Blindsided Read online

  The dinner over, I tried late on Saturday night to check in to my flight to Brisbane the next day, and to my horror discovered that my entire onward itinerary had been cancelled. Apparently, as soon as you don’t show up for a specific flight—as I hadn’t while snoring away in the Dubai executive lounge—all your ongoing legs are automatically cancelled. So I spent all night trying to organise a flight to Australia. Finally I contacted a friend who was high up in the airline and they agreed to get me on a flight and waive all extra costs.

  I departed the next day and arrived very early in the morning in Brisbane. That afternoon I played golf with my father at Royal Queensland Golf Club—and for someone who’d been in three different countries and barely slept for four days, I played pretty well.

  IAN LYNAGH: Michael arrived at around 6am in Brisbane and, as usual, Marie and I went to pick him up. Michael seems to enjoy coming home. We had some breakfast and went over to the golf course where I’d organised a game with a couple of friends of mine. Michael was quiet and he looked tired. He always pushes himself. He didn’t want any dinner and then he insisted that he’d walk to the bar where he was due to meet his friends in the evening. We may have made the comment that he was having a pretty tiring day by doing everything he’d done then going out at night.

  Prior to leaving for Australia, I had written to a couple of the guys I commonly kept in touch with, saying, ‘Let’s go out and have a beer.’

  There were two groups that I met with in Brisbane from time to time. The first was mainly school friends and the second was university friends and guys I’d played rugby with over the years. Because of my TV commitments, I’d been in New Zealand for the 2011 World Cup, which meant I’d missed the previous year’s informal gatherings, so I was extra keen to catch up with friends on this occasion. They were all busy guys doing different things and whenever I came over they would say, ‘Mate, this is great. You give us a reason to get together.’

  So I’d told the guys I was going to be in town and we’d arranged to assemble the two groups on successive nights. The first group agreed to meet on my first night at home, the Monday night, at 6.30pm at a place called Friday’s, a club owned by a friend of mine, down by the river in the CBD area of Brisbane. It’s a really nice spot. There’s a beautiful deck and it was meant to be a relaxing evening with friends: steak, a couple of beers and some good-humoured chat. We certainly did not have plans for a big night.

  We met as arranged, and started talking as a group of male friends usually does—telling a few old stories from the past. Well, just as I was taking a sip of my XXXX beer, a mate of mine, Peter Hancock, delivered the punchline of his story.

  The joke went down well; my beer didn’t.

  Immediately I started coughing uncontrollably.

  We’ve all done it when a drink goes down the wrong way, but this was more than normally forceful and violent. It took me a few seconds afterwards to catch my breath. I stopped coughing, gathered myself and then when I finally opened my eyes, I couldn’t focus. I could see vague shapes and colour but nothing more detailed than that. I was also very dizzy.

  PETER HANCOCK, SCHOOL FRIEND: The night started out as per usual: a group of mates sitting around having something to eat, a few beers and exchanging stories. Noddy was sitting at the head of the table and I was sitting to his immediate left. I recall telling a humorous story from our younger days. As I delivered the punchline I remember hearing Noddy start coughing as if his beer had gone down the wrong way. After a period of time (I don’t know how long), Noddy said that he couldn’t see to his left-hand side. He seemed fairly calm. At first I thought he was taking the piss.

  I sat there shaking my head for a second to see if I could regain focus. I was even composed enough to quickly analyse the likely cause and to conclude that it was probably a combination of jetlag, general tiredness and a momentary lack of oxygen caused by the cough.

  I thought, ‘It’ll come back.’

  But it didn’t come back.

  At that moment I knew that there was something not right. Over forty-something years of relying on and listening to my body, I’d become pretty tuned in to when issues were serious—and this was something completely unlike anything I’d ever felt before. It was a really weird sensation and I could also feel a blinding headache starting to develop. It was an all-encompassing pain.

