It’s Saturday evening and I’ve managed to close the shop at 5 o’clock, much to the annoyance of a couple of elderly tyre-kickers, who would have liked to spend another half an hour or so, looking at, but not buying, any of the nice things we have on show.
I told them I’d be back at 9.30 am on Monday morning but it’s now 11.30 and so far they haven’t turned up and, in truth, I don’t expect to see them ever again.
Anyway, I was in a rush because our local football team were playing Shannon Gaels in an important championship match in Tulsk, and my plan was to go home, have the spuds and head off to watch the football, which is exactly what I did.
However, I didn’t keep a close enough eye on the clock, and for some reason, that I still haven’t figured out, I was a few minutes late arriving at the appointed venue – I don’t like being late for anything so I wasn’t in the best of humour when I got in, but the way the match turned out I would have been better off if I never got there at all.
There is really no way to dress it up, Shannon Gaels were vastly superior to our lads in every way, and if I was Paddy Power (come to think of it, I wish I was) I would be closing the book on their odds to win the County Junior Championship.
Ballinameen, amongst others, might have something to say about that but right now it’s hard to look beyond the men from Croghan!
They were very strong right through the field and their two corner-forwards Michael Murtagh and Mathew McDermott were like Seamus Callanan against the Galway hurlers – almost unmarkable – and they wreaked havoc on our over-worked defence.
Anyway, the game was meandering to its foregone conclusion, when, in the very final minute, disaster struck for my young lad, Paul, who was playing in our half-back line, when he accidentally got a finger in the eye as he contested what turned out to be the last kick out of the game.
It was obvious, fairly quickly, that he was in trouble as, along with being in serious agony, he couldn’t see out of the eye but thankfully our physio Gerry O’Keeffe knew what to do, attended to the injury and put a patch on it, and told him to take a few painkillers and see how it would be on Sunday morning.
It’s on occasions like this that we appreciate how big a loss the A&E in Roscommon is (we did call on the way home but as it was 8.20, all was closed) and so we headed home and hoped all would be well in the morning.
Sadly that wasn’t the case and shortly after nine on Sunday morning, myself and my severely suffering son headed off to the University College Hospital in Galway.
Thankfully traffic wasn’t too bad, and after a pleasant enough drive we got there some time after 10 am. I thought to myself that as it was early enough we wouldn’t be too long and I looked forward to being at home in time to see the Kerry-Tyrone Senior Football Semi-Final.
I was wise enough to know that I’d hardly make the minor game, but I was confident it would all be sorted out in an hour or two.
All went well at the start – because he was in such apparent agony, the nurse saw him almost immediately, administered a few drops to his eye, which eased the pain instantly, and said she would do her best (which she did) to get him seen to as quickly as possible.
By now I was beginning to realise that the place was ‘mental’, and when we went back out to the waiting room, we sat beside a mother and daughter (who had a hand injury) who told us they had been there since the evening before, and, while an X-ray had been done, they were still waiting to see a doctor.
We were lucky, because at almost 2 o’clock we got into the treatment area, and you wouldn’t believe the bedlam that was evident all over the place – there were people on trolleys everywhere, the brilliant staff were run off their feet, but remarkably there was no sign of rancour or bad humour, on either the patients or the medical people.
Beside us was a young lad from Connemara whose vision was blurred and his father told us they had been in A&E for just over 24 hours, and hd didn’t know when they would be seen to!
I asked him how he had spent the night before and he said he was sitting in a chair in the waiting room the whole night long.
Over the corridor, on one of the many trolleys, was an 18-year-old girl who had received a neck injury in a rugby match the day before! I heard her mother telling someone that she had been the victim of a bad tackle in her first game for the Connaught U-18s and as they lived on an island they wanted to get her checked out before the girl went home!
It would be difficult to get her back after they left the mainland, and so they, too, were settled in for the long wait.
I warmed to the mother when she said the two teams were meeting again next month, and in no uncertain terms, she promised her daughter would get her own back!
You would think that I was a real reporter because I then met another man who was there over 24 hours and he too had yet to see a doctor – he was from Inverin and, as he explained to me, he was wheeling a barrow of turf out of the bog when the barrow stopped suddenly and he didn’t.
His back and hip and everything else was badly wrenched and he was barely able to walk when I met him!
Again he had no idea when he’d get sorted and he had got through the night with the aid of a couple of Supermac’s offerings, and was remarkably good-humoured and philosophical about it all.
As for us, we got to see the eye specialist at 6 pm and while Paul had a bad cut (I’d say any cut would be bad) on his cornea, and he’s in for another day or two (or even three) of agony, hopefully it will heal up in a week or so.
We made it home at 8.30 pm.
However, while for him it will all be forgotten fairly soon, for the staff in the Galway A&E it never ends, and next weekend it will all happen again.
I know you read regularly in the media about the state of the HSE, and the terrible mess they (and the politicians) have made of our health system, but when you see it, first-hand, and close up, it’s certainly not a pretty sight.
Nowadays it seems popular to continually highlight mistakes that are made by our medical personnel and of course that is only right and proper, but the more I see of their working conditions the more I wonder how they can function at all!
I believe they are performing miracles in appalling conditions, and certainly the A&E in UCHG is not a place for the faint-hearted.
And finally…
Finally, for this week, I want to wish our good friend, local musician with the Castlerea Brass Band Seamus Ward a happy retirement from his job, and also a happy 60th birthday.
He had a massive retirement party in JJ Harlow’s, Roscommon, last Friday night which I sadly couldn’t make (Friday’s not great for me as I work every Saturday), but his 60th party is on in Terry & Mary Leyden’s next Friday night so please God I’ll try to put in an appearance at that one.
Either way, Seamus is one of the good guys, and I wish him well for the future. Keep on playing the sax.
‘Till next week, Bye for now
