‘AN ORDINARY’ shoulder is how he remembers it, almost three years on, but it turns out it was everything but.
The events of a typical autumnal night at The Scarvey in Buncrana in August 2013 have changed the course of Caolan McLaughlin’s life.
He was training with the Buncrana senior football team when he and a team-mate went for the same ball.
McLaughlin can see it now, the image still so vivid.
He closes the eyes and can almost paint a picture…
An almighty coming together sent him spinning to the turf.
McLaughlin was concussed. But, this was no ordinary concussion.
McLaughlin has been getting medical treatment ever since, has had to quit sport and twice dropped out of school as he tried to complete his Leaving Certificate. As he says his ‘whole life stopped dead in its tracks’.
“I’d felt shoulders, hard shoulders, before and I knew right away that this one was different,” McLaughlin says.
“My first words were: ‘Awwww f**k’. I just knew I was dazed badly.
“There was like this wee white dot off the centre of my sight. I didn’t feel sick, just dazed. But something wasn’t right.
“The headache just didn’t go away. At the point of impact I thought I’d be grand in five minites. Then, five minutes later it was a case of: ‘It’ll be grand in 15 minutes’. Two days later it became: ‘Maybe I’ll be okay in a week’. Progressively, that timeframe got longer. My head was constantly sore.”
When he first went to Letterkenny General Hospital, he was given pain relief medication, but the tablets had little effect on him.
It was on a visit to the Hermitage Medical Clinic in Dublin that the full extent of his concussion was laid bare.
It could take ten years for the ‘constant, throbbing headache’, as he describes it, to clear.
“Ten years?”, he says in a corner of the Radisson Blu Hotel in Letterkenny. “That’s a long time, isn’t it?”
Since that night, McLaughlin hasn’t played football again, but it has hit harder with the now 20-year-old having been forced to leave Scoil Mhuire in Buncrana during his Leaving Certificate year.
“When the doctor told me ten years it was like someone had given me a kicking,” McLaughlin says.
“It was just like hitting a brick wall.
“The ball started to roll when I went to the Hermitage. I was told to play no contact sports until I was pain free. Since that day of the contact, in August 2013, I’ve not set foot on a pitch.
“They weren’t shocked in Dublin, but It’s their job to look at people like me. What concerned them was that it was all day every day. Apparently that’s rare.
“Out of all concussion cases, this is a 1 per cent job. I basically have a medium-term brain injury and for the brain medium term is ten years.”
For the last two-and-a-half years, McLaughlin has been taking migrane tables, but the side effects have begun to overcome the pain relief.
“I started strong medication last year and every month the dosage was going up and my weight was coming down. I suppose I dropped from training three times a week to doing nothing.
“I dropped four stone and my medicine dosage was for someone of what my weight had been.
“The side effects are overwhelming. The hands are numb all the time, I’d be cold all the time but the memory loss is the worst part…
“It’s every day things its effecting.
“The constant pain is there all the time. I used to be able to cope with that.
“The pain relief just became a part of the daily routine. I was taking a tablet – these were a step below narcotics – at 9 o’clock in the morning and I’ve relief for about four hours.
“But I’d be sitting in school just conked out like a zombie by around 11. I’d take another tablet just to get some ease from the pain. Even the tablets I’m on now, they’re effecting me. With memory loss, sometimes I can’t remember if I’ve taken them or not.”
He began stage two of his treatment last week in Dublin, which involves getting nerve blockers injected into his head.
McLaughlin attempted natural remedies for a while. For six months, he tried acupuncture and had physiotherapy once a week, too.
“The acupuncture was getting at the pressure points in the head and the physio was all about releasing tension in the neck. Like most things, it helped for a while and then it went backward again.”
A series of MRI scans – one in September 2013 in Ballykelly, one in a clinic in Dublin in 2014 and three in one day last January – and a lumber puncture showed up nothing out of the ordinary.
“They still haven’t really figured it out – it’s a mystery of the brain and that is so scary.”
When the shoulder connected with the left-hand side of his head, just above the ear, McLaughlin had no idea of what lay ahead. The following month, he was back in school at Scoil Mhuire, but by Easter he dropped out.
“It was just too much, the stress of it all,” McLaughlin says.
“Trying to concentrate, to study and to do homework. was all too much with the constant headache. I did my best, but just couldn’t do it. The second year I went in, but I left around Christmas.
“My hand was forced. There was no way I could do school. I forced myself to go in for a while, but it wasn’t worth me being there. All I wanted was to get the Leaving Cert done and then focus on recovery.
“To do that year’s school and with the constant pain was tough, but to have done all those days and come away with nothing…I just didn’t have any other options. There was no way I was going to pass with the way I was in and out.
“The doctors told me to leave earlier, but I wanted to go on. I tried my best to keep at it, but I just couldn’t do any more.
“I’d be in school and the tube lighting had such an impact on it. I’d have a constant, throbbing pain.
“I wake up with it, I eat dinner with it and I go to sleep with it. It’s just draining in every way. Doing anything takes effort.
“All my friends have gone off to college and that’s the biggest thing. They’ve all moved on and I’ve been wrapped in cotton wool.
“It’s not cheap. It’s what you’d call ‘big money’ for sure. Like, if someone handed you that money in an envelope you’d be thrilled.”
Only two months before McLaughlin’s ordeal began, his clubmate in Buncrana, Ryan Bradley, suffered a concussion injury that Donegal team doctor Charlie McManus would later say ‘petrified him’.
Just before half-time in the Ulster semi-final against Down in Cavan, Bradley went to ground as he won a ball ahead of Down player Keith Quinn.
“Ryan Bradley is 6”2’ and is 15 stone – he is a phenomenal build of a man – and landed straight down on his back after leaping five feet in the air,” Dr McManus explained later.
“When I saw that happening, I immediately tried to call for the Order of Malta ambulance assistance and Ryan was lying prostrate, his two arms outstretched. If there was one thing I’d have done differently that day, I’d wait for the stretcher to have come on.
“Ryan was subsequently hospitalised, he spent two days in his house where he couldn’t open the curtains and he couldn’t work for well over a week.”
McLaughlin had watched that game and winced as Bradley careered into Quinn. Little did he realise that he’d endure his own concussion nightmare just weeks later.
“Concussion is more dangerous than breaking a leg,” he says.
“If a player breaks a leg or an arm, he’ll be off straight away. If he dislocates his shoulder, he’s out of there. Then, if a player takes a knock to the head and is wobbling a bit…if that’s a good player, some people may be inclined to take a risk and get him to play on.
“It’s more dangerous than a visible injury. Just because you don’t see it, doesn’t mean it isn’t serious. Coaches have to realise that it isn’t about winning – it’s about player safety.”
In August 2013, he was part of a Buncrana minor panel that was on its way to shocking St Eunan’s in the Donegal Minor final.
For McLaughlin, the journey was so different.
He says “It’s been a huge struggle for nearly three years now. It just doesn’t go away at all. It’s so frustrating.
“My whole life stopped dead in its tracks.”
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