Archive News
Kids whose lives are racked with chronic pain
Date Published: 04-Oct-2012
The symptoms Aaron Flanagan Corless describes when he is talking about his arthritis will be familiar to many sufferers.
“It can be hard to do things in the morning like opening the milk carton or the cereal bag. From when I wake up I am really stiff, so tying buttons or laces can be a problem. As the day goes on it improves.”
Aaron’s symptoms are common enough – what is unusual is his age profile. We associate arthritis with older people, but Aaron is just 14 years of age. His younger brother, 10-year-old Joshua also has the condition.
Aaron is a lively, intelligent boy, but it’s obvious from chatting to him in the kitchen of the family home in Knocknacarra that his condition – rheumatoid arthritis – has had a profound impact on his life. He and his mother Ruth sit around the table discussing it, while Joshua watches cartoons on TV in the sitting room and joins us occasionally.
Joshua was diagnosed with arthritis when he was four – Aaron was diagnosed a year and a half ago after he got a really bad pain in his groin.
“They thought it was a disc at first,” explains his mother. “His hip had slipped and that happens with active kids. It stopped, but then it happened on the other side. They did tests and couldn’t find anything.”
Because Joshua had been previously diagnosed with the condition, the experts felt they should explore that possibility. They sent Aaron for an MRI scan which showed swelling in the tendons on the hips.
Subsequent blood tests confirmed that it was rheumatoid arthritis.
This kind of arthritis can affect your hands so badly that it can render them useless, because it affects the bones and the tendons, says Ruth. “If Aaron does a lot of handwriting, his hand goes into a claw position and it’s difficult to straighten it.”
That presents difficulties with schooling, but Enable Ireland have organised a Voice Recognition system which Aaron can use in his school, St Mary’s College in Galway, if he gets tired from writing or typing. And he will have a scribe for his Junior Cert exam next year.
Getting through the day requires significant amount of medication for both boys.
At the moment, Aaron takes tablets daily and has injections twice a week to try and keep the condition under control.
There are side effects to the injections of the drug Enbrel, including flare-ups in the immediate area but rubbing ice into it helps. However, the tablets he is on, Methotrexate, can affect a person’s liver and also cause mouth ulcers – at present Aaron and Joshua have to have blood tests every four weeks to ensure that their livers aren’t affected.
Still, these treatments help – Enbrel which is a relatively new drug has done Aaron the world of good, according to his mother.
As if he hadn’t enough to cope with, Aaron has also been diagnosed with fibromyalgia, which causes widespread pain throughout the body, away from joints. “People with arthritis can get it,” says Ruth, adding that it mimics arthritic pains and has affected his arms, legs and back.
“It can cause you to get really tired and lose weight,” she explains.
Aaron is a bright, sparky teenager who has had a lot to deal with, but so far perhaps the most difficult thing is not being able to indulge in his passion for soccer.
He has been playing the game with local club Hibs since he was eight or nine and “even that’s gone now”, says Ruth.
“If I do two training sessions and a game, then I’m out because I wouldn’t be able to play for ages,” Aaron adds.
He feels bad because he can’t commit to his team properly, he says.
But he is an active person, which is good when you have arthritis, and gets his exercise from swimming and cycling – “I love swimming”.
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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