Update Monday 23rd December 2002
Hello All —
Compliments of the Season.
Up to now these updates of mine have been intended for immediate family and friends, and so have included some fairly personal news and references. However, I’ve been recently asked to add quite a few other names to the mailing list and indeed to allow the letters to be included in some websites of interest to Dubliners fans and people who have kindly expressed an interest in my well-being. Therefore this letter and future letters may be on more general terms, and may include some references to events which will be already known to my family.
I’ve also been asked, for the benefit of some people who haven’t been in touch for a while, to put events in some sort of order. So as it’s coming up to Christmas here is a short retrospective account of this very eventful year —
Most of you will know that 2002 was the 40th Anniversary of the Dubliners, and that Ronnie Drew and myself were asked to join the rest of the band for several "Re-Union" tours and festivals all over Europe during the year. These proved a great success and indeed extra shows were added as time went on. The year started in January with the recording of a new CD by the Dubliners entitled “40 Years” and then in February with a great Dubliners concert in Glasgow on the 3rd, and a solo appearance at the Strib Winterfest in Denmark on the 16th. Things suddenly turned very bad with the sad death of our sister Gwen, who was two years younger than I, from cancer on the 25th of February. In March my solo Japanese tour was cancelled but the Dubliners with Ronnie Drew and myself performed in the open air at the very first St. Patrick’s Day Festival in Trafalgar Square in London on the 17th, and we also did a live TV special “Late Late Show” on the 22nd. April was taken up almost completely with a wonderful Dubliners Re-Union tour of England, and then May was given over exclusively to my own solo engagements all over Ireland. June saw the seven-man Dubliners take on a rare tour of Ireland, north, south, east and west including a very emotional and sold-out home-town week in the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin. The Gaiety show was filmed for a new Video and DVD, and July was once again filled with my own solo Irish gigs. I had decided at the start of the year to attempt to honour all my own solo engagements as well as the Dubliners shows with the result that my voice became increasingly hoarse, but I naturally blamed overuse of my voice for the condition.
However, after performing at the Cambridge Folk Festival with the Dubliners at the beginning of August my throat was so sore and swollen that I saw my doctor, who referred me to a specialist in the Blackrock Clinic, Dublin. This ENT specialist performed a laryngoscopy and a biopsy and ordered a CT scan. The result of all this was that on Wednesday 21st August he informed me that I had throat cancer, and suddenly everything looked very different. After informing my wife, Phyl, and the rest of my family my next duty was to tell John Sheahan of the Dubliners that I wasn’t going to be available for the busiest touring period of the 40th Anniversary year. Needless to say the rest of August, which was packed with my solo engagements in Ireland, was immediately cancelled. Luckily I had private medical insurance so I was able to begin treatment almost immediately, and began a very punishing regime of chemotherapy and radium treatments at the Blackrock Clinic and St. Vincent’s Hospital, both in Dublin. The Dubliners went to the prestigious Tønder Festival in Denmark without me on the weekend of the 23rd of August, and I think this was when it came home to me that my life was probably going to be very different from now on.
September, October and November were simply spent travelling between my home and the two hospitals almost every day for my treatments. I was lucky in that, except for the first five or six days, I was not so ill that I needed to stay in hospital, as many patients were. This would have made life very difficult, and I don’t think I would have been able to keep my spirits up. I was, however, considerably affected by the radium treatment particularly. My throat was badly burned both inside and outside, and we were worried that my vocal chords would be damaged, maybe permanently; my taste buds and for a while my swallowing reflex ceased to function and for three months I could eat no solid food, only a liquid food replacement called “Ensure Plus”. I had lost about 33 lbs in weight by the end of all of this. (Whatever that is in kilos, you can work it out). My sense of taste has still not returned, although I can now swallow. The combination of chemo and radium meant that most of my beard fell out, but I was left with enough of a beard on the front of my chin and my moustache so that it didn’t look too bad. Amazingly, and again unlike most of the other patients, the hair on my head remained untouched. “Lucky Jim” again!
In the meantime the Dubliners had gone to Holland in September for the Re-Union tour, again without me, and of course my own annual solo tour of Holland in October/November also had to be cancelled, much to my regret.
