the accident happened.
“Mummy rang me and said ‘somebody wants to talk to you’ and it was him,” recalls CJ.
“He said ‘are you coming down to see me? I don’t know where I am, I’m a bit scared’.
“We didn’t know what state he was in but he knew who I was and he could talk, so I didn’t give a f***.”
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IF Odhrán McKenna walked through your living room door right now and stood talking to you, you would literally have no idea.
There wasn’t a broken bone in his body, not a scratch on his skin. The entire sickening, crushing impact was to his head.
The pain could be excruciating but so were the sights they saw in Ward 4F – the north’s neurological ward – and the RABIU (brain injury unit) at Musgrave to which he moved.
Odhrán’s own memory of his time in hospital is sketchy but he knew enough from day one to know that he didn’t want to be there a minute longer than he had to be.
But Odhrán had to learn to walk, talk and remember. He even had to learn to eat. They recall how he would be sitting with a bowl of Rice Krispies, throwing them over his shoulder on the spoon and then chewing, saying “they’re lovely”.
In the context of the people in the beds around him, that was mild.
But for a 17-year-old whose life revolved around wielding his caman around the fields of Belfast and north Antrim, there were serious challenges to be met.
For weeks, he couldn’t support his own bodyweight. They had no idea if he would ever be able to walk again. His eating was up the left and he turned to skin and bone.
Yet as soon as he reached a point where he was any way capable of going home, he just had to get out of the hospital.
In the Crumlin home they lived in at the time, there was a long, straight hallway.
Sonia felt that was the best chance he had of making a full recovery. It would be three months before he took his first unaided step.
The pair of them hardly slept a wink for the first eight weeks. Weaning off his medication, the pain displaced from his head to the soles of his feet. Almost always at night-time, it was agonisingly painful.
They had gravel around the side of the house and the only relief he could get was to go and try to put his whole weight down on the tough, sharp stones.
“We were trying Epsom salts, Indian foot massages, acupuncture…”
To this day he has no feeling in the soles of his feet. Two surgeries have corrected a lot of the permanent double-vision he suffered after the accident. Still he’ll get three, four, five really bad migraines in a week.
Yet in the grand scheme, he knows he has more to be thankful for than to give off about.
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ALL the twins had ever wanted to do was hurl and play football.
From knee high they’d been at it and both eventually played themselves into Antrim minor hurling teams.
Almost identical to the naked eye, they were very different specimens on the pitch. CJ was always the score-getter, while Odhrán was the human wrecking ball in defence.
The pair of them start to laugh and recall the night their mother had to pull the car right up to the door of the changing rooms in Loughgiel to squirrel them out after Odhrán had started “a full-scale riot”.
Or the time at U16 they went back to play a Portlaoise team that had beaten them narrowly in the All-Ireland Féile final and in the heat of battle, someone barbed him with ‘where’s your All-Ireland?’
“The next thing the hurl was broke in two, and him standing with half a hurl telling the ref ‘I didn’t touch him’ and your man lying down with the bás of the hurl across his chest!” laughs CJ.
Doctors had advised him from day one that that going back to hurling wasn’t a good idea.
Yet on June 25, 2016, he posted a photo on Instagram of his first steps back on to the training field with St John’s, complete with the caption: “Week 13, back at it. Don’t tell the doctors.”
Next thing he was standing on in a minor club game to fill out a team for a league game against Dunloy. He could barely run yet but scored 0-3.
St Mary’s would go on to win both Mageean and All-Ireland Colleges ‘B’ titles that year.
Thirteen months after the accident, Odhrán McKenna came on for the last few minutes of both finals.
“I was raging too at not getting on sooner!” he laughs.
Former Antrim footballer Paddy Cunningham was the manager. He and the whole school are held in the highest of esteem in the McKenna house. They have nothing only good things to say.
“They were brilliant to me. I just wasn’t used to sitting on the bench but looking back, I wasn’t fit enough.”
Hurling holds a strange candle in his life now. Having made it all the way back to play a full-throttle senior league game against Cushendall ten days after his 20th birthday, the decision was made soon afterwards to retire.
As he watches CJ lift his kitbag and head out the back door to training on a Tuesday evening, a huge part of him wishes he could still do it.
And yet he owes so much to a sport that, in his own words, he never played for the love of it.
“I played because I wanted to win and I’m the most competitive person, stubborn. It was the competitiveness, being the best, being on one of the best teams.”
There were the friendships too. The twins quickly became best mates with Shea Shannon and Peter McCallin, who have been there at every turn before and since the accident.
Gratitude is the prism through which he now views it all.
Medics saved his life but hurling was the reason he got better.
“If I’d taken the option the rehab doctors were saying and not went back, I would have turned into a pudding and I might not have walked for six months. I might not have walked for a year. I might have sat and sulked.
“I have a lot to be thankful for with hurling.”
There were definitely days when everyone around him winced at the sight of him getting stuck in.
When he took a bang to the head in a training session just after the Cushendall game, it coincided with a routine CT scan in the days after.
The doctors only ever repeated their advice. The scans didn’t show up anything new but they felt his overall recovery was being hindered by it.
There was also the serious danger of the slaps to the head going wrong one day.
Life had begun to move on a bit. Olivia came along. He’d always been into construction and having recovered to achieve an A, B and C in his A-Levels, the elite athlete scheme helped him make up the difference on what he’d needed.
The offer that followed of a role combining work with Errigal Contracts – run by family Cormac and Peter McCloskey as well as Damien Treanor – and a Quantity Surveying degree at Jordanstown was too good to look past.
CJ took up the same offer and the pair of them spend at least half the week in London now, maybe a day in the Monaghan office and a day in Jordanstown. The time in London takes his mind off missing the training and games at home.
“The doctors were just saying things could be coming on a lot better than they are, and pretty much ‘are you sure this is for you?’
“When you’re 18 or 19, you can’t see 10 years down the line.
“I felt ok, but it was just the more hits on the head, the more chance of developing Alzheimer’s, dementia...
“At the start, my thing was ‘nobody will tell me what to do, I’ll show them’, but when you’re listening to that and getting a new life, you start to think it’s not the best thing.”
The “brilliant” Dr Sheena Caldwell was the one in his ear now and although it took a while “because I was so thran”, he softened over time.
“When I started to listen, it was like I didn’t have another option. A lot of people don’t have the option because they don’t get another chance at life. I was given that chance.
“During matches I still went in for everything and did everything the same.
“Would I have been able to get back to my full potential? Yeah, but it probably would have killed me. I think I knew that even before I stopped.”
The hurl has been hung up, replaced by the driver and nine-iron. As the spring of the year brightens, he’ll get back out to Massereene now and start whittling the handicap down from 13.
As he struggled to find his fitness and form over the two years after the accident, he got drawn into the mindset that he had been wronged by life, and that this most precious of sports had been taken away from him.
“This will sound really selfish but it was only when I stopped playing hurling that I realised.
“When I started going with Olivia, she remembers the accident and she was just like ‘you need to be thankful’. She changed my whole outlook on it.
“I feel very lucky but at the same time, there’s a bit of me that’s still the old me and feels like I’ve lost a bit.
“It’s the only thing that’s missing. For a while, it was a big thing that was missed. But it’s levelled out a bit. Generally, day-to-day, I feel superb. Really happy.”
That he survived at all was as much as anyone could have hoped for in those first eight days.
But to thrive again, to rebuild a life, to be walking, talking, smiling, working, joking, without a single outward sign that the accident had ever happened?
Odhrán McKenna is an actual miracle.