  Having said all that, I could still feel and I could talk—I was still in the game, so to speak, but the lack of vision on my left side was really starting to scare me. Strangely, even then, the word ‘stroke’ never entered my mind, although I later heard that Peter Hancock had whispered, ‘I think he might be having a stroke.’

  Regardless, the details of the next few minutes are very hazy for me. Originally I thought that I was lying down for much of the time. To this day I have no idea why I thought that. But I was later told that I was sitting on my chair and able to talk quite lucidly.

  PETER HANCOCK: I think because Noddy wanted us to call an ambulance, we all thought it was serious. I can’t speak for the others, but I was very concerned, having been through a similar ordeal with my wife, Angie.

  Ironically, an old school friend of mine, John Matson, who had travelled down from the north coast for the get-together, had literally just left. John is a GP. That left Tony McNamee—a physiotherapist and the only one of the remaining group with any kind of medical qualification—to ask, ‘Are you okay, mate?’

  ‘Give me a moment,’ I said.

  I shook my head again to try and shift the fog. Nothing changed.

  Then Tony said, ‘Shall we call an ambulance?’

  I said yes immediately.

  Sometimes you just know what’s needed. This was one of those times. You don’t second-guess that kind of instinct. I suppose I was hoping that they’d put me in an ambulance, take me to the hospital and fix it all there and then. Tony also asked me if I wanted him to call my parents and again I said yes. I had my phone in my pocket and I was able to get it out, remember the four-digit security code and tell Tony how to scroll through the menus to access my parents’ phone number—he had to because I don’t know my parents’ number by heart. I don’t even know my own number by heart.

  When the paramedics arrived—and they did so pretty rapidly—I was able to walk, with some assistance, down the steps of the club to the ambulance, but I have no recollection of the journey to hospital, probably because—I’m told—they immediately started to administer oxygen and possibly some painkillers to keep me comfortable.

  IAN LYNAGH: We got a call from Tony McNamee around 9.45pm saying that Michael had had a bad headache and couldn’t see . . . and that they’d called an ambulance as a precaution. My immediate thought was that maybe he’d had a bad migraine. A headache and vision issues? Migraine seemed the most likely explanation. Where we live is between the restaurant and the hospital and as we got ready and jumped in the car, we actually heard the ambulance going past at the end of the road. When we arrived at the hospital, Tony McNamee and another member of the group, Steven Grant, were sitting in the waiting room. At that point the ambulance had not arrived and then, shortly afterwards, we saw the ambulance pull in. We had no idea of the seriousness at this point. We still thought that he was tired, had overdone it a little maybe, which was a stupid diagnosis when you look back on it, but at that early stage nobody really knew what was wrong.

  Whatever happened after my arrival at the Royal Brisbane Hospital is mostly unclear to me. I have only fuzzy, sketchy recollections of who was there, what was said and when. Despite being given some kind of pain-relieving medication, I do remember registering that the headache was still very much there. The pain was totally debilitating.

  I also remember vaguely noting that the situation was being taken very seriously. It was a feeling in the air. Even in my dazed state I could feel the urgency and energy in the acute care unit, and the fact that Rob Henderson—head of the neurology department—was called at home also seemed indicative of the seriousn
ess.

  I should say that I knew very little about stroke. It wasn’t something I’d ever thought about and it had certainly never crossed my mind that I could have one. As far as I was concerned, stroke was something that affected older people or those with very unhealthy lifestyles. I fell into neither of those categories. I was fit for my age, still went to the gym regularly and ate reasonably healthily. I liked a glass of wine once in a while, but who doesn’t? It was going to take a while to come to terms with the fact that I’d just had a major stroke at the age of forty-eight.

  DR ROBERT HENDERSON, CONSULTANT NEUROLOGIST: I was at home when I received a phone call late at night from my on-duty staff saying simply that they had a 48-year-old ex-footie player admitted with symptoms that might suggest an acute stroke. They wanted me to have a look at the scans. No mention of a name. Now, at that time of an evening, there’s every chance that the staff who were working were probably (a) fairly young and (b) predominantly from overseas, so only when I arrived at the hospital did I realise that this wasn’t just any ex-footie player. Of course, being from Brisbane and also being in my forties, I knew exactly who Michael Lynagh was.