Thankfully the radium treatment finished in November after 35 treatments, and the chemotherapy finished on the 13th of December after about 130 hours of chemo in all. I did, however, have to visit Blackrock again unexpectedly on Friday 22nd of November. I had been feeling fairly sick and weak, but I had been warned that the side effects of the treatment would continue for a long time, so I presumed that this was just one of these effects. On the Thursday night I stood up to do something, felt very odd and suddenly fainted. I didn’t hurt myself, but it took a while to recover. The following morning I made myself comfortable downstairs (in case I fainted again) but felt very strange. I got a phone call at about 11 am from Dr. Armstrong’s secretary, apologizing and asking me to go to his clinic for a laryngoscopy, an appointment which he had forgotten to mention to me. I started to get dressed but fainted again, so when I recovered I rang the oncology department in Blackrock to tell them. They told me to get a taxi or an ambulance down to them immediately, where they would have a bed ready. I rang Phyl and asked her to come home, as I didn’t think I’d be able to organize things myself. At this stage I was drifting in and out of consciousness. When we arrived at Blackrock I was immediately put on an I.V. drip and given six units of blood, which is a hell of a lot. Also my haemoglobin level, normally at 12 for a man, was only 5.3. I spent the next four days in the hospital connected to an I.V. and gradually my blood pressure and my haemoglobin levels improved and I started to feel stronger. It transpired that I had a bleeding duodenal ulcer, what the nurse called a Gastric Bleed, and had been in fact in serious danger of death. So that was a lucky phone call!
I have also been lucky in the incredible support I’ve had from, not just my family and close friends, but from an amazing cross section of people, many of whom I’ve never even met. Hundreds of messages of goodwill have been passed to me by my manager Peter Boone of Domburg in Holland, Rainer & Manuela who run the “International Friends of the Dubliners” fan club in Germany, by John Sheahan of the Dubliners who was given messages for me while on tour, by booking agent Con O’Riordan of Cork and by many others.
The Dubliners in particular will always have my gratitude for their incredible support during my illness. Every single day I heard from at least one of them asking about my progress and wishing me well. And they are responsible for one of the most uplifting experiences I will ever have. During the second leg of the German tour, towards the end of November, they had been suggesting that I might like to come to Germany if I felt strong enough, to just be a part of the end of the year’s anniversary touring. There was no suggestion that I attempt to sing or even appear on stage, no pressure at all — they just wanted the whole group to be together at the end of the year as they were at the start back in January.
I flew to Lubeck on Wednesday 4th December in the company of John’s wife Mary and his daughter Seodhla. The Dubliners’ secretary Harriet Roche was also with us. I felt better having someone else with me, especially since my fright with the Gastric Bleed. Of course I had checked with the doctors, and they said they were happy for me to travel as long as I had my medication and got plenty of rest. On arrival in Lubeck I didn’t even go to the concert but went straight to the hotel and to bed for a few hours. I got up at about 11:30 pm and met the rest of the lads when they returned after the show, when we had a most enjoyable re-union.
The next day we drove in the tour bus to Hannover, and during the journey we discussed whether I felt like maybe coming onstage at some time during the concert. John had been explaining to the audience all through the tour about why I wasn’t there, and the lads told me that the response from the audiences had been very warm everywhere when he said that he was sure they wished me well. So as I was feeling pretty good, we decided to drop the keys of a couple of songs, and maybe try one of them out that night if I felt like it. Later I decided that I’d like to have a go. That night John did his usual announcement in German, and then said that I had just flown from Dublin and introduced me onstage. What happened next was the start of the most memorable night I’ve ever had on a stage — the audience cheered for at least three minutes, which is a hell of a long time in a show, and I started to sing “Carrickfergus”. This was the first time either myself or the other Dubliners knew whether or not my voice was in working order, and everything went perfectly. Everyone was very affected emotionally on and off the stage and I stayed on for the whole concert, swept along by the adrenalin rush of the whole thing. The concert was a huge success and we did the same thing on the following night in Berlin and on the Saturday in the Congress Centrum in Hamburg. We flew home to Dublin on the Sunday and on the Monday morning at 7:30 am I was back as usual doing chemotherapy in Blackrock. However I was feeling like a million dollars, better than I’d felt since I was diagnosed almost five months before. It was the best therapy I could possibly have had.
So that about brings things up to date. My next appointment with the doctors is on January 15th 2003, when they will perform a series of tests and make an assessment on my condition and whether all the treatments have had the desired effect.
However, there is just one more engagement to fulfil this year — on the 30th of December, the night before New Year’s Eve, the seven of us will all perform one last concert for the Dubliners 40th Anniversary Year at the Point Depot in Dublin. This promises to be a fitting end to the whole thing, as it’s in our home town and also, according to promoter Pat Egan, there will be about 5,000 people at the concert.
As this very strange and eventful year draws to a close, it only remains for me to say a heartfelt “Thank You” to everyone for all the support, prayers and good wishes which have come my way since the news of my illness was made known. I wish everyone a Happy Christmas and, more importantly, a Happy and Peaceful New Year.
Thanks to Jim McCann for letting me publish this letter