“THERE IS NO point dwelling on what might or could have been. The past has happened and cannot be changed; it can only be accepted. Life is much simpler and much happier when you always look at what you can do, not what you can’t do.”
– Henry Fraser, The Little Big Things.
Galway in the afternoon sun as spring turns to summer. No better city in the world on days like this, the locals will tell you. It’s hard to disagree.
Ciarán Gaffney answers the phone on his lunch break, looking out over the Corrib. The peace and quiet punctuated only by the gulls in the background. A good release, space to breathe, time to think.
The 23-year-old has another couple of months left on his internship in the marketing and communications department of NUI Galway, and will then graduate with a Masters in July. He’s enjoying it, but that’s when the job hunt will start.
With an undergraduate degree in Commerce and French, Gaffney’s intention is to go into management consultancy, although he knows that will likely involve a move to Dublin.
“Somewhere in between accounting and marketing, I think,” he says. That’s the plan, but Gaffney is just taking each step and day as it comes. Just trying to figure it all out, trying to find the right path. He knows it will take time, and knows first hand how quickly things can change. He is no longer Ciarán Gaffney the rugby player.
It’s a little over a year since the Galway native lay stricken and lifeless on the Sportsground pitch not far from here, and just eight months since he returned home from Parma facing into the reality of retirement at 23. That Gaffney is where he is so soon after is a testament to his mental strength, motivation and positive outlook.
This time last year, he was in a neck brace in a high-performance rehabilitation centre in Bordeaux recovering from a six-hour operation which ultimately ensured he would not be paralysed for the rest of his life.
Gaffney sustained the career-ending, life-changing injury seven minutes into his return to Galway in February of last year. Playing for Italian side Zebre, he hoped to impress against his former club Connacht, having come up through the province’s academy. Instead, it was to be his last game of rugby.
The incident was relatively innocuous. He collected a clearing kick and looked to run it back at the Connacht line. There was space to exploit and it was a chance to turn defence into attack. Gaffney remembers it vividly. He remembers the tackle, the contact and the crack. A dislocated neck, a ruptured disc in his back. In that split-second, back in Galway of all places, his life changed.
“It’s something I’ll never forget,” he explains. “The feeling of helplessness. The pain. Lying there with your eyes staring up to the ceiling, not knowing where you are in the sense I was just being stretchered from room to room.
“I’d be pretty claustrophobic at the best of times. I don’t know what the medics call it but I was definitely having a full-on panic attack. My breathing was all over the place. I’m indebted to Orla Armstrong, the Connacht physio, who came in and saw me in this frantic state and she was like ‘Just breathe. Count to 10, count back to zero, count to 20, count back to zero’ and just by focusing on that, it helped calm me down.
“It was a mixture of pain and fear. I knew something serious had happened. I couldn’t move my neck or my head at all. That’s something, the feeling, that will never leave me.”
Gaffney was rushed to University Hospital Galway, where he was cut out of his Zebre jersey and spent three sleepless days and nights in unspeakable pain before doctors were able to decide on the best course of action. It was a time of incredible uncertainty, worry and distress.
Eventually, Gaffney was operated on by orthopaedic surgeon Fergus Byrne, who cut through the front of his neck to remove the ruptured piece of the disk, replace it with an artificial disk and then bolt it together with the C5 and C6. The risk was huge, but there was no other option.
“I remember the pain, no amount of pain killers could ever dim it,” Gaffney continues. “But I could only think of a missed opportunity at the time. All I could think about was this was my chance to impress in front of my home people.
“This was the game I was really looking forward to all season. Since the fixtures came out, it was ‘When is Connacht away, when do I get to play in the Sportsground again?’
“Because that was ultimately my goal, to impress enough to get a contract back playing for Connacht again. That’s what was going through my head at the time. This is my opportunity gone and then obviously the seriousness of it hit home, but in my head, I was going to get back playing. All I needed was the doctor to tell me there was an x per cent chance of me getting back.”
The surgery was a success, but he remained in a neck brace for six weeks and a long and complicated road to recovery began. Gaffney travelled to France for expert care and rehab before returning to Parma, where he continued to make progress but the possibility of him ever playing again diminished as the weeks went by.
On the recommendation of a number of doctors, the fullback had to make the difficult decision to retire from rugby in August of last summer, a crushing and cruel blow for a player only really making his first steps in the professional game.
Although comforted by the fact he was fortunate to escape without permanent disability, the weeks and months which followed were unimaginably difficult for Gaffney as he came to terms with the sudden and unexpected nature of his retirement.
“I was scared to join the real world,” he says. “It has been difficult. I was struggling to fall asleep at night. When you’re a professional rugby player, you’re flat out training five days a week. To go from that level of activity to next to nothing, I was really restless.
“I’m naturally an over-thinker and that manifested itself into not sleeping at night. It’s probably a natural reaction to the unexpectedness of everything and the suddenness of it. You think about it.”
Back in September, just weeks after Gaffney’s retirement was confirmed, he was invited back to the Sportsground by Connacht ahead of their Pro14 game against Zebre, the same fixture he had sustained the injury in the February previous. That was too much for him. He walked out of the ground after 60 minutes, simply unable to sit there and watch.
“That was a painful experience. I couldn’t bear it. That should be me out there. It was also the fact it was the same fixture six months previous to that. It was a reminder of it all, that career-defining, life-defining week or incident. It was too soon.”
Gaffney still experiences difficult days, and there will almost certainly always be highs and lows, but he is in a much better head space now. Finding a new purpose, a new challenge and a new direction has helped.
“I didn’t want to dwell on it and get down about the hand I was dealt. The first two months were tough and it’s easy to get stuck in a rut but I wanted something to drag me out of bed in the morning. I thought going back down the education route would be best for me.
“With the Masters, I have been kept busy and through a lot of open and honest conversations with family and friends, I realised there is a lot more to life than rugby. Yes, it was my dream, but shit happens to everyone at some point in their life. I was actually quite lucky.”
Other than general stiffness in the neck and shoulder area, Gaffney incredibly escaped any long-term damage.
He continues: “It’s something that I try and constantly remind myself, as bad and heartbreaking as it is that I had to retire so young, it could have been so much worse. It’s something I try and draw on whenever I’m feeling sorry for myself. I got away with it.
“I’ve read a lot of books and one of them was Henry Fraser’s, who was an exciting prospect in the Saracens academy. He was in Portugal with his friends and went to dive into the water and ended up hitting the base of the sand and was instantly paralysed from the neck down. It’s an inspiring story. One of his mantras is accept and adapt and I’ve tried to take that on with me.
“Whenever I’m down in the dumps or feeling sorry for myself about not being able to play a game, as that’s all it is at the end of the day, I’ve got to remind myself that there’s a lot more to life than rugby.
Rugby is a 10-year career, it’s not going to define you as a person. That’s the way I’ve tried to look at it. I have to accept it, adapt and spin it in a positive direction.
Gaffney has learned to focus on the right things, and avoid the wrong, but that process has taken time. What happened that night, on 16 February 2018, will always be there and no doubt remain difficult to comprehend, yet he has already found a new path in life and fresh impetus.
“That’s it, there are positives, you just need to look at it that way. I think I’m dealing with it quite well. A lot of my close friends would be involved in rugby so it’s still there and I’d still love to be out there, but I’m not. My life is different now, it doesn’t revolve around rugby.
“Ultimately I’m trying to now find something that will give me the fulfilment like I would have got from rugby, and I’m really interested in team cultures and would have learned a lot from someone like Pat Lam. That’s why I think management consultancy would suit me. We’ll see. One step at a time.”
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