‘A drink-driving accident left me with horrific injuries –I don’t want others to make the same mistakes’
A car crash caused by his own drink-driving sent Shane Mullins into a coma. Here, he tells Emily Hourican about his recovery process and how he wants to use the experience to change the lives of young people with his self-help programme
Shane Mullins (32) was just 18 in 2005 when he had the car accident that changed his life. From this he has created a life-system of physical and psychological self-reliance and determination. “I was a bit wild,” he says frankly, of the person he was before the accident. “Since I was 14, I was working in construction and making a lot of money as a young lad. I could afford to go out. I was working hard, but partying harder.”
That night, Shane, from Galway, “went to a house party first, where I was drinking, and I drove up to the pub. On the way back to the house party after that, drink-driving again, the car crashed. There was a friend with me, but he was alright, thank God. He was discharged the night of the crash. That was a big relief. No other car was involved. I was driving. The car toppled over, hit a pillar and the pillar came through the roof. I received a brain injury and I was in a coma for three days. I lost sight in the left eye, and I lost power to my right side. I was only on the road for five months,” he says. “And that wasn’t the first time I’d driven drunk.”
He remembers nothing about the accident — “I was drunk” — but recalls waking up after the coma. “I remember waking up. I remember seeing my mother, God bless her. I couldn’t talk. I’d lost the power of speech and had to get speech therapy. My mother said ‘stick up your finger if you know it’s me’, and I stuck up my finger. I knew everything around me, I was very lucky that way. Many people with brain injuries wouldn’t. I was very lucky.”
This is something he firmly believes, that despite his horrific injuries, he is one of the lucky ones. “I was in hospital about six months,” he says. “Three months in Galway, and then three months in Dun Laoghaire in Dublin, in rehab. Learning to walk again, learning to manage with my eye, getting my right side active again. The real work didn’t start until I left hospital. When you’re in hospital, you’re surrounded by doctors, nurses, all the support you want. It’s when you’re out of it, finished with it, that the hard work really starts.” By the time he left hospital, he had a good understanding “of how much my life had changed, because I was coming out at the weekends for a day, then going back in again. I was being PEG-fed at the time, because my swallow went in the accident.
“I had been a very outgoing lad, a very sporty lad. I played hurling, football, soccer, every sport. And now I don’t play sport at all any more. I can’t because my balance is bad. That was hard. I had to work out who I was without that. I’m the eldest of four. I went from being the one looking after, to being the one who was looked after.
But I always had a positive attitude. My thinking was, ‘I’ll get through this. I’ll do it’. I can accept a brain injury, but I can’t accept not trying.”
The first thing he did was begin working to restore power to his right side.
“I kept going to the gym, and kept going. I had to. The strength was gone out of my body. The right side was completely gone and my left side was very weak, and that was my dominant side. Thanks to the gym, that’s now back. I started going in a wheelchair, being wheeled around by my mother to every station and being taken around the pool by my mother. Now, I can walk around and do my own thing. When it’s open, I go to the gym most days. I do not follow a programme.
“I do my own thing. I make up a programme in my head, and I do it. The hardest for me was getting out of the wheelchair. I was in a wheelchair for six months, and then getting off the walking stick. Now, I walk without a stick. There’s a bit of a wobble if I’m tired, but otherwise you don’t notice it.”
For several years following the accident, Shane carried on drinking. “I was very bad with it,” he says. “I was drinking too much.
“I was drinking, and getting drunk, as fast as I could.” Is that because he was unhappy?
“Probably. I was unhappy with my injuries. But not only that, everyone my age was doing it. And I wanted to be one of them. I’d come home and I’d be awful bad. People would have to carry me in from the pub.
“I wouldn’t be able to walk. I don’t remember, after one or two drinks, my memory would be wiped out but I was told I was good craic. No one said anything to me, but as time went on, I realised I wanted to achieve in life. I wanted to become my own person. And I knew drink was stopping me in my life from going forward, so I gave it up. Once I looked at it as a problem, I gave it up.”
Did he find it hard to give up? “No. I decided I’m not doing this anymore. And that was it. So I don’t drink any more, or go to pubs. I’m off drink 10 years, I’m off drugs 10 years. The only thing I have going now is poker. I love my game of poker — the buzz of it. The banter. Your social life is important, so that’s what I do now.”
In 2011 he started a course in radio journalism at GTI. “I always wanted to perform,” he says. “That’s what I was good at. I love being on stage. I wanted to do a course in radio journalism and it ended up being hard. I completed it, but it was hard.”
For the work experience section of the course, one of his lecturers suggested he give talks about his experience. “I went around the college doing talks. They interviewed me on GTI radio, and that was the start.”
Since then, he has given talks in colleges, schools and youth clubs around the country, and has been interviewed by journalists from as far afield as America.
“It started out with me talking to maybe five people, then I had 1,200 in Kerry one time. It got bigger and bigger. I thought, ‘why don’t I come up with an idea around this’, and that’s how D’MESS came about.”
D’MESS is the programme Shane has developed to help himself cope with his demons, and one he advocates for others. It’s a self-help programme designed to help young people face and fight their demons.
Each letter stands for a word: Determination. Motivation. Emotion. Support. Social life. During his talks to young people, Shane uses his accident and the changes he has made in his life to discuss each of these themes, explaining how he used this system to bring himself back from depression and alcohol dependency, in an attempt to positively motivate others and influence them to look after their mental health.
“This is the programme I live by, and I’m the proof that it works. I’m still standing here today. I’m trying to make a business for myself and a future for myself with this. My message is drink-driving is an absolute no-no. It’s a hard-man thing people are into when they’re younger. I thought I was a hard man. Just don’t do it.”
Do young people listen? “Some of them do. I couldn’t believe how my idea caught on with some people.”
Does he ever feel sorry for himself? After all, reckless as his behaviour was, he was a very young man when he had his accident.
“I could have. I could have sat back and felt sorry for myself. But I didn’t. I always had a positive attitude. The people around me — my mother and father, I look up to them — they kept me motivated. I believed in myself every step of the way.”
On the future, he says: “I’m hoping to keep going forward in my life. I’m healthy, I’m happy, and I want to bring D’MESS forward. I’m hoping the colleges and schools will start up again. I feel like this lockdown and Covid-19 has brought highs and lows. It has given me time to reflect and slow down, but I have felt mixed emotions throughout the last months. I would like to share my story with people and show how D’MESS worked for me and it can be programmed to anyone’s life. I am doing a walk of 150,000 steps in the month of January to raise funds for acquired brain injury Ireland. Overall I feel this lockdown has given me inner peace and I am ready for the road again.”
What would he say to the young man he was before his accident? “I’d give him a whelp across the puss and say, ‘cop on to yourself you stupid man’. But the thing is, it’s the accident that has made me the man I am today. So I don’t know. I’m a better man now than I was before my accident, and maybe I wouldn’t have learned any other way. I’m hoping to stop other people learning the hard way.”
‘The strength was gone out of my body... the hardest for me was getting out of the wheelchair. I was in a wheelchair for six months, and then getting off the walking stick. Now, I walk without a stick’.