It’s a Monday morning in late October and it’s not the easiest time to shake yourself for a 90-minute spin to the Mater hospital.
Oisín Kiernan has had a late night.
At the fourth time of asking, Castlerahan have overcome the last obstacle and they’ve gone and won the club’s first ever Cavan senior football championship, putting to bed three successive final defeats in the process. The celebrations are something that manager Donal Keogan will lament in two weeks’ time when they lose in the Ulster quarter-final but this is a tight group, it’s one that’s faced adversity in so many different forms and, now, they’re history-makers.
There’s no two ways about it, the one-point win over Crosserlough is going to be enjoyed long into the Sunday night and further into the week, and there is Kiernan, right in the thick of it.
He only joined the club two years ago but, already, he’s part of the family and that’s why it doesn’t make a blind bit of difference to him that he didn’t play the final on Sunday.
He didn’t play any of the knockout games because, in August, he was diagnosed with testicular cancer.
Castlerahan faced Ramor in the summer during the group stages and Kiernan knew something wasn’t right, but he held off until after the Ballinagh game before he said anything to anyone. He’s one of these engrossed GAA men whose calendar is set firmly by fixtures so, even when he makes the journey to Dublin this Monday morning after the final and faces worse news than before, he only has one thing on his mind.
“He told me that it had spread up to my lymph nodes and abdominal area so I would need chemo, four rounds of chemo.
“At the time, it wasn’t exactly what I wanted to hear but the attitude was that it was no big deal, just get it done and get back playing. I just wanted to get my life back to normal.
“But I asked if I could play the first round of the Ulster championship and he said I could, so two weeks later, I played that game.”
He wore number 21 on the Sunday and was very much a part of the day that he helped create but it was a constant fight for him, always pushing the boundaries to get back playing ball.
So, whilst the prospect of cancer spreading is a reality that could terrify anyone, Kiernan just heads back up the road to Ballyjamesduff and picks up from where he left off with his team mates, sound in the knowledge that he’ll be on the pitch the next day.
“I came back to all the lads on the Monday, it made it easier really,” he told SportsJOE.
“When I got the news, I just went straight back to all them and was chatting to them about it and we were celebrating at the same time.
“Even though it was bad news, it started to feel like not a big deal – just something that had to be done. And with Coleraine coming up, we got ready for that so that’s where my focus was and I didn’t really think about it too much.”
Fortitude.
It might not encapsulate Oisín Kiernan but it drips from him. Every so often, someone comes along and, whilst words might never do them justice, their character pumps out a trait you can’t see past, not that you’d ever want to.
Fortitude. Facing adversity with courage, with strength, with no relent. It’s in the family’s blood, fortitude. His father Brian has himself overcome testicular cancer – twice – and Oisín’s mother battles with Parkinson’s disease. It’s a fearless pack in the north of Meath so from the moment that Kiernan and his brother told their mam that he was going to get his haircut, secretly heading for the GP in Coole, everything was broken down into practicalities and, more than that, broken down around the Castlerahan calendar.
“To us at the time, it wasn’t a major big deal, like. We weren’t used to it but we had been through it before so we knew what it was about.
“One of the first questions I asked him [Pat Cullen] was if I could play on Sunday. We had the quarter-final of the championship on the Sunday and this was the Thursday.”
Naturally, the doctor didn’t permit it but it didn’t stop the efforts over the next month. Nor did it stop the training.
“I was just short of the county final. I think it was four or five weeks after the operation and I was waiting on the results of a scan I had.
“I was back in training but I wasn’t able to play the county final, they wouldn’t let me play.
“I was bed-bound for a couple of days with the wound itself but energy-wise, I was grand. I was training before the county final on the Friday night and we tried the doctor again but he said no because the wound probably wouldn’t be completely healed on the inside.”
By the time Monday had rolled around and one night of celebration was under the belt, that wound was the least of the worries with the cancer having spread and chemotherapy now required.
Still, two weeks later, two weeks before chemo treatment, Oisín Kiernan donned the maroon jersey with number 11 on its back and played the entire 60 minutes of the Ulster quarter-final clash with Derry champions, Coleraine. That Castlerahan were down to 14 men for most of the game in Kingscourt was just the latest in a string of smoking guns that copper-fastened what a feat this was and what an incredible man we were dealing with.
The six-point loss ended the club season but, even with the first of four bouts of chemo starting at the end of November, targets were quickly readjusted and the GAA calendar lit the path to recovery as a second season with Cavan rose on the horizon.
