It’s worse for your family, they’re helpless
Celtic hero McNamara on surviving a brain aneurysm
CELTIC legend Jackie McNamara owes his life to a stroke of good fortune.
It was a crisp, cold Saturday morning in February of last year and he had just returned home from a walk with his wife and their dogs.
“I got back into the garden and had this strange sensation of leaving my body,” he told the Irish Daily Star.
“I was passing out, I had no control over anything, I just shouted to my wife, ‘I don’t feel right’, and I went head-first onto the stones.
“Luckily where we live, we are 30 minutes from a major hospital. There was an ambulance in the area. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here.”
McNamara had suffered a brain aneurysm. All of a sudden, the man with more than 350 appearances for Celtic was in a fight for his life.
And while he has made a full recovery, it hasn’t been easy.
Damage
“My family were told when they put me in a coma that I might not survive that, and if I do I could have real brain damage,” he said. “For them it’s a lot worse than it is for myself. They’re helpless and just hoping that you pull through.
“They are experiencing it all and they are going through the emotion of knowing you might not survive the operation.”
He did, but there was more surgery to come. “Ihadmyaneurysmatthe start of February and I was sent home at the end of March,” he said.
“They told me I was going to get headaches for the next year or year and a half.
“So when I got home I was getting really bad headaches, my wife was saying I needed to get up to the hospital. I was like, ‘No, they told me I’d have headaches’.
Severe
“For a good four or five days I just went through it, taking paracetamol. But it eventually became really severe, so I went up to A&E and they readmitted me.
“I had hydrocephalus, which meant I had to go for another operation to get a shunt fitted into my head to control the fluid on my brain, drain it into my sto stomach.
““I had to go back in January to get a stent fitted into the arte tery. They always said I might haa have to go back in to get an op operation to get a stent put in, an and I did.
“But I had an MRI scan eight w weeks ago and I think everyth thing’s okay because I have not heard from them and I am still here!”
McNamara details his struggle in great depth in his captivating autobiography ‘His Name Is McNamara’.
He is embarking on a tour of the UK and Ireland to promote the book and speak directly to fans about his experiences as a player, a manager and his life after football.
His Irish dates include Enni
skillen (Charlie’s Bar, October 21), Lurgan (Lurgan Supporters Club, October 22), Waterford (Roanmore GAA Club, October 23) and Belfast (Crowne Plaza, November 11).
Reasons
“Why did I write the book? I think there are a few reasons, the main one being what happened to me last year,” he explained.
“I was actually in Glasgow, at a friend’s son’s 21st a few weeks ago, and people came up to me and asked how I was feeling now.
“A lot of people knew I was ill but they didn’t know what happened. Some people thought I’d cancer, others thought I had other things happen to me.
“I had other messages from people whose loved ones maybe had the same thing I had, a brain hemorrhage, and they were asking questions about it.
“It’s good when you are in hospital, because you’ve got t he best care of th e
NHS, b ut when you get home to recover it’s difficult to know what to do and how to feel.
“You don’t know what stage of your recovery you are at, because you are just left to your own devices.
“With a brain injury it does take time to recover. It affects your short-term memory and different things that you take for granted.
“You’ve got things like anger and frustration there and it’s important for your family as well to understand that.
Career
“I’ve had quite a lot of injuries over my career; broken legs, cruciates, but this was a bit different.”
He added: “Why me? That’s a question you ask straight away. “I was a 46-yearold at the time and I think I am relatively fit for my age. I was at the gym on Thursday running on a treadmill and then I collapsed on Saturday.
“What they said was, it was just the way I was wired up, it could have happened any time from birth. That is quite incredible when you think about how many times I’ve headed the ball or gotten knocks to my head.
“It’s actually the one part of my body that hasn’t been damaged in football.
“I’ve had a cut eye, fractured cheekbones, broken legs, cruciates, dislocated elbows, but I’ve never had a brain injury until my aneurysm.”
As well as hitting the road to promote his book, McNamara is tentatively working on getting back into shape.
“I was a bit reluctant to do that before I had the stent fitted,” he said. “I have been running over the last number of weeks and it’s something I need to do more.
Believe
“I do believe that’s one of the reasons why I’ve managed to recover from my illness, because I was fit and healthy.
“That helped me learn to walk again, it helped me in the early stages, doing things like climbing stairs in the hospital and doing little memory tests; all these little things.
“I definitely think being fit helped me.” nGet your ticket to see Jackie
McNamara at any of his UK and Ireland appearances on eventbrite.