It was 7am on a dark winter morning last year and Kathryn Dane was warming up in Irish Rugby’s high performance centre (HPC) when she suddenly realised something cataclysmic was happening to her body.
She was working with strength and conditioning coach Ed Slattery to rehab a knee injury, just doing some simple hip thrusts, when she felt “this massive pain behind my right eye in the back of my head”.
It came out totally of the blue.
In the intervening eight months, battling through her torpid, frustrating recovery, there were surely multiple temptations to cry “why me” and wallow in despair. But the bubbly Old Belvedere and Ireland scrumhalf chooses instead to see the serendipity in her brain haemorrhage.
When and where it occurred made it, literally, a stroke of good luck.
“Ed noticed straight away that my face had dropped. I didn’t know that but I didn’t feel great and he quickly got the team doc, who was actually in the gym at the time. They knew straight away I’d had a stroke of some description.”
The location of the IRFU’s high performance centre in Abbotstown. was a second blessing. Within 15 minutes an ambulance had delivered her to nearby Connolly Hospital.
She had a brain AMV (Arteriovenous Malformation), probably there from birth.
“It’s just a malformation of blood vessels that people can be born with or develop, a vulnerable vessel that, under high pressure and high strain, can burst.”
An MRI quickly confirmed it and she was moved to Beaumont Hospital, where embolisation stopped the bleed. After a fortnight of treatment and scans she got home to Enniskillen to commence her lengthy rehab.
Dane is not sure if her age (25 then) and fitness helped but she never lost consciousness and, as a physiotherapist, understood the need for urgency. If it happened elsewhere, especially on a pitch abroad, she could have had such a different outcome.
“The speed at which the thing took hold was incredible. I think I had immediate left-sided weakness, I needed help to get myself off the gym floor into the medical room, so thank God I wasn’t on my own on a gym floor, and in the HPC, and so close to Connolly and Beaumont hospitals where I needed treatment immediately.
“It was by chance it happened here but I do really believe it was supposed to happen [here].”
Her professional training helped initially.
“I knew exactly what was happening. I’d treated patients with strokes in the past as a physio, not in the crazy acute stage that I was in, but it did help.
“But I also then remembered patients who’d had multiple strokes from the exact same thing and I thought ‘Oh, is my life going to look like that?’ I don’t want to be one of those people who has to keep looking over my shoulder,’” she admits.
“I’ve never lived in fear before but when something like this happens to you out of the blue you do think ‘Gosh, I’m vulnerable for the first time in my life’. Sometimes ignorance is bliss!” she smiles.
She quickly skips over her lengthy rehabilitation, revealing only that it was “three to four months before I could do a very supervised cardiovascular training”.
That surely tested an athlete who played underage soccer for Northern Ireland before concentrating her talent on rugby and winning 23 Irish caps to date.
“At the beginning there was a lot of headaches and fatigue. I’ve obviously been tired as a rugby player but this level of fatigue has just shocked me. It really floors me. We don’t appreciate a good night’s sleep enough,” she says.
For someone who admits “my whole identity is entangled in rugby”, it was the psychological recovery, more than the physical, that has tested her most.
Dane is not only an international player but is also doing a PhD, through Trinity, analysing the tackle in women’s rugby; work that is invaluable to the game and which provided some welcome distraction during her recovery.
“I really struggled to sleep properly in the beginning and that was a mixture of emotional and mood things. I had a lot of work to do to deal with the mental stuff first before I could be in a better place with my physical health.
“To be honest, it wasn’t until two or three months afterwards that I actually started to digest and process it.
“That was really, really emotional and difficult to come to terms with. I was just in survival mode [initially]. I don’t know whether it’s the elite athlete in me, but we’re not used to making time for the emotional processing of these big injuries. That was probably the biggest step in my recovery.”
Friends, family and especially her ‘rugby family’ – club and international team-mates, the IRFU and Rugby Players Ireland – have all helped as have some specialist brain injury services within Northern Ireland.
Chris Henry, the Ulster flanker who had a mini-stroke during a South African tour in 2014 (related to a congenital heart defect), has provided some particularly pertinent advice.
“Chris actually gave me so much energy and really motivated me to get after my training and see where it takes me. He reminded me that I’m still super young and our bodies are incredible and if I can get back on a pitch then I might as well try.
“We’re very much just playing it day by day, week by week. I’m really lucky that I’m in the [IRFU] full-time programme doing all my gym sessions and off-field conditioning sessions. Hopefully I will get running in the next four of five weeks and play it by ear.
“I just want to make sure I’m in the best place physically before I even begin to make that decision about returning to contact and returning to play. I’d love to but I just have to take these steps beforehand, it’s like any other injury,” Dane explains.
Whatever happens next, the experience has irrevocably changed her.
“I used to go through life at 100 miles-an-hour, not really appreciate the good things or achievements. Since the stroke I’ve realised that when you’re in those dark places you start to see all the light you have in your life.
“I have an incredible army of friends, team-mates and family around me and so many opportunities through sport and my PhD that I never really appreciated before. Now I’m going to be properly grateful for what I have and enjoy rugby and all the moments. I think I did take it for granted before.”