“It was just something to focus on. I’d say that helped me big time, just purely focusing on getting back playing and, not so much as a distraction, but to prove that I can get back playing and that I wasn’t going to let it beat me.
“I was training away when I was out of hospital. There were some nights when I wasn’t a hundred per cent – I was able to train but just not feeling myself but I just trained away as best I could and it probably stood to me training through all that.”
The process was one week of chemo and two weeks off and, until the start of February, Kiernan went through one of the most notoriously difficult forms of treatment and still found time to train.
He went through the mill in the hospital in Dublin and managed to report for county training when he was out but, even in those week spells in the Mater, the same boy wasn’t lying around idle.
“After the first one, I felt normal, I didn’t notice a change really. After the second one, the hair started to go and the energy was a bit less. By the third or fourth one, it was obviously accumulating and felt the tiredness but it actually wasn’t as bad as I thought it might be,” he explained.
“I was just trying to keep the diet right and keep exercising – the doctor’s advice was to push the body into doing what it could do so, for the first two rounds, I was getting out of the hospital in Dublin to go to the gym but by the last two, I wasn’t really up to it.”
He was still able for the Bray to Greystones walk and tackled the Howth cliff when he was released with his girlfriend Lisa who spent every bit of time she could in the hospital with him.
Between her and the family and his Castlerahan and Cavan team mates, Kiernan had help behind him to get to that hilt and to finally hear those sweetest of two words: all clear.
But he wasn’t even contemplating anything else. There’s a popular American football coach named Chuck Pagano who was with the Indiana Colts when he immortalised the line, ‘live in vision’. During a surge of late-season form from the Colts, the leukaemia-stricken head coach gathered the team in the dressing room and told them to live in vision, not circumstance. He fronted up to his situation but said in no uncertain terms that he had already beaten and that he was already headed on the road to dancing at his daughter’s wedding.
There was nothing but a positive mindset from Kiernan who lived every day without fail in the vision that this was going to be done with and he’d be back doing what he loves most, playing football.
“It was a relief. To be honest, I didn’t really think about it that much because I was told it was going well and I was expecting the all-clear but it was relief for everyone, my family, my girlfriend, the football lads. The support was unbelievable.
“At the time, I was more annoyed at missing the football because we were going well. But then seeing the reaction of everyone else, it took me by surprise. I didn’t make a big deal of it but when I saw the reaction around me, I copped that this is probably a bit bigger than I thought originally.”
From a roughness in his testicles to seven months of a fight that included fighting with his club and county shirts.
“It wasn’t even a lump and it was never sore, that’s what confused me. I would describe it more as a divot and there was a roughness and that was definitely different.
“I left it four to five weeks and it wasn’t getting any smaller so I had to say something.”
Having finished chemo in February and overcome the cancer, there was still room for one last moment of pure inspiration from this fella.
Before the national league ended, he was used as a second half substitute by Mickey Graham, and six months after having an operation for testicular cancer, barely six weeks after finishing chemotherapy for cancer in his lymph nodes and abdominals, Oisín Kiernan ran onto Breffni Park to represent Cavan as they took on All-Ireland champions Dublin in the final game of the league.
Allianz Football League #AllianzLeagues
14mins 2nd half
Cavan: 1-6(9)
Dublin: 1-12(15)
14mins 2nd half substitution Cavan
Off: 05 Gerard Smith
On: 24 Oisin Kiernan— Official Cavan GAA (@CavanCoBoardGaa) March 24, 2019
The only thing he wants anyone to take from his story though is that he could’ve been back playing earlier.
“If I didn’t leave it four or five weeks, there’s a chance that it might not have spread up into the lymph nodes and I might not have needed chemo. I’m one of the lucky ones that I got hold of it early enough but if I had said it from day one, it probably would’ve just been an operation and no chemo, which would’ve saved us four or five months.
“Go get it checked. These doctors and GPs, I don’t know if lads are afraid of getting checked but it’s just routine to them.”
The doctors looked after their routine and Kiernan did his too. Games, training, football. It was never a case of if he can get back. It was always when he would get back. It was always living in vision, not circumstance.
“I didn’t think any other way. I wanted to get back playing football and that was it.
“I didn’t set any targets, I just wanted to get back as soon as possible and I’m a happy man that I have the all clear. But now I’m just mad to push on again.”
Fortitude.
