IRELAND RUGBY INTERNATIONAL Kathryn Dane has opened up on the events surrounding a brain haemorrhage which she suffered last year, and her ongoing recovery.
Dane first revealed her health scare to the public in February, three months on from the event which took place at international training.
The 26-year-old scrum-half said at the time that the IRFU medical team were close by to respond quickly and help get her to hospital. Speaking to the media today, she explained that she was brought to Connolly Hospital when she first began showing symptoms and an MRI was carried out to confirm her diagnosis. She was then moved to Beaumont for further treatment.
Dane says that life for her now is “as normal as it can be” but that her general health is “really good right now.”
She may also require additional treatment to eliminate the risk of another similar event.
“It was just a normal day of training,” she begins, “I was rehabbing an ACL injury I had. I was in at 7am doing some warm-up sets of hip-thrusts with my S&C coach Ed Slattery, and just got this massive pain behind my right eye in the back of my head. I didn’t feel great, but up until that point I was 100%, I was feeling fine. Ed noticed straight away that my face had dropped. I didn’t notice it had dropped, but I didn’t feel great and he quickly got the team doc, who was actually in the gym at the time, to have a look at me, and they knew straight away I had had a stroke of some description.
“I went to the medical room, lots of reassurance, got me an ambulance and I think I was in Connolly hospital within around 15 minutes, which was really lucky, it was so fortunate it happened where it happened. It was scary and a bit shocking at the time, but with my physio background I knew what was happening but it wasn’t confirmed until I got to hospital that it was hemorrhage from a thing called an AVM [Arteriovenous Malformations] that I was born with but didn’t know about it until it burst.”
Dane explained that an AVM is essentially a “vulnerable vessel” which can burst when under high pressure or strain.
Commenting on what her future in rugby will be, Dane added:
“We’re very much just playing it day by day, week by week at the moment. I’m really lucky that I’m in the full-time programme doing all my gym sessions and off-field conditioning sessions, and hopefully get running in the next four or five weeks and play it by ear.”
Dane, who is a chartered physiotherapist and is currently working on a PhD, says that her medical background was a help to her during the ordeal. She had treated stroke patients in the past and did consider what her life might be like based on her experience with those cases.
“I also then remembered patients who’d had multiple strokes from the exact same thing and I thought ‘Oh, is my life going to look like that. I don’t want to be one of those people who has to keep looking over my shoulder.’ I’ve never lived in fear before but when something like this happens to you out of the blue you do think ‘Gosh, I’m vulnerable’ for the first time in my life. It is beneficial to have that knowledge but at the same time ignorance is bliss sometimes!”
Dane was discharged from hospital after about two weeks and continued her recovery at home in Fermanagh. She was assigned to a brain injury team and was instructed to manage her energy levels to combat fatigue and headaches which she developed in the beginning. To try and help her make sense of what had happened, she spoke to other athletes who had been through something similar, including retired rugby player Chris Henry. Henry suffered a mini-stroke on the morning of Ireland’s 2015 November Test against South Africa in Dublin.
“I spoke to Chris about a month ago and he was really really helpful, talking about his experience. That kind of peer support was really helpful, he actually gave me so much energy and really motivated me to get after my training and see where it takes me. He reminded me that I’m still super young and our bodies are incredible and if I can get back on a pitch then I might as well try.”
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