‘I’ve no resentment towards rugby’
Former AIL star Philip Caldwell is trying to battle through the biggest challenge of his life after sustaining horrific spinal injuries during a simple game of tag rugby
THE night Philip Caldwell’s life changed forever began with a text message like hundreds of others he’d received over the last decade or so. ‘Fancy a game of tag, Flipper?’ He’d agreed to help his girlfriend Ali with her garden, but the temptation was too strong. After five months in lockdown, the tag rugby season was back and his old coach from his Leinster U-21 days, Ian Morgan, was looking for bodies for a hit-out at Terenure College RFC, so he agreed to tog out.
It had been a while, but it didn’t take long for the former scrum-half to click into gear, and within a minute he got the ball and headed for the try line.
“It was my first touch of the ball. I just got it, received the ball and then . . . a bang,” he recalls.
Philly scored the try, but his momentum carried him over the dead-ball line and into a fence beside the pitch.
Players and officials immediately gathered around him, concerned about the blood coming from his head, but the 38-year-old was far more worried about the lack of feeling below the chest.
“A mate of mine, Andy Tallon, was playing for Lansdowne on the pitch beside me. I was just calling out for Andy and he came over and I said ‘dude, I can’t feel my f***ing legs’,” he remembers.
“There’s a lot of things I could square off, there was blood coming from my head and everyone is worried about the big, gaping wound. Whereas that’s the least of my worries.
“That lack of feeling, not being able to move just . . . to be coherent during it is very difficult. It’s hard to think back on it.”
I**** F you played rugby at senior level in the 2000s and early 2010s, you probably came up against Philip, the nippy scrum-half out of Barnhall who made the Leinster U-21s and enjoyed a fine club career with St Mary’s, Blackrock and Lansdowne, as well as stints in Australia and New Zealand. When he wasn’t playing contact rugby, he was keeping fit playing tag, and in more recent years he had been back coaching at Parsonstown.
Now, the rugby community is rallying around him because he’s in the battle of his life in the National Rehabilitation Hospital (NRH) as he deals with the life-changing injuries he suffered on July 15.
From Terenure, Caldwell was rushed to the Mater Hospital where his spinal contusion was confirmed. He was paralysed from the chest down and no one could tell him what kind of recovery he’d make.
“I can’t say enough about the Mater staff. From the nurses to everyone,” he says.
“I basically had to breathe for a week. In through the nose, out through the mouth. They were telling me that would get oxygenated blood through my body and that would have a bearing as to how the recovery would go. I just went to a place . . . I’d done deepsea diving, I just went to a weird place.
“They gave me heavy, heavy steroids. That sent me a bit manic and the staff – a lady sat with me for five hours one night from 11pm until her shift finished. God knows what I was saying to her.”
From there, he has made slow but incremental progress.
Moving his fingers, taking one step, then two, then three and then attempting the stairs. Going to the toilet without medical assistance, learning to drive again, texting; every step has brought him closer to some form of normality.
“A lot of things have fallen into place, there’s a long road ahead of me and it’s just small, incremental things coming back,” he explains.
“I remember the first twitch of my fingers. The injury is to the C5 joint, that’s going to be the hardest thing to bring back. What you would take for granted, buttoning up your shirt and things like that, those fine motor actions are going to be what’s difficult for me.
“My biggest fear of the whole lot is the fear of the unknown.”
Having entered the Mater on July 15, he stayed for three months before moving to the Dún Laoghaire facility which will be his temporary home until he’s released in January.
His friends, family, former teammates and opponents have rallied around, and while the support was overwhelming at first, it has driven him on further.
“It has been a tough, tough road. You go through a whole range of emotions with it. From the realisation of what has actually happened . . . at the start, I’d a big outcry from family and friends and I wasn’t able to deal with it at that time,” he says.
“It’s been a whirlwind. The outcry; there’s a beauty to it. I didn’t die, but it’s kind of like being at your own funeral!
“People are sending messages to you. I’ve had messages from Australia, New Zealand – a club I played with over there – I can’t stress how much that spurs me on.
“I’m a very driven person anyway. “It’s a good community, the rugby community. The ethos of the whole game, we beat the crap out of each other for 80 minutes and then there’s an unwritten rule you go in and buy the opposition man a pint afterwards.
“What I’ve seen from the outcry of people. Some of the things they have said about me. I played for St Mary’s,
Blackrock and Lansdowne and got on with all of the lads there.
“I was chasing a goal of playing professional rugby, I got as far as Leinster U-21s and didn’t quite get there. When I look back on it now it is that community.
“The guys set up a video message for my birthday and if I didn’t get out of the chair and walk that day . . . to get that type of (support). What they’ve said has been the essence of what rugby’s about.
“It’s kind of like God has given me back these small little pieces. I squeezed toothpaste out of a holder. Getting to that . . . taking the first few steps. Take two, then you won’t do more this week.
“For a decent portion (of his rugby career) I was trying to go as high a level as I could, but when I look back on it it’s the various teams – I played first and second grade on all of those teams – you build up a good band of brothers with that, it’s a little bit humbling.”
Youngster
As a youngster, Caldwell dreamed big. And while his rugby career didn’t take him all the way, the skills he learned on the pitch and that internal drive to improve have stood to him in his recovery.
“I’d have been best mates with Trevor Brennan’s younger brother Damien. He tragically passed away of meningitis when we were 12, a week before secondary school started,” he says.
“We had a stupid pact we made as kids that we were going to play for Ireland, that always spurred me on.
“I’m still using that fighting spirit in here. Since the incident happened, it’s amazing what you draw on.
