Man with locked-in syndrome uses technology to say ‘I do’

Bernie Dolan will never forget the day she met her fiancé David Garvey’s parents outside Beaumont Hospital. They were waiting to tell her he had just four days to live.

“I knew by them. It was the hardest thing that they ever had to tell me. I started bawling, I just couldn’t believe it,” she says two-and-a-half-years later. Thankfully, the doctors were wrong.

Last week the couple finally got married. It marked the end of a testing ordeal which had David (35) fighting for his life, paralysed and left with “locked-in syndrome”, a condition in which a person is fully cognisant but unable to communicate without the use of technology.

David uses an eye-gaze machine, which allows him to communicate through visual contact or with the use of his chin to select letters of the alphabet on a computer.

In an emotional ceremony at Castle Arch in Trim, Co Meath, Bernie says her highlight was seeing him waiting by the marriage registrar with a big smile on his face. “It was pretty emotional, that we had actually achieved it and got our dream.”

Before they met on a night out eight years ago, David had suffered three strokes and was in a wheelchair. For reasons unknown, he had developed fluid on the brain, the devastating results of which would form the basis of the couple’s lives for the next two years, stranded in a hospital ward.

Not long before they went on holidays in 2012, David went into hospital for an MRI scan which diagnosed his condition.

“He was in college. We were travelling; we went to France for two weeks. There wasn’t a bother on him,” remembers Bernie.

Then, in September, he went back to hospital to have a shunt fitted – a device used to relieve pressure on the brain caused by a build up of fluid.

The following November, things became worse when he developed difficulties with his speech and swallowing. Then on Christmas Eve, the doctors delivered the worst possible news.

He was given just a few days to live, but, against the odds, began to regain his strength. On New Year’s Day they operated successfully, although David remains on a ventilator to help his breathing.

He wouldn’t leave hospital until December, 2014 and despite the ordeal Bernie resolved to support him. They wouldn’t even consider postponing their wedding which had been planned for September 2015, to coincide with the anniversaries of their parents’ nuptials.

“We had two Christmases in Beaumont. It was nice. They made it as special as they could and I had my own little Christmas tree. I can’t criticise Beaumont Hospital,” Bernie said.

“It was grand. We still have our own way of communicating. I would know what he is trying to (say).”

David currently lives in his parents’ house in Dundalk and they plan to buy a minibus so he can travel more freely and renovate their home in Bernie’s native Navan.