The Congress Altar Cappagh Hospital May 16 2008

As the result of an early childhood illness, by fourteen my right leg was five inches shorter than my left, and inevitably without attention would fall further behind, so I was brought to Cappagh Hospital in October 1964 for a series of operations which would stop my growth and leave me two inches shorter in height, but with only a slight limp. Most of these operations would be under Mr McCauley, but at least one was under Mr Joesph Gallagher, who I not only respected, as of course I did Mr McCauley, but warmed to as a person. On one occasion he introduced me to his entourage thus: “This young man is as healthy as a trout.”
When you’ve been confined to bed for some time, a remark like this can only be described as Positive Medicine, and I’ve never forgotten it as such.

photo credit: Philip Casey some rights reserved.

For me, Cappagh was a positive place. When I entered St Mary’s ward for the first time on a beautiful autumn evening, the ward was full of light and sound. It was like walking into a tropical aviary, such was the energy and colour. Being from the country, adjusting to twenty-four hour company took some time, but almost immediately I realised that while many of the boys had been here for years with ailments such as polio, most of them were full of normal, healthy mischief and fun.

Imposing order on this chaos was Sister Angela. I was only fourteen, but I quickly saw through the stern mask to a deeply human heart and sense of humour. Once, I was dared to ask her did she want a Kiss, which was a popular toffee. Without hesitation I intercepted her on the corridor and popped the question. She was of course taken aback at my effrontery and disrespect for her vows, but when I quickly proffered the tube of Kisses, she erupted into laughter.

Because children were often in Cappagh for years, I remember many of them, though not all of their names, of course. There was Larry W., a fine tall youth who was disabled by polio. He once had a classic, slow-motion fight from his wheelchair with a tall, thin boy, Alan K., also stricken with polio, over a chess game. It took them so long to get their fists to a sufficient height to land a blow, that the strike count was probably one a minute, but it was no less ferocious for that.

Although they had ample reason, very few if any of these boys showed self-pity. Danny M. struck me as particularly brave. He had brittle-bone disease, and invariably fell and broke another bone almost as soon as he had recovered from the last misfortune, but invariably, hopes dashed as they were risen, he smiled through it. There was Gerry from Clare, and Philip from Finglas, and Oliver from Kilkenny, and Willie, famous as Little Willie – but by the time I knew him was far from little; he was wild, and great fun. There was Mossy D., about whom more in a moment, and the great Tommy Lavin, who had an arm amputated and who died from cancer a few years later. He, too, never lost his spirit in adversity, a young man of noble courage and elegant character.
There was John C., from Waterford, an inveterate reader who advised me to read something decent, rather than endless Agatha Christies, and handed me the plays of Sean O’Casey, thereby changing my life.

And there was Paddy Doyle. A few years later Paddy would be muscular and married to Eileen – I would be his best man. But when I first met him, he was a small, skinny thirteen year-old orphan, his feet twisted by what would later be diagnosed as dystonia. There was certainly no inkling that he would be internationally famous as the author of The God Squad.
Being a farmer’s son capable of carrying a sack of wheat, Paddy was like a feather to me, so I carried him on tours of the hospital, including around the Congress Altar and up to the top of the fire escape of the Nurses’ Home, from where we had an excellent view of the farm, which if I’m not mistaken was owned by the Sisters of Charity and partially supplied the hospital – but I’m open to correction on that. Later he would reach the Congress Altar under his own steam.

Beneath the Nurses’ Home was the Occupational Therapy department, run by Sister Bride. She was so beautiful she could have starred in The Nun’s Story, but would probably have been horrified at the suggestion. One of her occupational therapists was an English Rose called Pat, so all in all the atmosphere in the OT department was very pleasant! I had my first inkling of a literary bent when I was asked to work on a magazine with Paddy and others. I can still smell the Gestetner ink. Paddy was particularly good at weaving as he would be at writing.

Needless to say, Paddy and his wife Eileen and their three sons and their partners are my friends to this day.

Then there were the lovely girls in the girls’ ward, every bit as lively and mischievous as the boys. In summer, the beds were wheeled out onto the verandas, and we didn’t need binoculars to see them. On the long summer evenings, there were not-so-secret rendezvous behind the Congress Altar, no pun intended. Separating us was a ward, or wards, for asthmatics, but there were girls there too, including the stunning Hannah, who I’m sure had a legion of admirers. I remember several lovely ward maids, too. It was all great fun.

Of course there were dark moments. Operations are never easy, and the aftermaths of some were excruciating over a long period. Some of the children were orphans, and others weren’t but never had visitors. No doubt some of them envied me my visitors, specifically the gifts of my visitors. It was of course difficult for relatives to travel long distances in those days, but it was thought that some children had been abandoned by their families. Some had diseases which would dog them all their sometimes abbreviated lives.

But the nurses were heaven on earth for a teenage country boy. Goddesses in their pristine uniforms, it was only later that I realised that the student nurses were teenagers like us – only more mature. We gave many of them nicknames. I was in love with some of them, of course, including Twitty from Wexford and Benjy from Dublin.

