My and my leg: Paralympian Tiarnán O'Donnell on the physical, emotional and financial toll of pain and prosthetics

Irish Examiner

7 days ago

RETURNING home from the Paris Paralympics, Tiarnán O'Donnell couldn't even carry his own bag through the airport. He was a walking hazard. He was once again disabled and dependent. It had been six years since that combination had last dictated to him.
Having just competed at the pinnacle of his sport, the contrast could not have been greater. And the contrast was only beginning.
Leaving Dublin Airport in the background, Tiarnán was ferried to the family home in Boher, a quick spin outside Limerick City. From participation at the largest-ever gathering of para athletes to finding himself stuck in his childhood bedroom. He could no longer walk freely and unaided as he had done for the previous six years. He couldn't even carry a drink, never mind cook for himself.
Back leaning on others. Back leaning on crutches. The wheelchair was also taken out of storage. Neither had been called upon in over half a decade. The simple act of going out to meet friends became a hassle.
After two years of putting life on hold to get himself into the PR2 mixed double sculls boat in Paris, the plan was to spend a couple of months exploring Asia and behaving as regular 26-year-olds do.
That plan, along with every other post-Games plan, had to be pulled. His independence had been stripped. The cost of reclaiming his independence and once lived reality came with a €67,000 price tag.
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2024 Paris Paralympic Games, Vaires-sur-Marne Nautical Stadium, Paris, France 30/8/2024 Ireland's Katie O'Brien and Tiarnan O'Donnell on their way to finishing fourth Mandatory Credit ©INPHO/Maren Derlien
Tiarnán O'Donnell strolls into Ballincollig's Talbot Hotel on Monday lunchtime wearing black shorts. He's a shorts-in-all-seasons operator. And so on this day, as like most others, his prosthetic right leg is in full view.
Sat on a couch in the hotel lobby, he straightens out his microprocessor prosthetic leg and goes through its various components. Inside is a computer, sensors, and a gyro to help him balance and ensure the leg knows where the leg is at all times.
Basically, a bionic leg, he says by way of explanation, simplification, and abbreviation.
The model he wears allows him to live an able-bodied life. The model he wears carries a shelf life of up to nine years, depending on how active the user is. O'Donnell was fitted for his first microprocessor prosthetic leg - an older version of his present attachment - following amputation in August 2018. That leg began to break down and reach its expiry date on the run into the Paris Games. The timing couldn't have been worse.
Having had the amputation in London, the relevant EU agreement for receiving treatment abroad meant his parents didn't have to fork out for his first prosthetic. The Irish system is not as generous. Instead of exclusive focus on the final leg of his Paris representations, he was now burdened with having to find €67,000 down the back of the sofa to cover a new prosthetic leg.
The burden was so pronounced that he buried the issue until after the Paralympics. Not before, mind, it had left a mark both physically and mentally.
'In my seven years as an amputee, this was the first time I had to think about getting a prosthetic. I went for a meeting with my prosthetic team and they told me you have to figure out how you're going to come up with the €60-70,000. I remember somebody in the health system saying I was lucky I'm only missing one leg as it would be twice the cost if you were missing both. I found that mindset absolutely nuts,' says Tiarnán.
'My leg was broken pre-Paris, but I managed to get through Paris with it. Pre-Paris, it was causing me injuries. I was getting injuries in the boat because of how poorly I was walking because my prosthetic wasn't.
'But I didn't have €67,000 to spend pre-Paris to replace it. And I couldn't go with a less functional prosthetic because I would have to completely relearn how to walk. I had all of that stress going into Paris.
'And then I got home from Paris, on a high at being a part of the Paralympic movement and realising a peak moment in my life which was to represent Ireland on the biggest stage, to one week post-Games not being able to leave my house because my prosthetic wouldn't work.
'Coming back from the airport, I couldn't even carry my own bags. It was that bad. My knee would either buckle from underneath me or lock up and I'd trip. I was a walking hazard.'
