He got the scan about a week before he departed for Australia, a reluctant participant in the entire process. The lump had first appeared on the left side of his neck several months earlier, but he had settled on the ostrich approach and was waiting for it to disappear.
It was about the size of a table-tennis ball and, following the umpteenth nudge from a concerned friend, he eventually relented and agreed to get it checked out. The updated plan went something like: scan, pack bags, head for Australia.
“One nurse did kind of say to me at the time, ‘Are you sure you want to go?’ She had an inkling, and to be honest I had an inkling too. But everything was booked and I was in denial as well, denial about the seriousness of what it might be.”
He was idling around unhurried Fremantle a few weeks later when the real world caught up. He’d lost his phone shortly after arriving Down Under and the hospital couldn’t reach him, so they contacted his next of kin.
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“My father got the news first, the poor fella. Imagine hearing that. He got in touch to let me know. He was like, ‘It’s all good, it’s all good.’”
Only, it wasn’t. Hodgkin lymphoma.
The ground turned to quicksand; he was sinking. Stage three might have been mentioned, but he can’t be sure. The moment remains a blur, legs as firm as jelly, Western Australia spinning around him. It was December 2022. Níall Kane was just 27.
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Playing for Meath was always the ambition. From as early as he can remember, there was nothing else. He won hundreds of All-Ireland finals in his back garden, pictured the celebrations in his dreams.
He played minor and under-21 for the county but the senior call didn’t come immediately. The years passed, nothing. However, after a central role in Simonstown winning back-to-back senior championships in 2016-17, he was handed the club captaincy for their three-in-a-row bid in 2018. Later that same year, the call did finally come.
“I had been visualising that moment and waiting for that call for a long time,” he recalls. “I remember putting on the jersey for my first game, we were playing Leitrim in a challenge in Oldcastle, and I was just so proud. It was such an honour.”
He played as if his life depended upon it; his kamikaze style endeared him to Meath supporters. If he couldn’t be the most talented footballer in the dressingroom, he sure as hell could be the most committed. He wasn’t David Clifford – he was the lad you’d send over to mark David Clifford. He thundered into tackles, emptied himself for the cause, but his willingness to embrace reckless endangerment didn’t come without risk.
In March 2019, on a Siberian Sunday at Páirc Tailteann, in the dying seconds of a league game against Kildare – and with Meath clinging to a one-point lead – he prevented the visitors scoring an equaliser by diving on a loose ball as if shielding the home goal from the impact of a detonating grenade. In doing so, he dislocated his left elbow.
He was whisked to Drogheda Hospital and underwent surgery. Even now, five years on, he can’t do push-ups properly. Meath won that game by a single point, but it was a pyrrhic victory for Kane. Twenty-nineteen had been his breakout year – he played in all five of Meath’s league games until the elbow dislocation, even scoring 0-2 from wing back against Donegal. The injury setback could hardly have come at a worse time.
Still, that August he managed to get back on the field, coming off the bench to play against Kerry in the All-Ireland SFC Super Eights.
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The plan was to do a year or two in Australia, see if there was a new life to be made on the other side of the world. He was a qualified personal trainer and yoga teacher. The possibilities were endless.
So, the news coming down the phone line hit like a train.
The natural reaction might have been to hop on a plane for home. But he paused. It would have been easy to latibulate, ie hide in a corner, but instead he poured all his energy in to research.
“That time in Australia allowed me to process it and to come to terms with the diagnosis,” he recalls. “There was nearly a little bit of shame at first – I had been the healthy guy, and I projected that myself through my social media and how I carried myself. I thought I had it all sussed out, but I didn’t. I came to terms with that when I was away.”
But the impact of the news was immediate. In the space of just two weeks after getting diagnosed, he lost 10kg.
“The stress was eating away at me, literally. As much as I was trying my best to cope with all of this, I was in bed wondering, ‘Am I going to wake up in the morning?’”
He heard about a fellow Meath man living in Perth who in March 2020 had been diagnosed with stage four lung cancer.
“I was put in touch with Gary Morrell, who initially had been given a couple of months to live but he just threw the kitchen sink at it with a conventional and holistic approach with regards his treatment. That kind of set me up as regards how I was going to go at it.”
Kane came back to Ireland in January but, before entering conventional medical treatment, he wanted to prepare himself for the chemo. He cleaned up his diet, engaged in therapy, spent as much time as possible in nature.
