Ryan O’Dwyer’s painful road to recovery: ‘I was a horrible person’
A brain injury, he concludes, is different for everyone and as if to underline that fact the experienced Dublin hurler points to a rare and curious positive about his own case.
“I actually eat salmon now whereas I didn’t eat salmon before,” the Tipperary native revealed. “If you gave me fish before, I would have said, ‘no, horrible’. So my taste has probably been affected too but, look, I eat anything anyway.”
Everything changed for O’Dwyer that night in late October, 2015 when, queuing for a nightclub, he was the victim of an unprovoked attack and suffered a fractured skull, broken jaw, and bleeding on the brain.
He has said he doesn’t think he’d be alive but for the interventions of Chris Thompson, the Dublin team doctor, and while he is close to a full recovery and will be on county final duty on Saturday for Kilmacud Crokes, it’s been the rockiest of roads.
“It would mean a lot to win a county final at any stage but I suppose if we do win, I’ll look back and see the road I travelled and say, ‘Jeez, I’m one stubborn man’,” said the 30-year-old.
Anybody who has ever played against the combative Kilmacud Crokes man would probably have said that anyway, though this was a different sort of determination, a shadowy battle he didn’t even know he was fighting at times. For months, he was irritable and prone to anger, a symptom of the brain injury.
“I was a horrible person and looking back on it now, I didn’t like the person I was,” he admitted. “I’ve done a little bit of reading into it. You could get a brain injury and I could get a brain injury and it’s two totally different reactions to it. You’ll have a few regular things, like being tired the whole time and forgetfulness.
Louis Theroux was on RTÉ there last week, he was doing a show on brain injuries and my fiancee was in tears, she was saying, ‘that was you’. There was a woman there, from some part of England, and she was having a row with her husband and getting really aggressive with her kids and she hadn’t seen the kids in a while. Cliodhna said to me, ‘that was you’. I didn’t realise it, you don’t realise it when it’s happening to yourself. It’s a very scary thing.”
He returned to hurling with Dublin in April though has refused to taper his natural, all-action style of play despite what he has gone through.
“No, I’m still reckless, still a destruction derby! When I knew I was allowed to go back hurling, Donncha O’Brien (doctor) said to ease into it, try to avoid slaps. But then I said it to Chris Thompson that that’s when you get injured, when you are holding back, that’s when you get a slap. And he said for your own sake, don’t change your game. And I had to ask myself what got me to where I am? I know I’m not the best hurler out there but I’m playing at a reasonably high level and what got me to this stage is the way I play so I said I wasn’t going to abandon that.”