Benjy, a beautiful redhead whose perfume I will never forget, swore she’d never marry…
Some of them, like Fritz and Benjy, and indeed one of the primary school teachers, sometimes brought some of us to see Dublin, with Sister Angela’s blessing. Sister Angela on at least one occasion gave us money “to treat the girls.”

As nurses, some of them were outstanding. I believe that a staff nurse, Martha Moroney, saved my sanity when I was having my leg lengthened. Her calmness and superb nursing skill saved me a great deal of pain and I want to thank her here, some 42 years later. Perhaps I remember her particularly in contrast to another staff nurse at the time, who I dreaded coming near my leg.

Among other great healers were Fritz, and Staff Nurse O’Callaghan, also both deeply calm in a crisis. Some have a healing touch and others don’t and one doesn’t forget it. I have been in hospital a lot since then, and their skill and demeanour has always been the gold nursing standard for me.

It must have been 1966 when Mr O’Malley, Minister for Education, swept through the wards and decided there should be a secondary school in Cappagh. It was held in the more spacious girls’ ward, and the teacher chosen was the bi-lingual novelist and poet Eoghan O Tuairisc/Eugene Watters. His first wife had recently died and he took the post to help him endure his bereavement. It was more like a university, or perhaps a hedge-school, than an orthodox secondary school, though of course the curriculum was addressed. Arriving in beds and wheelchairs and on crutches, there were no benches. We were encouraged to think and to ask questions. He lectured us on the Bible, including, if memory serves me, the Song of Songs, and he lectured us on John Keats, a great literary love of his. He had just won an Oireachtas prize for one of his books, and he put up a monetary prize for the best essay on Keats, which I won – my first literary prize. But the best moment of education I have ever received happened by accident.
Mossy D. had a spinal problem, and was confined, on his back, to a striker, a narrow, semi-rotating bed. Mossy must have been sleep-deprived, but in any case he fell asleep in Eoghan’s class, whereupon there were cries of “Sir! Sir! Mossy’s asleep.”

Eoghan put his finger to his lips and shusshed us.

“Listen,” he said slowly and quietly, “to the beautiful sound … of the human body at rest.”

First published in the Cappagh Centenary Commemorative Book, 2008

The passage is from a chapter called The Frozen Moment, and his remark about homeopathy is an aside, but nonetheless arresting for that:

Professor Gary Schwartz, who works in Arizona, has pointed out that in any communication between two things, A and B, a network comes into being and a ‘feed-back’ loop is created. A memory of the relationship is formed and ‘emergent properties’ arise. In this way permanent storage of information can occur, and this can circulate indefinitely. It is not in something or out of something but circulates between both. This storage of information outside the brain happens in all kinds of situations, for example, between one person and another, between the heart and the brain, between cells and atoms, between a substance and the fluid in which it is dissolved.
(This may, for the first time, provide a scientific rationale for how homeopathy can work. Sceptics say that by the time full dilution has taken place, nothing of the original substance remains in the fluid in which it was dissolved and therefore the remedy can have no effect. But if a ‘feed-back’ loop between the substance and the fluid has been established, then the potion could be effective.)
- paperback edition, page 285

So there you have it. You’re still entitled to be sceptical.

Doctors who include homeopaths in their team see clearly that it is complementary to their orthodox practice. The two can and do co-exist to the great benefit of sick people. Does homeopathy always work? Probably not. But I can tell you from long and bitter experience that neither do antibiotics.

*image Wikipedia Commons

The Cat Flap
I’m no objectivist (I think!) but I really enjoyed
Peter Sirr’s review of The Poems of Charles Reznikoff, 1918 – 1975, and while I could take or leave some of the poems quoted, I thought this was marvellous.

Walk about the subway station
in a grove of steel pillars;
how their knobs, the rivet-heads–
unlike those of oaks–
are regularly placed;
how barren the ground is
except here and there on the platform
a flat black fungus
that was chewing-gum.
(Jerusalem the Golden, 18)

Rosemarie Rowley’s essays

ECT in the life and work of Sylvia Plath by Rosemarie Rowley

One of the characters in my novel The Water Star undergoes ECT and in trying to imagine it I could not see how it could be other than barbaric.
Rosemarie Rowley thoughtful and affecting essay convinces me that this is so.

Writing of the ECT as a ritual should not surprise us. It is a ritual, a modern one. The treatment is both profoundly humiliating, and barbaric, twin elements of torture. In a letter to the author of this essay, myself, Ted Hughes described it as an atrocity. He wrote to me that ECT was the crucial event in her writing

The Beckett Country Collection
The Beckett Country Collection is now online at Irish Virtual Research Library and Archive Project (IVRLA) at UCD.
The Beckett Country Collection is derived from
The Beckett Country: Catalogue of an exhibition for Samuel Beckett’s eightieth birthday. E. O’Brien and J. Knowlson. Black Cat Press. Dublin 1986... See Eoin O’Brien’s Samuel Beckett page.

