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“It was painful. It led to not really going out – or going out at one in the morning. I rapidly became a less shy person. I would have been relatively shy, but that had to go basically. Even at that, it was just uncomfortable. Just meeting my friends for a drink, or doing anything, now had this layer of dealing with sometimes well-meaning people and sometimes genuinely nasty enough people.
Moloney tried to think of a venue where a hurler’s face would have little or no purchase in a crowd and he thought of Hayfield Manor, a five-star hotel near the college. But one middle-aged woman spotted O’Donnell, and she pounced, politely and sweetly. With his cover blown, others followed. Moloney was gobsmacked; he thought he knew what O’Donnell was dealing with.
The concussion happened at a Clare training session. People tell him that his arms were pinned in a tackle, and when he fell, his head collided with the sun-baked turf. He spent that night in Limerick hospital, “not able to formulate a thought.” “I kept going on this thing, ‘I think I’m getting better.’ And because I thought I was getting slightly better I would do more things – and because of that it would kick off more symptoms – which meant I would get worse, worse than I’d ever been. I was on this kind of wave, but the trajectory was down. Oisín [O’Donnell’s brother] and his wife Clodagh are both doctors and they didn’t understand what was happening. I definitely didn’t understand. It just added to the fear.
It was about a month before he was put in contact with UPMC, an American healthcare company with clinics in Ireland. At his first appointment they assured him that everything he was experiencing was normal and that he would make a full recovery. The prescription was to exercise, to use his phone, to sit at a computer screen, not to run away from noise, or take shelter in a darkened room. They pushed him to go back playing hurling, too, when his recovery came to that point.
Shane O'Donnell back doing his thing for Clare against Limerick last summer. Photograph: James Crombie/Inpho