Archive News
Brotherly love is a life saver for Mattie
Date Published: 04-Apr-2013
”I could spend all evening and the most of the weekend explaining what this transplant means to me and I don’t think I would get it across to you,” says Mattie Hoban about the change that has taken place in his life since receiving a kidney transplant seven months ago.
Sitting across the table from Mattie is his brother Sean, the man whose donation is responsible for giving Mattie back his quality of life.
Sean isn’t looking for any glory for donating a kidney to his older brother – the reason he has agreed to be interviewed, he says honestly, is to demonstrate that living donation is not only possible, but that it can be hugely successful.
The two brothers live near each other in Abbey-Duniry, East Galway, and it’s obvious that they are very close. Sean, who is self-employed, runs a garage, while Mattie has a small farm. Years ago he was a lorry driver, but that all changed drastically back in 1989. He went to the doctor suffering from tiredness and was initially prescribed an antibiotic for a kidney infection.
When that didn’t work, the doctor sent him to a kidney specialist in Merlin Park Hospital. The father of three young children, aged between 12 and six years of age was told almost immediately that he was suffering from kidney failure and needed to begin dialysis immediately.
It was a dreadful shock for Mattie and his wife Kathleen, but there was no other option. He was very sick during the dialysis, but a year and a half later a kidney became available and he received a transplant.
Unknown to Mattie and Kathleen, Sean had put out feelers about becoming a living donor way back then, but while that was allowed in other countries, it wasn’t being done in Ireland at the time.
The kidney he received worked, “but it wasn’t 100 per cent”, Mattie recalls, adding that he still wasn’t able to return to work.
Eventually it also started to fail, and by 1997, after being checked by transplant experts in Dublin’s Beaumont Hospital, he was back on dialysis. Again, he was back to Merlin Park three times weekly, being hooked up to a machine so that toxins could be filtered from his body. He was fortunate in that it only lasted a couple of months – by early 1998, another kidney had become available.
“The second was brilliant and I got a good 10 years out of it,” he says.
For Mattie one of the highlights of getting that kidney is a thing most of us don’t even think about and it’s the simple act of drinking water.
When you are on dialysis you are restricted to 500 ml of water a day – very little. After he got that transplant, he wasn’t allowed water for several days – the nurses and his family would just wet his lips. “Then the doctor came in and said ‘you are on free fluids from today’,
meaning I could have water. It was better than winning the Lottery.”
But 10 years later, it failed. Mattie explains that some people who receive kidney transplants can “have them for 20 or 30 years, but there are no guarantees”.
Over 20 years ago, when he was first diagnosed, the average lifespan for a transplanted kidney was seven years, but that has improved hugely, thanks to advances in medicine.
However, for Mattie, because he’d had a build up of antibodies over time, as a reaction to the previous two kidneys being put into his body, it was getting more difficult to get a match, he says.
He went back on dialysis in 2007 and was on it for five years. He got great care from the staff in Merlin Park’s dialysis unit but it was a grim time, he says.
“Dialysis keeps you alive, but you can’t live,” he explains, outlining the dietary restrictions involved when a person has kidney failure, not to mention the constant visits to specialists on top of the three days of dialysis every week at Merlin Park.
For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.
People’s living conditions less than 100 years ago were frightening. We have come a long way. We talk about water charges today, but back then the local District Councils were erecting pumps for local communities and the lovely town of Mountbellew, according to Council minutes, had open sewers,” says Galway County Council archivist Patria McWalter.
Patria believes we “need to take pride in our history, and we should take the same pride in our historical records as we do in our built heritage”. When you see the wealth of material in her care, this belief makes sense.
She is in charge of caring for the rich collection of administrative records owned by Galway County Council and says “these records are as much part of our history as the Rock of Cashel is. They document our lives and our ancestors’ lives. And nobody can plan for the future unless you learn from the past, what worked and what didn’t”.
Archivists and librarians are often unfairly regarded as being dry, academic types, but that’s certainly not true of Patria. Her enthusiasm is infectious as she turns the pages of several minute books from Galway’s Rural District Councils, all of them at least 100 years old.
