Surviving on a diet of hope and music

Mar 10 2008 by Emma Pinch, Liverpool Daily Post

Strokes are Britain‘s third biggest killer. Emma Pinch meets a Liverpool man who has found that survival is only half the story

SEAN McNAMARA gropes for the words which fit the image he has in his head. He’s describing the things it’s difficult to do since the stroke he had last May paralysed his right hand side.

“I can’t . . . push the houses,” he says vexedly.

His wife, Brenda, jumps in with well-meaning suggestions. “Open the door?” Turn the door handle?”

He shakes his head with exasperation.

The word won’t come. The right words often lie just out of reach these days. But when Sean picks up his fiddle, and his fingers curl over the four strings, familiar as old friends, he doesn’t need words.

Listening to Sean play, it is easy to understand how he was sought after as a fiddle player at weddings, christenings, birthdays and ceilidhs at the now defunct Irish centre, and had slots on Radio Merseyside. When you ask what music means to him, the answer comes unhesitatingly. “Life. Love. That’s what music means to me. Music was for the fun of it.”

On May 7, 2007, it looked as though Sean would never play again.

It all started with a pain in the back of his head when he woke up. Sean has no recollection of the first couple of weeks, but Brenda’s memory needs no prompting. “I asked him what he had for breakfast. He had eaten Shredded Wheat but he couldn’t tell me ‘Shredded Wheat’. He wasn’t confused, but he was struggling to get the words out.” She phoned the hospital for advice and was told to take him in to A&E at the Royal. “I wasn’t very worried about it, I was just going with the flow,” says Sean. “But, by the time we got to the hospital, I started to notice my vision was going.”

As he underwent a battery of scans and tests his condition further deteriorated. For Brenda and daughter Anne Cavadino, a nurse herself, the changes they were witnessing were horrifying.

Sean was always a vigorous man, rugby playing in his youth and then a referee at weekends, with a day job in Customs and Excise. Trim, upright and still fresh faced at 77, he had always enjoyed good health except for minor ailments.

“When he went into A&E it was his speech, but by the end of the day he didn’t recognise the sister on the ward and by the evening he couldn’t say much at all,” explains Anne. By the time the consultant took them into a side room late afternoon to see them, their nerves were stretched to breaking point.

They learned that a vessel in his brain had ruptured and caused a bleed, exacerbated by the Warfarin he had been taking to thin his blood.

“Sean was just slumped in his bed. The consultant asked him to put his finger on his nose and he couldn’t. He explained how serious it was. It was just horrendous,” remembers Brenda.

“My daughter went running out of the ward, crying and I followed her.

“I didn’t know what was happening and I asked for a priest for him, who came from the cathedral right away.”

The next 24 hours were critical. It seemed their prayers were answered when he pulled through and after 10 days was taken to Broadgreen’s specialist rehabilitation unit.

Although the threat of death had lifted, movement on his right side had dwindled to clumsily lifting his right arm off the bed. Physiotherapists started work on him right away, massaging his limbs and manipulating his muscles in an effort to stimulate nerve pathways. All Sean knew was that when he tried to move his arm and leg he couldn’t.

“All my fingers were swollen,” says Sean. “There was not a sense of much movement. I wasn’t thinking much about it, I just couldn’t do it.”

Walking had to be relearned, as did simple tasks such as filling and boiling a kettle through interminable repetitive exercises. A personal fear of dependency kept him going.