His parents, Paddy and Neasa, told their son they'd take out a loan to fund the new prosthetic. Tiarnán, though, was determined not to be a financial drain on his family. Not at 26.
Before and after he and mixed double sculls partner Katie O'Brien rowed down the Vaires-sur-Marne to an eighth-place finish, Tiarnán shook a lot of important hands. A lot of Government Ministers told him they couldn't wait to provide support all the way through to LA 2028.
But in the weeks after Paris and with no more photo opportunities, Tiarnán didn't feel at all supported. And so on October 8, he posted an Instagram story calling out the political class. His message to them didn't hesitate in getting to the point.
'I basically said, I'm home from Paris, stuck in my bedroom and can't do anything. I want to start my journey to LA and I want to live a normal life, so something has got to change.'
His Instagram inbox immediately blew up. Sport Ireland weren't far behind in stepping in to cover the cost of the new prosthetic.
'I was in almost disbelief that somebody had decided they're going to take this weight off my shoulders. But five minutes later, I was infuriated because this is what amputees have been experiencing their whole lives, whereas this was my first time experiencing that dread and hopelessness of sitting in my bedroom not able to walk, and only because of who I am I got looked after. Elation to anger.'
The HSE provides prosthetics free of charge to eligible amputees such as medical card holders and people on the long-term illness scheme. Those that don't must find and hand over €15,000 for the most basic-standard mechanical limb.
16 November 2024; Sean Codd from Glasnevin, Dublin, right, meets Paralympian Tiarnán O'Donnell during the PTSB NextGen Community Series at the National Indoor Arena on the Sport Ireland Campus in Dublin. Pic Seb Daly/Sportsfile
O'Donnell has heard of amputees not taking work promotions because the increased wage would disqualify them from medical card eligibility and, consequently, prosthetic cover.
Accessibility is one half of the problem. The quality of prosthetics available in this country he describes as 'pre-historic'.
'The prosthetics available in Ireland are just metal joints. People manage with them, but they have no real functionality. They're almost like, and there is no polite way of saying this, a peg leg, a fixed leg.
'They can walk up the stairs, but it is a case of leading with your good foot and then dragging your bad foot up. If someone with a prosthetic is walking down a hill that isn't a microprocessor knee, they essentially fall down that hill, whereas when I put weight through the heel of my prosthetic, it adds resistance to naturally allow me walk step over step.
'There is no denying €67,000 is expensive, but because of this prosthetic, I'm not a burden to the health system, I am contributing to society and living a normal life. That is all people want to do. And if you give them this prosthetic, they're not on disability benefit, they're out in the workforce paying taxes, and on top of that they lead a normal social life so they're not slipping into issues with their mental health.
'My position in sport has given me the opportunity to access prosthetics that aren't available for other young people in Ireland. I visit schools with disabled kids, and I tell them, they can be just like me, they can do what I do. But I feel it is a white lie. It's like, you could, but only if you get the opportunities I get. That scares me.
'I don't need to worry about this issue if I'm being selfish. But nothing is going to change if I don't make some change.'
Tiarnán did not require the platform afforded to him by dint of Paralympic involvement to seek change. His advocacy began many years before he ever pulled a green oar or captained the Irish U23 wheelchair basketball team to third-tier European bronze.
During his first week at University of Limerick, he and a wheelchair-using friend were going to a lecture when his friend informed him he couldn't go this route as there were stairs further down the path. His friend told him he had to go a more circuitous route and would meet him at the front of the building.
The inconvenience and unfairness prompted Tiarnán to contact college authorities and volunteer himself as the student disability representative.
During his third-year work placement at the Galway base of Boston Scientific, it dawned on him that the route he and his colleagues took every day to get coffee on-site was not doable for a wheelchair-employee. The company's sole two disability car park spaces were for guests. Again, he spoke up.
Within a week, four wheelchair spaces were created. An elevator was constructed to ensure the stairs en-route to coffee no longer acted as a roadblock.