Part of her role involved cataloguing all the records of the Councils – Ballinasloe, Clifden, Galway, Gort, Loughrea, Mountbellew, Portumna and Tuam. These records mostly consisted of minutes of various meetings.
When she was cataloguing them she realised their worth to local historians and researchers, so she decided to compile a guide to their content. The result is For the Record: The Archives of Galway’s Rural District Councils, which will be a valuable asset to anybody with an interest in history.
Many representatives on these Councils were local personalities and several were arrested during the political upheaval of the era, she explains.
And, ushering in a new era in history, women were allowed to sit on these Rural District Councils – at the time they were not allowed to sit on County Councils.
All of this information is included in Patria’s introductory essay to the attractively produced A4 size guide, which gives a glimpse into how these Rural Councils operated and the way political thinking changed in Ireland during a short 26-year period. In the early 1900s, these Councils supported Home Rule, but by 1920, they were calling for full independence and refusing to recognise the British administration.
“I love the tone,” says Patria of the minutes from meetings. “The language was very emotive.”
That was certainly true of the Gort Rural District Council. At a meeting in 1907, following riots in Dublin at the premiere of JM Synge’s play, The Playboy of the Western World the councillors’ response was vehement. They recorded their decision to “protest most emphatically against the libellous comedy, The Playboy of the Western World, that was belched forth during the past week in the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, under the fostering care of Lady Gregory and Mr Yeats. We congratulate the good people of Dublin in howling down the gross buffoonery and immoral suggestions that are scattered throughout this scandalous performance.
For more from the archives see this week’s Tribunes here
Date Published: 23-Jan-2013
SLIGO 0-9
GALWAY 1-4
FRANK FARRAGHER IN ENNISCRONE
GALWAY’S first serious examination of the 2013 season rather disturbingly ended with a rating well below the 40% pass mark at the idyllic, if rather Siberian, seaside setting of Enniscrone on Sunday last.
The defeat cost Galway a place in the FBD League Final against Leitrim and also put a fair dent on their confidence shield for the bigger tests that lie ahead in February.
There was no fluke element in this success by an understrength Sligo side and by the time Leitrim referee, Frank Flynn, sounded the final whistle, there wasn’t a perished soul in the crowd of about 500 who could question the justice of the outcome.
It is only pre-season and last Sunday’s blast of dry polar winds did remind everyone that this is far from summer football, but make no mistake about it, the match did lay down some very worrying markers for Galway following a couple of victories over below par third level college teams.
Galway did start the game quite positively, leading by four points at the end of a first quarter when they missed as much more, but when Sligo stepped up the tempo of the game in the 10 minutes before half-time, the maroon resistance crumbled with frightening rapidity.
Some of the statistics of the match make for grim perusal. Over the course of the hour, Galway only scored two points from play and they went through a 52 minute period of the match, without raising a white flag – admittedly a late rally did bring them close to a draw but that would have been very rough justice on Sligo.
Sligo were backable at 9/4 coming into this match, the odds being stretched with the ‘missing list’ on Kevin Walsh’s team sheet – Adrian Marren, Stephen Coen, Tony Taylor, Ross Donovan, David Kelly, David Maye, Johnny Davey and Eamon O’Hara, were all marked absent for a variety of reasons.
Walsh has his Sligo side well schooled in the high intensity, close quarters type of football, and the harder Galway tried to go through the short game channels, the more the home side bottled them up.
Galway badly needed to find some variety in their attacking strategy and maybe there is a lot to be said for the traditional Meath style of giving long, quick ball to a full forward line with a big target man on the edge of the square – given Paul Conroy’s prowess close to goal last season, maybe it is time to ‘settle’ on a few basics.
Defensively, Galway were reasonably solid with Gary Sice at centre back probably their best player – he was one of the few men in maroon to deliver decent long ball deep into the attacking zone – while Finian Hanley, Conor Costello and Gary O’Donnell also kept things tight.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
Date Published: 23-Jan-2013
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