  The priority for the acute medical staff when someone is admitted with symptoms like mine is to establish the cause as quickly as possible—ideally within the first hour of admission. It’s a very critical stage in the treatment of stroke because, with the blood vessels still potentially unstable, the risk of another stroke is still very high. A second stroke could have meant devastating damage.

  With that in mind, the first step is usually to take a CT perfusion scan to establish what’s causing the symptoms, as well as to highlight what damage has already been done. I don’t recall the scan itself but I do remember the confirmation I received from the head neurologist, Rob Henderson, that the right (the human body has two) vertebral artery at the back of my head had dissected, causing a blood clot which in turn led to a large stroke in what was initially thought to be two areas of my brain.

  DR HENDERSON: There is a system in place whereby anyone admitted to the emergency area with symptoms suggestive of acute stroke could be given a procedure called thrombolysis within an hour of arrival. Thrombolysis is designed to dissolve blood clots in cases of acute stroke and it involves the introduction of thrombolytic drugs. When I arrived at the hospital, Michael had already had a CT perfusion scan. That scan is designed to distinguish areas of brain tissue that can be salvaged by thrombolysis from those areas that will go into infarct, or, in everyday terms, a state of tissue death. What was extremely positive was that Michael was outwardly quite healthy: his scan pictures looked much worse than he did. He was very with it and able to talk so we were able to get a clear history from him. The results of the CT perfusion scan, however, ruled thrombolysis out because it was clear to me from the images I was seeing that the stroke was not, in this case, reversible.

  The major problem for Michael was actually in a different part of his brain from where it first appeared. It first appeared that the part of the brain that controls vision—the occipital lobe—was the major problem. Although it did, in the long run, turn out to be the major issue, the bigger problem at this early stage was damage to his cerebellum—the area of the brain that controls coordination. That damage had not been too obvious initially, but for the first three days after a stroke there’s a major risk of swelling [to the cerebellum].

  Rob Henderson explained to my parents and me that the artery that had dissected was at that moment largely stable and, in fact, had blocked itself off with a clot at the initial stage, and then that block would hopefully later be reinforced by scar tissue. It scared me to think that this was actually going on in my head. But the fact that the artery was blocked was good news. If it doesn’t block off, there’s the risk of more blood leaking through to push upwards and dislodge another clot that could lead to further strokes. In some cases, if the artery doesn’t block off, surgeons can go in and surgically seal it off, but in my case that wasn’t necessary.

  IAN LYNAGH: We were outside in the hallway talking to a couple of the specialists and at that point things seemed a little more serious. Across the hallway was a glass office where all the doctors and emergency crew were. Coincidentally, from where I was sitting, I could see an x-ray they’d put up on the screen. I said to Marie: ‘Jeez, that poor guy’s in a bit of trouble.’ I could see a big blob at the base of the occipital area—it was the size of a fist, maybe even bigger. ‘I hope to God that’s not Michael’s brain,’ I went on to add. Not for a single second did I think it was, but, as it turned out, that’s exactly what I was looking at. We waited for another fifteen minutes and then a group—including Rob Henderson—came to talk to us. I don’t recall a lot of the information he gave us at the time. I was still in shock.

  MARIE LYNAGH: By this time Michael had given me all his personal possessions—his wallet, keys and phone—but before we left for the night, he insisted that I give him his phone so he could call Isabella. I told him that he wasn’t allowed to call from the emergency area. ‘I don’t care. I have to call Isabella,’ he said. And he did. The other thing he was very concerned about was his commitments to Sky Sports that weekend, so we agreed that we’d call them first thing the following morning to explain what had happened.

