In the summer of 2001 I was having a ball. I’d left my busy job as a residential art teacher in a boarding school, where I’d often worked sixteen hour shifts, seven days a week, for a job in a day school on the south side of Dublin. I was living in my own flat for the first time in years and was enjoying my new found freedom. When I started to feel very tired a couple of weeks into September I put it down to the fact that I had started a new job. It didn’t make much sense as the job was far less stressful than I’d had in years, I was working less hours, getting more exercise and eating healthily but I figured I was adjusting to a new lifestyle.

Around this time, I had woken up one night with a dreadful pain in my shoulder, shooting down my arm. My first thought was that I was having a heart attack (My father had died suddenly from a heart attack at 53 almost a year earlier), but then I rationalised that I was only 27, not overweight, and had probably slept funny. After all, I was far too young to be that ill. When I woke up in the morning the pain was gone and I thought no more about it until it happened again a few nights later. I also noticed that there was a strange gurgling in my chest and that my heart was thumping really loud. Again the pain was gone in the morning and it wasn’t until I started to feel dizzy and breathless at work that I went to see a doctor. I looked up a GP in the yellow pages but she couldn’t find anything wrong with me. She listened to my chest and said it was clear, couldn’t explain the dizziness and after taking a urine sample deduced that my symptoms were probably caused by a kidney infection with a touch of PMS.

After a course of antibiotics and a week off work I wasn’t feeling any better but the doctor couldn’t find anything wrong with me so I must have been imagining it, right? By this time I had developed a really irritating dry cough. The pain in my shoulder was almost constant and had spread across my back. The breathlessness was worse and I was falling asleep on the couch every day after work.

When I went home to Ennis at Halloween, 2001 for my Dad’s anniversary my Mother was shocked by my appearance and when she put her hand on my back she could feel the gurgling in my lungs. I couldn’t carry out a conversation without choking from the cough so she made me an appointment with her doctor the next day. She couldn’t find anything wrong with me either but sent me for an x-ray because she had noticed how breathless I was. An hour later she phoned me and asked me to go back to the hospital for a more accurate test called an echocardiogram.

So, a year to the day after my dad had died of a heart attack, in the same hospital, I was being told, in broken English that I had a very serious heart condition. Of course he was completely wrong but it took a month and a half of torturous tests, a series of misdiagnoses, from TB to a rare virus, before a correct diagnosis was made.

Having presented with a large tumour in front of my heart and a lung full of fluid, the doctors at Ennis General referred me to a cardio thoracic surgeon at the Mater for removal of what they thought was a benign thymoma. This further misdiagnosis meant that I was waiting a month for a bed. In the meantime I was getting sicker. I couldn’t sit up for any period of time, the pain was relentless and I had to sleep slumped over a pile of pillows.