The Battle by Paul O'Connell

Author:Paul O'Connell [O'Connell, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780141956312
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2016-10-06T04:00:00+00:00

Part Three

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14

The drug was called Tazocin – an intravenous antibiotic. It was supposed to attack the tiny pools of pus that had appeared, from out of nowhere, in my groin. I’d been given it three times a day for a week at the Bon Secours Hospital in Cork, until I told them I needed to go home.

I had a new son. Paddy was just a few weeks old and I wanted to be with him and Emily, not staring out the window of a hospital room, sixty miles away, when I didn’t even feel sick, or trying to pass the time by watching DVDs I wasn’t in the mood to enjoy.

They let me go home, and a woman from the Baxter medical company came to my house, put the antibiotics in a portable fridge and showed me how to administer the dose myself, using the PICC line running along my left arm all the way to my heart.

After a week of this, there was minimal improvement and I noticed that my body was beginning to react badly. It started with pains in my knees, and after another week of the IV treatment it was worse. When I opened the valve to let the fluid into my vein, there was a throbbing pain in my jaw, in my knees, in my elbows. The only way I could fight it was to keep everything moving. And twenty minutes later, when the dose was all in, I was sitting on a bench at my kitchen table feeling frustrated, asking myself why nobody seemed to have any answers.

I can’t do this any more, it’s making me worse.

Why isn’t it getting better?

How did this happen?

Before they put me on Tazocin, I had been taking strong oral antibiotics, which gave me diarrhoea for three weeks. The weight kept falling off me. I lost ten kilos in the end. I looked ridiculously light, pale, downright ill. I noticed people were looking at my shoulders and I could see the question in their head.

Is there something wrong with him?

At first nobody really said anything, until it was too obvious for them to ignore.

Mostly they were subtle when they first came out with it:

‘Did you lose a bit of weight?’

Then not so much:

‘You’re after dropping a good few pounds, Paul – are you?’

And then, after they stopped asking me what game I was hoping to make it back for:

‘My God! You’ve lost so much weight!’

When I left school I weighed fourteen and a half stone, or 92 kilos. At twenty, I met the Connacht coach, Steph Nel, and he told me I’d need to be a minimum of 110 kilos to play professional rugby. That became a magic number for me, and it wasn’t easy to get there because I’m not a naturally big man, unlike a lot of the second-rows I’ve played with and against.

I found out that I was an ectomorph, or a slow gainer. It meant I couldn’t eat enough. I needed two grams of protein a day for every kilo of body weight.

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