  After I spoke to Isabella that night, I felt a little more relaxed. The call was definitely emotional—it’s a phone call that nobody ever wants to have to make. Despite the dire situation I was in, my aim was to assure her that I was in the best possible place. ‘I’ll be fine. The doctors know what they’re doing—just focus on the boys,’ I said.

  I was already pretty certain that I didn’t want her to drop everything and fly to Australia. I actually felt it might hinder my recovery, as I’d be worrying about where the family would stay and the fact that the boys were missing school. Also, there really wasn’t much they could do. I thought that it was more important for Isabella and the boys to maintain their routine. I also didn’t want to send a negative message to the boys. It was hard to do, but I wanted to make a mature decision for everyone’s sake. I thought that to panic and fly Isabella and the kids out would have made it seem as if I was preparing to see them for the last time. I thought that would be a knee-jerk reaction. Weak. I was more interested in maintaining, as far as possible, a degree of normality in a ‘Dad’s going to be fine’ kind of way.

  ISABELLA LYNAGH: I was actually under a bit of pressure from some friends that were saying: ‘What are you doing? Your husband is in hospital. You go, we’ll look after the kids.’ It started to get to me after a while. I was talking to Michael and we had discussed what the best thing to do was. I was acting on his wishes—what we both thought was best for all of us. It proved to be the right decision.

  I wanted to transmit to Isabella and the boys a sense that the situation was under control, even if it wasn’t. I always think that there are certain things children need to be shielded from, to some degree, and me being in hospital in a critical condition, thousands of miles away, was definitely one of them. Their feelings were much more important than mine at that moment.

  ISABELLA LYNAGH: Michael was obviously heavily sedated, but he was still very lucid. He told me what happened, about choking on the beer and that he had this big headache. He also told me that he couldn’t see very well. He was very reassuring and I think that’s one of the reasons I kept my sanity. It’s in Michael’s nature to play things down sometimes and he does that so that I don’t worry too much. He just wanted everything at home to be calm and for us to carry on as normal. Michael actually spoke to me every day while he was in hospital. He doesn’t remember that, but he did.

  The following morning was when the full enormity of what had happened dawned on me. My parents and I met with Rob Henderson and Craig Winter, another of the senior neurologists. They showed us the scan images and explained exactly what they meant. Rob pointed to a large area of swelling at the base of my skull, very close to my brain stem. It wasn’t good news.
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br />   In addition to the small area of stroke around my right vertebral artery that was causing the loss of vision on my left side (the medical term is hemiopia), there was another area of even greater concern. A separate part of my brain—the cerebellum—was also showing significant stroke damage. It’s the part of the brain that controls coordination and it was this section that had swollen and was at risk from further swelling. It was a major worry. The already swollen cerebellum was fractions of millimetres away from pressing down on my brain stem, and if that happened the results would be catastrophic. I was likely to die, the surgeons said.

  Die?

  That word really hit me hard.

  I guess I just wasn’t ready to confront my mortality so suddenly. Are you ever ready? The severity of my situation didn’t seem real, because of how able I was and felt. There I was, I’d survived a massive stroke when others often don’t, but there was still a possibility that I might not survive. That possibility was hard to fathom.

  ISABELLA LYNAGH: Michael’s mum rang me and said, ‘Isabella, this could all go very badly, very shortly.’ She explained to me about the swelling and that really freaked me out. I couldn’t comprehend how serious it was because I’d been talking to him and he seemed fine. My best friend told me later that she saw me crying outside school the day Marie called. I tried to stay strong. Completely losing it, with my husband in a critical condition in Australia and me stuck in England with the kids, wouldn’t have helped anybody. So I tried to stay strong for everyone. I knew it was the right thing for me not to fly to Brisbane. Part of me knew he’d make it.

  In 1993, when he was sick with peritonitis, I remember his dad ringing me and saying he was in a really bad way. My feeling was, again, ‘It just can’t end this way.’ Our relationship had started so magically and I had a really strong belief that this was not the way the story was going to end. I kept telling him to stay strong. I even lay in bed at night, consciously sending all my positive energy his way.