“They give you all the tools. As I’m talking to you now, I’ve got all of these hand gadgets. My injury basically affects my hands as well as my body and being able to walk and all that
stuff. So, I am sort of like a baby re-learning how to do everything from scratch. They give you everything to do, but rest is a key part of it as well.”
There is a mental challenge to go with the physical challenge. The pandemic means he cannot have any visitors to the NRH, so his contact with the outside world is limited to FaceTime calls and WhatsApp messages.
His parents, John and Susan, could come to the Mater but Level 5 restrictions mean he’s isolated from family at the moment.
“I can do sensory overload with that, I couldn’t do it every day. It becomes too real that you’re not seeing them,” he says of contact with the outside world.
“FaceTime is big for me, while they were allowed (to gather), I loved . . . I’ve a twin brother Richard and he’d a baby girl Grace. We’re four boys: me, Richard, Stephen and Cormac and I don’t have any kids but all of the boys have had boys, so she’s the first girl to come into our family.
“Over the barbecue, I loved being able to talk to her and be able to speak to people and pass (the phone) on to just feel part of that. I found it very difficult when they were just at the foot of the bed and I couldn’t move. I’d a feeling of helplessness.
“But, each little step and bit of progression. I walked three steps, now I’m thinking there’s potential to climb the stairs. That was something that was playing on my mind for two months!
“Not seeing your family, they’re mad to come and see you . . . I’m not ashamed to say, I’d a bit of a period when I finished up with commodities trading (a few years ago), I’d a little bit of depression for about eight months.
“I’d a good tool-box to deal with that . . . I used that a little bit, I haven’t been afraid to shelter my family from everything that’s gone on in here. I’ve had tough nights in here. There’s been some dark days where I think I’m not going to get any better. I’m naturally a very positive person, very upbeat, but you can’t be that person all the time either.
“It’s also soothing to my family and I get a great release from being that open. That bit of weight lifts. There’s a fine line, you don’t want to be ‘Debbie Downer’ every time you’re on the phone. That’s not me.
“I look at it as a pressure valve, if you feel it building up . . . there’s a lot of people going through things during the pandemic.
“So, it’s a big part of it and they’re aware of it in the hospital. They’ve moved from communal to individual rooms, it’s great for your privacy but I’m palling around with four or five guys now. We’re all on a journey, we’re all sharing stuff.”
T***** he former Ireland international Stephen McIvor is a mentor to Caldwell. A sports psychologist, the ex-Garryowen and Munster scrum-half wrote his thesis on mental toughness and the patient has drawn on his support here. “An awful lot of this is your perspective. There’s been a tragedy that has left me with a challenge and that challenge can become an opportunity,” he says.
“If you can get your mind into that frame. All the rugby teams do it, the little one-percenters and incremental gains. All that stuff.
“You will have bad days, but it is about getting up and going.”
Now, his focus is on recovering as much of his functionality as possible.
“It’s an 18-month journey and after that it’s not that they give up on you, but they say that’s the level the spinal cord recovers to, the scar tissue will have healed,” he says.
“My mother, saint that she is, tracked down a guy who had a similar injury to me four years ago in England.
“He’s been able to walk. That’s my minimum. My absolute minimum is to be able to walk freely, the hands are something I’m constantly having to work on. They feel a bit numb.
“I have picked up the phone, sent text messages. These are all things I wasn’t able to do two or three months ago . . . but the next thing is to try and replicate what I have here on the outside.
“It doesn’t end on January 14, it only begins. I need to get a team in place whereby I have the structure I have here to be able to give the absolute most I can give to make the available gains.
“I’ve a good support network,
I’ll have a friend come to the gym with me. I’ll meet people for walks. It’s about getting miles in the legs, re-training and re-training.
“When you get tired, take a rest and then go again.
“No disrespect to anyone who sent the message . . . I sent a video to my family and they sent it on to friends of me walking and a couple of people have said, ‘you’re going great, you’ll be back up in no time’. That’s not the truth.
“I understand, I have sent the exact same text. But, there’s times when I read that and I go, ‘you’ve no idea how hard this is going to be’. I’m willing to put in the work, but I know it’s not going to be easy.
“I love that in here they tell you that.”
‘I walked three steps, now I’m thinking there’s potential to climb the stairs’
Uncertain
The road ahead is long, the future uncertain, but Caldwell’s friends have rallied around to create a trust in his name to raise funds to help with his rehabilitation.
Before the accident, he was working as a self-employed courier and his injuries mean he faces a precarious future on that front.
For now, his focus is on making the most of his recovery.
“I’ll keep shooting from the hip until someone tells me, 18 months and one day in, ‘right Philip, you need to put the breaks on this now and accept what you have’,” he says.
“I’ve accepted everything that’s come back. You do want for stuff, but I’ve accepted each little piece as it’s come back.
“If I took stuff away from you and fed it back to you ever so slowly, it’s amazing that euphoria. It’s a beautiful journey as well. It’s weird.
“I have no resentment towards rugby, I don’t know why. I thought I’d be very angry. It must be because of the outpouring, because of that community we belong to. It hasn’t let me get bitter or anything like that.”
Support Philip Caldwell’s rehabilitation by virtually selling out the Aviva Stadium for next Saturday’s final Autumn Nations Cup match. All money raised will go straight to ‘The Philip Caldwell Trust’ which will be used to financially assist Philly in his recovery (rehab, physio, home adaptations). Any excess funds in the trust will be donated to the IRFU Charitable Trust. For further information and to buy tickets, go to https://fta4philly.com/