I still remember the feeling of my parent’s wooden bed frame at my back as I made myself comfy at the end of their bed. Dad wanted to talk to me, and very unusually for him, he was home sick and in bed. It was the early 1970s.
I don’t remember how he explained it, what words he used. I just remember, and I can still picture it, sitting up, listening. I was about 10 years old. It was a game changer.
As a child I told anyone who asked (usually other kids), as bravely as I could, that my fingers fell off and my hand shrunk in the wash or that I fell off a ladder and banged my hand, and it stopped growing.
[ Ageing Thalidomide survivors have not gone away ]
My parents were absolutely right not to have burdened me with facts that I could not understand at a young age. Of this I am certain. It allowed me to live a life as normal as they and my siblings could have hoped for me. Plenty of rough and tumble, argy-bargy and a huge degree of seamless help for the youngest of six that never made me feel special in the wrong way.
But by the early 1970s it was time to learn the truth, triggered by media coverage that they feared I would hear second hand. They had started, with other parents, the Parents for Justice for Thalidomide Children campaign. And a young journalist named Olivia O’Leary was coming to interview Dad.
[ Ireland’s thalidomide survivors: ‘The State is only waiting for us to die’Opens in new window ]
That’s my next memory. I can remember sitting on the last step of our stairs, waiting to go into the front room to be introduced to Olivia. Nothing more.
I have no memory of what my mum and I said to each other after that chat with my dad. I have no memory of it ever being discussed with her or my brothers and sisters. But I remember trying to learn to say and spell this new word. Too big for me. So, like we were taught in school, I broke it down.
THAL - ID - O - MIDE.
There followed efforts by the newly established Irish Thalidomide Medical Board to examine any child put forward by their parents in response to newspaper adverts, placed by the Irish government, for children if it was believed their deformities were caused by Thalidomide.
Some parents received telegrams, others got letters, to bring their child to Crumlin hospital and the Rehabilitation Hospital for examination. Wow. You put more than 100 children together over a few days with missing arms, missing legs, or tiny misshapen hands with no arms, or feet at the torso with no legs, some missing ears, some with facial paralysis, or some with all or a combination of the above, and that saying “carved on my memory” seems a feeble way of putting it. The examinations were traumatic. Thalidomide had nowhere to hide. It was a wrecking ball to the embryo.
Finola Cassidy is one of approximately 40 people in Ireland whose mothers took Thalidomide to prevent nausea in pregnancy, with devastating side effects on the developing foetus. She is secretary and spokesperson for the Irish Thalidomide Association.