'They were like, 'we'll sort that, no problem, we just didn't realise this was an issue'. That lift will ensure other people with a disability don't have a different experience to me. Everywhere I go, I have these goggles on. I'm able to see things others don't. I don't think it is ignorance, it is just not knowing.'
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At the age of five, Tiarnán came in the door limping from a school sports day. Subsequent investigation found a vascular anomaly in his leg. The diagnosis arrived shortly after older brother Ronan had emerged from the woods following a six-year fight of his own. A rare arteriovenous malformation in the brain meant Ronan was 'on death's door until the age of five or six'.
Paddy, Neasa, and their four boys returned to hospital for a second saga. Tiarnán's fight would run for 14 years.
Repeated operations every nine months to lengthen and straighten his leg. Three weeks post-op and he was again at square one. Twenty-something operations in total. The toll on a child to endure such surgical overload for no progress at all.
A mother's intuition. They always know. She requested fresh scans and had them sent across the Atlantic. This boy from Limerick was the 16th person in the world to be diagnosed with fibroadipose vascular anomaly.
A month before his Leaving Cert year at Castletroy College, he underwent surgery to remove a large chunk of tumour from his calf. A high-risk surgery. Those cutting into him damaged a nerve and paralysed him from the knee down.
'The leg was paralysed but I was still in the most incredible pain. It felt like I was getting electrocuted in the leg all of the time.'
His Leaving Cert diet was not Irish, English, Maths, Engineering. His Leaving Cert diet was ketamine, morphine infusions, tramadol, oxycodone, and amitriptyline. An opioid diet no 18-year-old should have to endure.
His six-foot frame disappeared. His weight dropped to 48kg.
There's a chocolate granola from Lidl he can no longer go near. Even a whiff makes him queasy. It was his breakfast of choice Leaving Cert year. The cocktail of drugs he was consuming meant it was a breakfast that would come straight back up.
'I was going to school completely doped up just so I could function and sit in class. Even at that, I couldn't concentrate because I was still in so much pain and so out of it from the medication.
'I am a sixth-year student trying to study and be a normal teenager, but even though I knew it wasn't normal, I just got on with it. I actually tried to hide it from my friends.
"I remember one day on the way to afterschool study, I had to run to the bathroom. My friend came in with me to see if I was okay and I got sick in front of him. This shame came over me. I was like, 'fuck, now he knows I'm sick because I let the mask slip'. Of course they knew, but it is only now I realise how much I was struggling back then.'
A week before his Leaving Cert, he was studying maths equations whilst paralysed from the chest down after receiving an epidural in the latest attempt to suffocate the pain.
His points total was skewed by a most trying year. He received his 10th and final choice. A far more important choice was in front of him.
'Pre-Christmas in first year of college, I decided on amputation. Everything I went through forced me to grow up quickly. The amputation came at such an amazing time in my life because for the first time I took control of my disability. I went to my parents and said, 'I can't do this anymore'.'
We are chatting the day before he flies out to Lucerne for this weekend's Rowing World Cup. He pulled gold in the most recent World Cup event in Italy. That was as a single. There's no single sculls on the Lucerne menu, or LA menu for that matter. With regular mixed partner Katie O'Brien sidelined, he'll partner West Cork's Sadhbh Ní Laoghaire.
We're over an hour in the lobby. The latte is cold, the conversation has moved to tattoos. Hidden under his sleeve is SISU. Grit and determination in the face of adversity. The ink is inspired by his 21-year-old cousin Elliott. Elliott lives with the terminal illness Duchenne muscular dystrophy.
'He has every reason in the world to complain, but doesn't. Even in the depths of my struggling, I was like, if Elliott doesn't complain then who am I to complain.'
Back to hospital. The last face he saw before amputation was his mother's. The tears rolled down her cheeks.
'I told her, no, this is a time to smile. I am finally going to have a quality of life. This is the start. Went into it smiling and have been smiling ever since.'