Mark Connolly Interview, copyright Victoria Mary Clarke, 2001-09-12

Imagine the worst nightmare you’ve ever had.  Now imagine you wake up and it’s actually happened.  Mark Connolly is living his personal nightmare.  He calls it “Winning the anti-lotto.”  Eighteen months ago, Mark was a champion skier who ran five miles every morning and was, by his own description, “as fit as a fiddle.”  Six foot three and weighing fifteen stone, he was a natural athlete.  Today he’s in a wheelchair, paralysed from the chest down.  Yet, last weekend, he took part in a scuba-diving event, to raise money for the Spinal Injuries Action Association, so that others with similar injuries might have the opportunity to participate in sports.
Meeting Mark, I am aware of not having personally got to know anyone in his position before.  I am nervous and don’t quite know how to react.  I’ve arranged to meet him at the ESB headquarters, where he is a computer consultant.  He meets me in the lobby and escorts me upstairs to his bright, sunny office, overlooking the garden.  Should I act as if it’s perfectly normal, to be in a wheelchair?   Should I push the chair, open doors, that kind of thing?  Or would he prefer to do it for himself?  There’s a fine line between sympathy and support, as Mark is well aware.  It is obvious that this is a man who is making the absolute best of his situation.  This is an athlete, who is finding ways to engage in and enjoy challenging competitive sports, despite his injury.  While most people I know regard walking to the local shop of a Sunday, for the papers, as exercise, Mark is busy diving in the Irish Sea.  Talking to Mark, it is possible to see just how important exercise and sport is, to anyone in his position.  But he is aware, too, of the need to let the public know that support is needed.
‘Somebody with a serious spinal injury can still engage in certain sports, with the help of other people in their club, but does that make people think that the injury is somehow less catastrophic?”  He asks me. “ You might see a number of paraplegic men and women speeding across Howth harbour, or diving off Ireland’s Eye, and you might say isn’t that fantastic, that things are not so bad for them?  And that’s true.  But the daily effort that goes into getting that far is huge.  Yes, we can do a lot and have a very fulfilled lifestyle, but please don’t forget that we need as much help from the various authorities as possible. It looks so normal, when you see people in their wet-suits and their scuba gear, it would be difficult to tell who has a spinal injury and who hasn’t, but if you watch the amount of help we need to get to this stage, it’s immense.”
One of the wonderful things about scuba-diving, for Mark, is that for someone like him, who retains the use of his arms, it feels relatively normal:
“There  is that moment, when you are twenty feet under the water, when  you are just as mobile as you would have been before your injury.  And for a few hours, you can imagine that everything is as it was, before the accident.”
It seems cruel, but I have to ask him to describe the accident that has changed his life so horribly.  Surprisingly, he seems not to mind talking about it.
“I was a fitness fanatic, as I went over for my eighteenth annual ski trip to Austria,” he tells me, quite neutrally, without any trace of emotion.  “It was a beautiful sunny day and the piste was perfectly groomed.  Cold, very cold, but a perfect, still day.  I was skiing along, when I went over a ridge and hit a crust of ice with deep snow underneath.  I  was going too fast for the unexpected conditions.  Skis dug in.  Next thing I was on my back with no poles, no skis.  I knew there was something very, very seriously wrong.  Two Austrians miraculously had mobile phones and called for help. I thought I was going to die. I knew I’d injured my back and I felt that there was something wrong with my breathing and I also felt some pressure building up inside me.  What was happening was that I was bleeding internally, from the shards of bone.  I was in hospital within an hour and fifteen minutes.  Underwent a five hour operation and received fifteen units of blood, which is my whole body and a half, of blood. I was very lucky to survive.”
And that was it.  It sounds so simple.  But did he really feel lucky, to have survived? 
“The first few weeks were horrendous,” he admits.  “It’s the opposite of a bad dream.  When you have a bad dream, it’s often about something terrible that’s happened, either to you, or to somebody close to you.  When you wake up, you say thank God that was just a bad dream.  Instead, I was having dreams about being on holidays in Spain, with my wife Catherine and the kids and waking up in intensive care.”
