Getting a guide dog has given Pat Costigan a new direction in life after losing his sight, writes CLAIRE O'CONNELL
IN THE past six years, Pat Costigan has had two open-heart surgeries, a brain haemorrhage and a stroke, and he has lost most of his sight. Yet the upbeat 52 year old still reckons he is very fortunate.
And now the arrival of his guide dog, Quandro, is opening up opportunities he could scarcely have considered before.
“The dog has changed everything,” says Costigan, gesturing towards the large and impeccably well-behaved retriever/
German shepherd cross curled up beside us at their home in Kimmage, Dublin. “I don’t feel blind any more.”
The seeds of Costigan’s sight loss were sown in 2003 when he needed a mechanical valve put into his heart to correct an abnormality that had been there since birth.
Having a mechanical valve meant going on the blood-thinner warfarin, which can increase the risk of internal bleeding. But Costigan took an active role in monitoring his blood readings to ensure the dose he was taking kept him in a safe range for clotting.
Then two years later something happened that no one could have anticipated. “I woke up and thought I was having a migraine. My sight was messed up and I had a bad headache,” recalls Costigan.
The family was due to travel to France later that day, so Costigan’s wife, Frances, drove him to the GP to get checked out. “On the way I started throwing up out the window of the car, which was not a good sign apparently,” he says.
When things went from bad to worse, the GP called an ambulance for Costigan, who has no memory of the time, and doctors at St James’s Hospital discovered that an abnormally formed blood vessel in his brain had ruptured and bled.
“It was a congenital abnormality in my brain – it had lasted for 48 years and then it just gave up the ghost,” says Costigan, who explains that the warfarin had probably hindered self-repair of the brain bleed before the damage was done.
But there was some hope, he adds. “One of the doctors told Frances that I had just won the medical lotto. Beaumont [Hospital] believed they could operate on me, so they sent me there, opened up the back of my head and fixed what they had to fix.”
Costigan now shudders to think what might have been if the symptoms had started on the plane to France: “Had this all happened a few hours later, I was dead.”
The haemorrhage damaged a part of his brain involved in vision. It meant his sight was reduced, but he was still able to return to work part-time as a clinical electron microscopist at University College Dublin.
Then two years later, his heart valve became infected and he had a stroke. “I was sitting in my living room one Monday morning having a cup of tea with a friend and I said I think I have just gone blind. I can see nothing,” he recalls.
Another rapid visit to the GP confirmed that something serious was happening. “He said all right, we had better ring Frances, it looks like you might be having another bleed,” says Costigan. “I don’t know how Frances got through all this. It has been very tough on her but she is very calm, she is the perfect woman to have in a drama. She is unflappable.”
Waiting in the hospital that day though, Costigan thought his time was finally up. “I can remember going to AE and I had this huge need to see my daughter, Sarah. I thought that was it, I was gone, and I didn’t want to die without a proper goodbye.”
Thankfully he survived, but more brain surgery meant Costigan’s sight took a further knock, and he is now almost fully blind.
“You can see a full clock face, but I can just see between half-past six and twenty-to-seven with each eye, which means I have to do a lot of scanning to see something,” he says.
He retired from work, had the mechanical heart valve replaced with a less troublesome biological one – which means no more warfarin – and he has kept a positive attitude.
“I’m not just lucky, I am incredibly fortunate. A stroke and a brain haemorrhage and yet no motor damage, just blindness – I can live with that,” he says. “It’s amazing how it changes your mindset and I do have a very healthy attitude to the whole thing. I choose every single day to be the way I am. I could sit in a corner for the next 20 years, but that’s no alternative.”
But Costigan’s big frustration was using a cane to get around. He had given up on trying to negotiate busy streets in town, and even in his own area he was stoned by kids on two occasions when out walking with the mobility stick.
So he applied for a guide dog, kick-starting a year-long process of interviews and assessments to make sure a good match was found.
“The Irish Guide Dogs For the Blind invited me down to an information day at their headquarters in Cork, so I went and found a crowd of people who were totally professional and loved what they were doing,” says Costigan.
Eventually he and Quandro were introduced. “It was love at first sight. I was besotted,” recalls Costigan, who spent three weeks last year training in Cork with his new canine partner.
And he realised things were going to be forever different the moment they navigated some tricky terrain. “In training they took me up a road that was being dug up, there were loads of bollards,” he remembers. “I could have done it with the cane but I wouldn’t have – but with the dog I was straight up no problem. It was staggering. That was my turning point, I realised I could get back to normal now, I could get back to a stage where I never thought I could be.”
His family also noticed the difference straight away when they came to visit him in Cork, recalls Costigan. “My son Daniel, who was 12 at the time, said ‘Dad you no longer move, act or appear like a blind man when you are with Quandro.’ And, for me, that epitomised it.”
Back home and several months on, Costigan talks about an almost “spooky” relationship between man and dog: “It’s like he can read your mind,” he says. “There’s a relationship there.”
And he is resetting his goals in light of his newfound flexibility. “I have all this potential and I feel I can take it on again, so how do I do it? What do I do?” he says.
“One thing is that I have aspirations to go to France on my own with the dog. The thoughts of it scare me, but I want that sort of freedom again. I am happy with what I have, but I want a lot more now with my life. And the dog means that is now possible.”