Former RTE journalist Valerie Cox on how a life-saving mission almost led to the death of her husband
THE last time I sat at Valerie and Brian Cox’s kitchen table, in March 2016, the sideboard was filled with good luck cards following Valerie’s retirement from RTÉ. Today, in their place, are Get Well Soon cards.
Just a few weeks after we last met, Brian was in a coma, at death’s door, on a remote Greek island. One day, Brian and Valerie were serving food to desperate crisis-stricken refugees on the island of Chios; the next, Brian was struck down with a deadly brain virus and the Coxes were in the grip of a lifeand-death crisis of their own.
Over the past 18 months, Valerie — who we all know and love from her years giving us our morning dose of It Says In The Papers on RTÉ Radio 1 — and retired school principal, Brian, have been to hell and back. ‘It’s a miracle Brian is still with us — there’s a God somewhere,’ says Valerie, looking lovingly across the table at Brian, her husband of 43 years. Brian is in chatty form, but has lost around two stone since the last time I saw him, and now uses a Zimmer frame.
‘They told me Brian might never wake up — nobody expected him to make the recovery he did,’ says Valerie.
Brian nods his head. ‘I keep thinking aloud and quietly that I’ve been very, very lucky. Other people point out how bad I was. I don’t remember. It is thanks to the caring people, not just doctors — but truly helpful people and I’ll always remember that. And maybe it was more than that. I can’t prove it, but I believe it was the hand of God.’
When we last met Valerie and Brian had no plans to put their feet up — far from it. Their suitcases were packed for their third trip to help refugees in Greece, escaping wartorn Syria. Plenty of people thought Valerie, 66, and Brian, now 74, were mad when they made the snap decision to head to Greece to join volunteers in the autumn of 2015.
Moved by heartbreaking photographs of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi’s body washed up on a Turkish beach, the Coxes — who have five children and four grandchildren — decided over a glass of wine in the garden one evening to cancel their holiday to the Norwegian fjords, and instead book flights to the Greek island of Kos.
Arriving with 13 suitcases of clothes and supplies, they spent most nights sitting by the water’s edge with their torches, waiting for the boats. They plucked mothers, babies and grandparents — making the treacherous night crossing over the Aegean Sea from Turkey — from flimsy, overloaded dinghies.
In January, they returned to Kos and Leros, with their garda son, Eoin and a film crew to make a harrowing documentary, which aired on RTÉ, revealing the savagery of the unfolding humanitarian catastrophe.
For their third mission last March, they flew to Athens to work with some of the thousands of refugees, locked out of Europe, and in limbo, now holed up in derelict squats. Valerie and Brian mucked in, buying clothes and food before flying out to refugee camps on Chios. But then one morning, Brian fell ill.
‘At one stage, they told me he might never wake up’
‘He woke up with vertigo — there are no doctors there, so we went to the hospital,’ remembers Valerie. ‘They gave him tablets but he was a lot wobblier the next morning, and by the next day, he could hardly move — so I had to carry him to the hospital.’ Brian remembers nothing about his time in the tiny hospital on Chios, where doctors believed he’d suffered a stroke.
But the truth was a lot more sinister. Brian had contracted herpes simplex viral encephalitis (HSE), a rare, one-in-two-million condition, triggered when the cold-sore virus enters the brain. If not treated within a few days, 70-80 per cent of HSE victims die. But doctors weren’t treating Brian for HSE, as they had wrongly diagnosed him.
‘I got a phone call from the hospital on Saturday night to tell me to come quick, that Brian was very bad,’ says Val. ‘That weekend was a Greek Orthodox festival, so I’d to drive down through the port, the streets teeming with everyone out celebrating, and crackers going off with the tears streaming down my face.’
‘It’s a poor place with basic facilities — at night in the hospital, it’s up to families to look after patients, so there were around ten family members at each bed and three chairs between us. Brian couldn’t get out of bed.’ He continued to go downhill. By the Tuesday afternoon, Val’s daughter, Maeve had arrived and was at Brian’s bedside with Val. ‘Next thing he had a brain seizure,’ says Val. ‘It was the most frightening thing I’ve ever seen. He kept saying: “Help me, help me”.
‘We shouted but couldn’t find a doctor or a nurse — nobody. I told Maeve to video Brian. The seizure went on for two minutes, but felt like an eternity. I put a wet towel on his face. Then he fell unconscious.
‘When the nurse finally came in, there was chaos. He needed to be intubated to get him breathing. They inserted a tube into his throat and whisked him away and we couldn’t see him for a few hours. Their English was very basic and facilities were so basic — they didn’t have an ICU.’
Valerie wanted Brian immediately airlifted to an Athens hospital but doctors feared he wouldn’t survive the trip. By then, he was in a coma and on a ventilator.
Meanwhile, Maeve leapt into action. ‘Maeve fought with everyone to get things done — Laya Healthcare were fantastic,’ Val explains. ‘The next day, Brian was more stable and we finally got him off the island two days later. It was a lot of trouble to find a
‘I can’t prove it, but I believe the hand of God saved me’
heavy plane — he had a lot of equipment with him. The plane came in at night and the ambulance took him to the airport.’
In Athens, Brian was taken to Hygeia Hospital, a state-of-the-art facility, where he was treated by world-class consultants and within a few hours, was properly diagnosed.
‘They tried to explain how serious it was and stayed with us, talking to us through the night.
‘Afterwards, they told us they thought Brian was going to go that night,’ she says. By then, Val and Brian’s other children, Brian Jr, Emily, Eoin and Aengus had reached Athens, along with Val’s sister Iris Condron and a family friend from Cyprus. ‘We got the prayers going back home,’ smiles Valerie. ‘We’d loads of Muslims praying for Brian, loads of Catholics and even atheists.’
After two months in a coma in Athens, at the start of June they were given the green light to travel back home to Dublin.
Val revels in telling the story of their action-packed journey home by air ambulance. ‘It was extraordinary — like something out of James Bond. We were taken through the VIP part of the airport, for the millionaires with private planes and I was taken by limo out to the plane — there was a police car, flashing lights, and a fancy Learjet with a long wing awaiting us. The jet had been stripped out and turned it into an ICU.’
‘When we got out on the tarmac at Dublin Airport, Brian momentarily woke up. The crew were German and Brian’s a German teacher so I told them: “keep talking”. I gave him a kiss and said “Brian, you’re home.”’
Brian was whisked to St Vincent’s Hospital, where he remained, unconscious, in ICU, for five weeks.
‘They saved his life, no doubt about it,’ says Val. ‘Professor Chris McGuigan pulled Brian back from the brink. Brian was at death’s door. ‘At one stage, in the June, they told me he might never wake up. The family