`I was thrilled to win the IPPA award and to win a double (the Overall Best Wedding Portfolio at the Irish Professional Photographers' Association, 1999 and - the first Irish woman to win - the Kodak Wedding Photographer of the Year) in the one year is amazing, but it has been a long, hard road. My rock bottom came one night a couple of years after the accident when I saw my former schoolmates from the Presentation Convent in Thurles at the local rugby club. We had all worked hard to do well in our Leaving so that we could go to university. They had no idea what had happened to me and were asking, "How's college? How's the art?" All I had to show for my college career was the disability allowance and a DPMA bus pass. At my very lowest, when I was experiencing great pain and felt I had lost everything, I went to my GP, Dr Margaret Lonergan, and asked her: "Give me a reason." She replied: "You'd take your mother with you." That was enough. I am the only daughter in a family with five brothers, and my mother and I are very close.
Dr Lonergan also helped me to realise I had to let go of my expectations. All my life had been focused on doing a good Leaving Cert and then a university degree. It took me two years to realise my condition was something I must accept and that college was an expectation that was gone forever.
The day of the accident I had just got first-class honours in the first year of a degree course in industrial design and engineering at the National College of Art and Design and the University of Limerick. I was over the moon. You know how it is - you're on a high after that first year, with the summer holidays beckoning. My younger brother, Enda, had just made his Confirmation and I stood for him. Afterwards, we decided to go outside Thurles for a family trip to Lough Gur, Co Limerick. My Dad had just got a new car and we kept giving out to him for driving at 30 miles an hour because he was breaking in a new engine. Then, out of the blue, we were hit head-on on a bend. I was wearing a seatbelt, but still I shot forward and hit the roof and then flew backwards, hard, like a switch. I remember having to hold my neck straight with my hands while they cut us out of the car. I had massive soft-tissue injuries and damage to the facet joints on either side of the vertebrae. I was also injured in my lower back in the sacroiliac joints, because of the way I had landed after being thrown forward.
The pain was unbelievable. I spent five years in and out of hospitals, seeing various consultants. You get on a medical merry-go-round and it's frightening. The doctors do their X-rays and their MRIs and allocate you a 15-minute slot in their day and that's it. I can understand it from their point of view, because they are seriously overworked, but I was 21 years old and looking for answers. There were no answers. One doctor said to me: "What do you think I have? A magic wand?"
I was taking so many painkillers that I was going zombie-eyed, my voice was slurred, and emotionally I was dropping lower and lower. It was a consultant at Beaumont Hospital, Dr Lorna Browne, who rescued me by referring me to the National Rehabilitation Institute, which assessed me as having the movements of an 80-year-old woman riddled with arthritis. For two years, I spent the day at the NRI having intensive hydrotherapy and occupational therapy. It was very, very strenuous treatment. I had to take painkillers immediately before and after, then in the evenings I went exhausted to bed at my Uncle Joe's house.
Seeing some people at the NRI partially paralysed and in wheelchairs, I said to the institute's director, Dr Murray: "At least I'm not as badly off as they are." And he said: "It's all relative Sinead - you are in a massive level of pain and they are not." After two years of therapy at the NRI, they got me into an art history course at Trinity College Dublin, but after nine months I was back in full-time physiotherapy for a further two years. As I improved, I joined the Dublin Camera Club as a safety valve because I needed something to float away on. I continued with the camera club when I returned home to Thurles and one day Terry O'Rourke, a photographer from Nenagh, was the visiting lecturer. He was very kind and encouraging about my talent, even though I was practically institutionalised at that stage. Two years in rehab on the CV doesn't look the hottest. At the NRI, it was explained to me that no one would employ me with my background of chronic back pain and that whatever career I chose should involve self-employment. So when Terry asked me if I wanted to come out on a wedding with him, I went along.
The secret of doing weddings is that the art of photography is secondary to the art of managing people. You must realise that while you have done many weddings before, this is the first wedding for the bride and groom - I wish more doctors would take that attitude to seeing patients. I have been working as a photographer since 1992 and won my first IPPA award in 1996. There are days when I'm bad and I lie down in bed for the day and that's fine. My parents, Mary and Liam, are brilliant - Dad, will pack up all my gear and put it into the jeep so that I don't have to lift and carry. When he cannot help, I have two assistants, Leanne and Yvonne, who carry my gear. My mother, too, is a fabulous person and I wouldn't have made it through without her.
I also wouldn't have made it without my physiotherapist, Audrey Ryan, the physio with the Tipperary hurling team. I got married 18 months ago to William Smyth, a horticulturist who I met on a business enterprise course. We're about to build a house-cum-studio. I don't talk to William about the person I was before the accident or about those dark days in rehabilitation. I have closed the door on all of that; closing doors has helped me to cope. I'm very happy now. I think that when you have experienced trauma and loss in your life, you gain the ability to appreciate more what you do have.
In conversation with Kathryn Holmquist