Jim Murty
Warrior Orla gives voice to everyone suffering from CF
ORLA TINSLEY: WARRIOR
Monday RTÉ One, 9.35pm
WE all tend to take our breathing for granted... it’s as easy as, well, breathing. Not Orla Tinsley however who, for as long as she can remember, has been a prisoner of her lungs.
This year though she has a brand new set that she got for Christmas – and in May she celebrated by doing something the rest of us don’t even give a second thought about... she blew out the candles on her birthday cake.
Orla has good reason to be glad to say goodbye to 30 and welcome in a 31st year she thought she might never see.
For cystic fibrosis sufferer Orla spent the second half of last year fighting her own body and losing.
Six times the Kildare native answered the call from a hospital in New York, where she is living and studying, that a set of lungs had become available for her... only for her hopes to be dashed when they didn’t match.
And with every rejection her health deteriorated to the point when ten days before Christmas she phoned her mother Patricia to ask her to take her to hospital because in Patricia’s words: ‘She was breathing like a fish through her mouth.’
Orla was immediately put on life support.
That we know now that Orla did get a double lung transplant just before Christmas allows us all to get through this heartrending and beautifully-paced documentary in one piece. But we are carried along still on the rollercoaster of emotions, not least when Patricia puts up the Christmas Tree in her apartment and Orla beseeches the gods: ‘I hope these lungs come soon.’
With a smile, of course, because Orla is, in her own words, ‘a ninja.’
We first meet Orla Tinsley in the New York Met dragging a canister of oxygen behind her. Of course we have come to feel we know her already because of her fearless campaigning for CF and the donor programme.
Orla, who is doing a Masters in Creative Writing at Columbia University, is addressing her mortality in typically playful and challenging Orla-style.
She is lying down next to a mummy wondering what it would be like to be dead.
‘We should laugh at death, guys, If we understood it better
we’d know not to be scared.’ she said.
And she is engaging with the marble statue of an Amazon wounded warrior who ‘embodies everything I admire in womanhood: strength and the ability to be independent’.
Orla may have been propelled into the role of CF crusader but her real calling is writing and this exchange with the Amazon and the reaction of a Met workman to the statue inspire her to pen an essay for class.
The workman had dwelt on the Amazon showing a breast which sparked Orla to rail: ‘She didn’t deserve to have that sort of objectification.’
Her tutor challenges her view so he can draw more out of her as we are given a glimpse into the academic thrust and parry she longs for, but is increasingly being denied because of her condition.
We also see here that as independent a woman as Orla is she is surrounded by an invaluable network of friends, among them Quentin and Jack, who have come out to stay with her, a loving brother, and ordinary extraordinary parents in Brian and Patricia.
Patricia speaks to every mother when she says she’ll know that Orla is truly well when she has to run after her just to keep up.
Mum knows Orla better than anyone, of course, and she’s always had that insight. It’s just that Orla has been waiting for her body to catch up.