‘Men are slow to get checked out, I knew there was something wrong but I let the pain go on’
THE BIG INTERVIEW: Jimmy Geoghegan with JIMMY MCGUINNESS
The pain shot through his body with overwhelming ferocity. It was pain direct from hell and it brought Jimmy McGuinness to places where he had never been before - and never wants to go back to again.
It was a Monday morning just over a month ago and the Kilmessan man was at home close to Navan Rugby Club having just finished his shift in Tara Mines. There was nothing unusual in that; he had been working in the Mines for years and shift work was simply part of his normal routine.
This Monday morning was different. This Monday morning his world went a bit mad; it literally turned upside down. The former Meath footballer, who won an All-Ireland SFC medal in 1996, had been getting episodes previously when he would find himself in the grip of a terrible pain.
They were moments when he would be seized and immobilised by the savagery of it before, after an hour or so, it would subside. This time it was different. This time the pain persisted and brought him low. Very low.
“I thought I was going to die, you think you are going to die the pain is so bad. You think there is no way out of this, the pain is so bad. You want to just lie down but you can't,” he recalls.
McGuinness - who is married to Sandra, with a daughter Jade (24), who is a teacher, and James (10) - is sitting in his back garden.
The sun is shining. Conditions are pleasant and summer-like but what he was describing was anything but agreeable or soothing as he looked back on a series of dramatic events on that Monday morning a few weeks previously that brought him close to the precipice.
“I don't know if I was going in or out of consciousness before I made the decision,” he adds. “I decided I had to get an ambulance, I couldn't continue like this. I had a hand down my throat trying to make myself sick. I had seen people do that and I was trying to get my hand down my throat to get whatever I had out but there was only water. I was trying to make myself sick to relieve the pain.”
He was taken to Navan Hospital before he was transferred to Connolly in Blanchardstown. “I was in a bad way going to Connolly, really bad way, I was going in and out of consciousness. I really can't remember the first two or three days there, maybe bits of them. I just wanted morphine, morphine and painkillers. I wanted morphine and those other painkillers that are very popular in America, they are so powerful you can only get three of them at a time here. I needed something.”
He recalls how there was a real sense of urgency in the way he was brought to hospital - all the hurly burly made him suspect something had gone badly wrong with him. Really wrong. “I knew there was something up,” he says now. “Someone told me I was within an hour of getting diabetes.”
A problem with his pancreas was eventually identified as the culprit of the intense pain. “The pancreas is making the juice or enzymes for the stomach but they weren't getting through to the stomach, gall stones were blocking the ducts, those enzymes are very strong and will destroy anything near them.”
The past few weeks have been anything but easy for Jimmy McGuinness but now he's on the way back. He's been through a lot but by highlighting his own struggles he hopes he can help others. To reinforce the point that if you feel something is wrong, get help. Now.
“Men are slow to get checked out, unfortunately. I knew there was something wrong but I let the pain go on.”
ALL-IRELAND GLORY
As a young man Jimmy McGuinness lived for sport. He played hurling with Kilmessan and football with Dunsany and loved it all. He was very good too and was part of the Meath team that would the county's first and only All-Ireland u-21 FC crown in 1993, his six foot two frame and ability to win and distribute the ball part of the team's formidable armoury.
McGuinness graduated onto the Meath senior panel and became an integral part of a new Meath team Sean Boylan was building in the 1990s along with others including Paddy Reynolds, Trevor Giles, and Graham Geraghty - now McGuinness' brother-in-law, who endured his own health issues last year.
By 1996 McGuinness was an established part of the side that made their way to the 1996 All-Ireland final where they defeated Mayo after a replay. In that second game there was a mother and father of a row between players from both sides that has since morphed into GAA legend.
After the bust up to end all bust ups two players - Meath's Colm Coyle and Mayo's Liam McHale were sent-off. McGuinness was one, but only one of many, who joined in the fray. In an after-match inquiry the Kilmessan man received a six-month suspension.
“The rule is one in, all in. I was only 23 and a lot of the guys on the team were more experienced than me, so to single a player out like I was, it did affect me, because I felt it was very unfair and unjust,” he adds. “No-one goes out on the field to start a fight, to bring the game into disrepute, one in all in is a mantra most teams use.”
Despite episodes like that McGuinness loved his time as an inter-county footballer. He relished the challenges that he faced at that level and there were plenty of tests to overcome. All kinds of mental and physical tests.
“Every time you went out to play a game it was a mental challenge, a lot of the training with Sean was a mental challenge. I have no doubt they were part of Sean's way of finding out what players would stick it on on the pitch and keep going. The thinking was, OK it doesn't matter how long something takes, but don't quit, that was instilled in us.
“That's the way Boylan picked his players. It was so, so easy to make an excuse when the training got hard to opt out, so easy, but you had to stick at it,” he added. “We never complained, if we were hit hard on the field of play, we kept going. That's still in me to this day, get over it, and I'm hoping that mantra will make me strong now.”
HEALTH
When his football career was over Jimmy McGuinness enjoyed a game of golf. It was out on the course he could indulge his fiercely competitive spirit. As the years passed he found himself grappling with something else that tested his resolve and spirit; the curse of the modern age - anxiety.
In recent years anxiety came to undermine his health and quality of life. Sleep was often a stranger to him. A tendency to spend a day off here and there indulging in a few cans of beer while listening to his favourite bands such as Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, relaxed him to some extent but the health issues remained.
“I had lost weight but I was pounding the roads walking and then I gave up drinking,” he says. “I was still getting unbelievable bouts of anxiety even though they were slowly subsiding. Anxiety, it's just so draining, you're trying to be stable for people to talk to them but you just have no energy to be talking to them, that's what it is like. It just drains you.
“You have that feeling all the time that something big is going to happen to you. The way I use to deal with the anxiety is go for a walk, I would walk around Navan, maybe 10, 15 miles at a time. I would have my earphones in, the music on, and just walk.”
All the walking helped but he still felt unwell from time to time and lost two stone in weight. He particularly felt unwell on that Monday morning in late April when the walls of his world fell in around him as the pain gripped him like a vice. He knew he needed help.
While he was in hospital McGuinness has undergone many tests. He has also been looked after by a Meath football legend who he has great time for - Dr Gerry McEntee. “Gerry is my god and I don't mind saying that,” he says.
While the past months and weeks have had contained plenty of anguish and pain for McGuinness there have been happy, humorous moments too.
He recalls with a broad smile the banter with other patients in his hospital ward, Dubs, who gave him plenty of slagging. He responded in kind. He loved it all and laughed heartily.
Now out of hospital a few weeks he has had to keep a close watch on his diet. He takes nutritional drinks to build him up again. He knows he still has many challenges to face on his journey back to full health but he's in a better place now. Certainly better than he was on that Monday morning a little over a month ago.
At least he no longer gets that savage pain from hell that made his life a misery. That is certainly something.