His family and friends, however, were naturally concerned. The lump was visible, and doctors had advised against delaying treatment.
“Some people were frightened by my calm approach at not jumping in with the conventional medical system straight away. The medicine can be great, but I felt if you were not ready to receive it then it is not going to work as well. I wasn’t ready so I held off. It’s not that I didn’t believe the conventional way was going to work. It was more, ‘What’s the best way of doing this?’ I just had to trust my own intuition, to make my body stronger. If I made a mistake and was wrong, I would have to live with that.
“My family were a little bit hesitant at the start, but once they understood that was how I wanted to approach it, they were brilliant. I was very lucky, my family and friends were great. ‘We’ve got your back’ kind of thing. That meant so much to me.”
He would occasionally take off to west Cork to use hyperbaric chambers. He’d book about half a dozen sessions in the high oxygen rooms during the day and sleep in his van at night.
He had read Vicky Phelan’s memoir, Overcoming, and discovered the benefits of intravenous nutritional therapy (vitamin drips). Off in his van again, this time to Portlaoise.
“I made sure those I’d gathered around me were good people, not quacks who were going to contradict the medical treatment. There are tons of things you can do that can assist the chemo and make it more effective.”
He started to log down all the various holistic treatments he tried and almost ran out of paper. There was nothing he wouldn’t consider if it might ameliorate his situation. He took himself away to Donegal, attended a Young Men’s Rites of Passage retreat in Wicklow, went off the grid.
“I turned the phone off and told the family, ‘You’re not going to hear from me for three weeks.’ I needed time alone. After that I was ready to go the conventional route. I reached out to the hospital and they got me up and running. I started my treatment but by then I had built a team of people around me – medical professionals, herbalists, acupuncturists, therapists, good people.
“Nobody is walking your path, only you, but you can do it alone while having a team around you, if that makes sense. I learned to ask for help.”
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He started chemo at the Mater hospital in late 2023, every two weeks for six months.
“I expected to be in this lovely room, nice, calm music playing and sitting in big comfortable seats, but you walk in and suddenly you are staring down a hall and it’s just wall-to-wall people getting treatment,” he recalls.
On his first day, he scanned the faces, some more ill than others. Most were older.
“You immediately think, ‘Why am I here?’ I’m only young.’ But I gained so much empathy. I was a fit young man going through this and my body was strong, I felt I was able for it. But what about somebody who is older and had been sick prior to a diagnosis, the burden they must be going through. It’s humbling when you see what people can endure, their strength and resilience.”
He coasted through the first three months but eventually the accumulative effect of the sessions started to kick in. There was fatigue, long sleeping hours and awful night sweats.
“That was the worst out of everything through the treatment, because you were waking up drenched. Your sleep was interrupted, your mood was impacted.”
His hair fell out. For a man who sported a topknot and a beard playing intercounty football, it was like Agassi without the mullet.
“The topknot was a thing there for a while with Meath,” he smiles. “We had Cillian O’Sullivan, Lynchy [Eoin Lynch] from Longwood, there were three or four boys at one stage rocking the topknots.
“But I didn’t mind the hair falling out, to be honest. That was all superficial.”
And then the eyebrows went, the beard, everything.
“I was ready for it, it didn’t really faze me, but there were some people who would have known me and they’d be double-checking to see who was saying hello to them.
“I had to learn to deal with people who were uncomfortable, I knew it wasn’t badness from them, they just didn’t want to be crossing your boundaries.”
He wasn’t one for chatting during chemo, though the patients were placed so far apart that you’d have to shout to hold a conversation. Besides, most folk were just trying to get through it, however they could.
Another former Meath footballer, Liam Hayes, once likened his own chemo treatment to a scene in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings where the “good guys” were entering the battlefield inside his body to kill the “evil little bastards”.
“I had a visualisation thing as well which I had recorded and prepared prior to treatment, I’d listen to that,” says Kane. “You are visualising the stuff coming in, it’s medicine and it’s healing. I found that helpful.”
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His last game for Meath was a league match against Roscommon in 2022. By that stage, truth be told, Kane had figured his career in green and gold would not stretch beyond the season.
“Before I knew about the cancer, I knew my footballing days with Meath had come to an end. I knew it hadn’t really worked out.