Eoin O’Brien
Do further explore Renaissance Man Eoin O’Brien’s website.
Eminent cardiologist, friend and publisher of Samuel Beckett, he is also a considerable medical historian. See, for example, his Conscience and Conflict. A Biography of Sir Dominic Corrigan (1802-1880). The Glendale Press. Dublin 1983, which, as it has long been out of print, he is generously making available for free download under a Creative Commons licence, along with other medical history volumes of great value, such as The Charitable Infirmary, Jervis Street 1718-1987: A Farewell Tribute. Edited by E. O’Brien. The Anniversary Press. Dublin. 1987. pp.279. Illustrated..
Many of his voluminous papers and essays are likewise available. It’s quite a monument to a life’s work, and is still growing.

The Dublin Review of Books

The Dublin Review of Books is proving to be a most stimulating online review, allowing critics to flex their critical muscles in essays up to 7,000 words in length. Such reviews have only been available to tiny audiences in Ireland, and it’s a particular pleasure to see such intellectual stimulus online, for free. The Phantom of Exclusion, by Barra Ó Seaghdha’s review of Surveying Irish Poetry
Modern Irish Poetry, 1800-2000, by Justin Quinn, Cambridge University Press, 256 pp, £14.99, 978-0521609258, is a fine example of this.

Chris Singleton
Finally, he gets in this post as he writes fine lyrics, but Dublin solo artist Chris Singleton’s Rock and Roll and Hyperbole recently had a very interesting post on how musicians can track how and when their music is being listened to. Here’s an excerpt:

With the rise of social networks like Facebook, Myspace, iLike and Last FM, musicians now have a plethora of ways to measure how many people are listening to their music. For example, any band with a Myspace page will be able to see how many plays of their songs they are getting; which tracks tend to be more popular; and how many songs are downloaded (as opposed to just listened to).

The permalink for the full entry is here.

Canada – where a pack of smokes is ten bucks and a heart transplant is free.

Hurler regains sight after ‘miracle’ diet supplement

In these short dark days of the Northern Hemisphere, when everyone is supposed to be happy, there are a significant number of people who are depressed by the lack of light, the commercialism, life in general. Posting this video here is a little present for such people and for anyone who has ever been depressed, whether clinically or temporarily.

Once again it’s a TED Talk, but they just keep getting better.

Sherwin Nuland, the surgeon and author, talks about the development of electroshock therapy as a cure for severe, life-threatening depression. Midway through, his story turns personal. It’s a moving and deeply felt talk about relief, redemption, second chances.

I have always found the idea of electric shock therapy to be abhorrent, but this, from a person who experienced it, has made me think again. See what you think.

Especially to all of those who I haven’t managed to contact this year (most of my friends and greater family) -

Happy Solstice, Christmas, Holidays and New Year

Enzymes are classified into several groups. Hydrolytic enzymes are the most relevant in clinical nutrition, and they are of three major groups:

1) Digestive enzymes—manufactured by digestive organs to assist in digesting food;
2) Food enzymes—found in all raw, uncooked food;
3) Metabolic enzymes—manufactured by all cells to carry out their respective functions.
Although there are many classes and sub-classes of digestive enzymes, there are four general enzymes considered here:
• Amylase—digests starches, including grains and starchy vegetables;
• Cellulase—breaks down plant fibre;
• Lipase—splits apart fats and oils into fatty acids;
• Protease—breaks down protein into amino acids and small-chain peptides.
Probably the most familiar of the amylases is lactase. People who are lactose intolerant are both deficient in and lack the ability to manufacture this enzyme.

All the above, except cellulase, are manufactured in the human body.

The Essentials of Enzyme Nutrition Therapy

Of course because the site promotes the benefits of marijuana, many will be sceptical. But I’ve been sceptical about the arguments of the anti-marijuana lobby for a long time. To paraphrase Shakespeare, methinks they protest too much. When it comes to people suffering and dying I think we’ve an obligation to have an open mind.

For the record, I don’t do cigarettes, marijuana or any other kind of drug bar alcohol – the latter in pathetic moderation these days – and the occasional painkiller. My only real drug is the internet. But when I see people suffering and dying, and what they have to endure as conventional treatment, I have to ask myself what harm a regular puff would do them?

And I haven’t been given a satisfactory answer.

I remember the sheer relief of morphine when I was in hospital. It’s a high, there’s no doubt. although the last time I had it they give it in controlled feeds, not the once off blast from an injection (pity, that). I know from experience it’s highly addictive. Yet a natural substance which is not addictive, or at least not within a million miles as addictive as morphine, is looked on with horror. Why?

Just as architects who design hospitals should be confined to bed in one for a minimum of six weeks, preferably in full-body plaster, politicians who jump to ban beneficial substances should be put through a pain programme for a similar period, and given relief only when they promise to have an open mind. That would change the world for the better really, really fast.

Who knows, we might even find a cure for cancer.

Anyway, judge for yourself.

US: Pot Shrinks Tumors; Government Knew In ’74 [via Digg]