For most of us, the relatively everyday hassles can be depressing enough.  A few days of rain in July, a bill from the taxman.  Mark has something to really get down about, and he is aware that depression is a very real threat.   “At  some stage, I decided that rationally there is nothing to be gained by going into the deep pit of depression.  My father died suddenly, in June of 1986, and I went into a very deep depression, was actually in hospital for a couple of months.  So I recognised the danger that was lurking. If you let yourself think negatively for more than two or three days, you can start heading in that direction. When I got to the hospital, I looked around that intensive care ward and I saw people who were much worse off than me.  Some of them not dealing with it.  But some of them dealing with it.  And I said to myself if they can deal with it, I can deal with it.
Did he feel as though God was punishing him?
“I see the actual injury as just extremely bad luck, I don’t see anything deeper in it, because I’ve seen wonderful people with similar injuries.  One young man, aged seventeen, paralysed from the neck down.  A very, very nice guy and absolutely no reason why it should happen to him.”
I ask Mark to describe some of the daily physical challenges that he faces.  He cringes. 
‘This is stuff you wouldn’t be able to print!”
I urge him to give it a go.
“Well, in terms of urination, I have no control below the chest.  So when my bladder fills up I get an involuntary movement in my leg or in my tummy and this will indicate to me a whole number of possible problems, one of which might be the bladder.  This happens about five times a day.  And when it happens, I insert a catheter.  If you don’t do it, you can suffer from dysreflexia, which can cause a stroke almost instantly.  Or you can cause pressure on the kidneys.  On the bowel side, I have a daily routine.  I have to glove up and insert a finger up there and clear out the lower bowel.  One of the ways of getting you to turn your eyes away from a beautiful girl is to think of the fact that she might have to do a dump now and again!  So it’s not nice.  But you get used to it.  It’s a cultural thing. Californians wouldn’t have a problem with it.”
I suppose the one question that most people would want to ask, but wouldn’t dare is whether there’s sex after spinal injuries.  Mark is candid. 
“The whole sex thing is different.  Obviously you have no sensation down there.  But there are various methods, either with injections or with pumps, of getting a full erection.  And you have your upper body and you have your partner and you can have a very full sexual relationship, but with limited positions, obviously!  It’s kind of strange because you don’t have any sensation and you don’t have an orgasm, even though your partner would. 
You always wonder if your partner is still happy about the sexual situation, because she knows that  although mentally you are getting the same thing out of it, that pure physical rush is obviously not there anymore.  And it’s hard to get your head around that, at times.”
I wondered if Mark was tempted to distract himself from the enormity of his situation, with alcohol or drugs.
“People do get into heavy drinking or some sort of addiction, which ultimately is a death-wish.  I wouldn’t condemn people who do that, but it’s a waste. If you go down that route, you’re devaluing your own humanity and you’re devaluing the friends you have, and relations that care about you. If a terrible thing like this had to happen, I think forty years of age is a good time for it to happen, in the sense that I’m established, I have my career, my wife and kids, a house. It’s very difficult for a seventeen year old who has been severely injured to wake up and think about a life ahead, because they are at an age when they are just moving away from their parents, just about to embark on an independent life and relationships are only kicking off.  And you wake up in intensive care  and all of a sudden that’s all dashed and you’re back to a dependency on your parents.
But you just have to get on with it.  Every day, for the first ten minutes, you think Oh my God, this is it.  This is the way it’s going to be. And the option is there to lie in bed all day, thinking woe is me, life is horrible.  Of course, if you have had a very serious spinal injury, you should let yourself lie in bed for a while and curse out loud, if you want to.  You shouldn’t pretend it’s not happening.  But eventually, when you’ve cursed bad luck or God or whatever, you’re going to have to ask yourself what next. You have to do something during the day, like studying or working.  You have to find something to fill up your day, something meaningful.  And you need sport.  Even more than before the injury, because we all need the endorphin rush, the buzz.  That’s the point of the Spinal Injuries Association, to provide a way for people to experience that kind of activity. And we give people with spinal injuries a chance to achieve something that they can be proud of.”
It’s still a beautiful day, outside as I leave Mark to get on with his work.  So I take my bicycle down to the beach and just ride it up and down for the rest of the afternoon, revelling in the fact that I still have the use of my legs, and I can.  But if I couldn’t, I hope that I would have a fraction of the courage and humour that Mark Connolly has.