“That was really tough to come to terms with because it was all I had ever wanted to do. It just wasn’t meant to be. But I never took for granted how privileged I was to be able to wear the Meath jersey. It meant so much to me.”
He’s never indulged in self-pity. That’s just how it worked out. Making for Australia at the end of 2022 felt like a clean break. No hanging on, no second-guessing himself, he’d be out.
“I gave all my jerseys and all my gear away,” he continues.
“All bar one. I still have the jersey from the day I dislocated my elbow against Kildare, because it had to be cut off me.
“For a while that jersey was symbolic to me of several different things, so I kept that. But recently I’ve been toying with the idea of parting with it too.”
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The Hill of Tara, that’s where we meet. It’s Kane’s choice. He spends a lot of time here. Feels its energy. Standing on top of the Forradh, he points to landmarks off in the distance: Skryne Tower to the northeast, Loughcrew out west.
We start our conversation sitting on a tuft of grass, leaning against Duma na nGiall (the Mound of the Hostages). But as the rain intensifies, we stroll back down towards the car park, passing the steep slopes where Seán Boylan broke and built Meath footballers.
“Some of the methods Seán used, they were far out at that time, he was looking at things differently, holistically, not simply the conventional way of training teams,” says Kane. “Bringing them here to Tara, taking them to the beach, running in the pool, giving lads herbal tonics, the players believed in him and were willing to try it.”
Back at his van, Kane rustles around a wicker basket, yanks out a flask and offers Hawthorn tea.
“This was picked a couple of weeks ago. The leaves of the Hawthorn are a really good heart medicine.”
Herbal tonics, indeed.
He looks out the window and draws an imaginary arc across the landscape with his hand.
“Everything in that hedgerow is medicine.”
He talks about the power of elderflowers, spring nettles, the many uses of the dandelion and the benefits of rosehip tea. He asks if we ever noticed how cleavers (sticky backs) resemble the lymphatic system in the body? We nod assuredly, lying, and privately undertake to check that out.
Time passes, the showers come and go, the flask gets drained.
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All-clear.
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Six weeks after his chemo finished, Kane heard those words and not much else. The ground felt firm, his legs felt strong. It was late May 2024.
“It was like this great weight was just lifted off my shoulder. I was a little bit nervous going in, but it was kind of like before playing a match, you know if you have the work done and if you have given yourself the best chance. I felt I had done everything in my power and thankfully I got a good result.”
One of the themes returned to often by Jim Stynes in My Journey, his powerful book on dealing with cancer, revolved around the loss of ego. It resonated with many patients, including Kane.
“I’m not the same person I was two years ago. Cancer changed me and I would definitely say for the better. I have a broader view of life, of what my place in the world is and how I can help. I have a clearer picture of what my purpose is and what I’m here to do. It would have been great if I could have learned all those lessons without cancer, without doing all that to my body, but I am extremely grateful for everything I’ve learned.
“Oftentimes you’ll hear illness or injury called the pain teacher, that it’s here to teach you something, perhaps something in your life is out of balance, something needs to change. One thing I’ve learned is that you can take action by being open and willing to learn. It’s about realising what is important in life. Some people might be workaholics but it’s important to figure out your priorities. When you are on your deathbed, you won’t remember the 60-70 hour weeks you put in, you’ll remember the time you spent with your family, your kids, your friends.”
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In late June, he wandered up to Simonstown with the intention of taking part in the warm-up of a training session, just dipping his toes back in the baby pool of Gaelic football. But the club’s second team had a B League game against Seneschalstown the same night and were short on numbers. Squealer was spotted.
It’s a schoolyard nickname that has its roots in Frankie the Squealer from The Simpsons. The moniker stuck.
“There are a lot of people who’d know me but don’t actually know my real name, I’m just Squealer.”
Squealer’s last game of football had been in September 2022 when Simonstown beat Ballinabrackey in a relegation playoff. It might only have been a league game on that evening in late June this year, but Kane had done no training, his body was still adjusting to life post-chemo, he wasn’t fit, he wasn’t ready.
He said yes.
Some of the Seneschalstown players had been schoolfriends, they recognised the moment. There were several knowing nods, a few smiles, it was good for the soul.
“I dropped every ball and didn’t do an ounce of tackling, but I enjoyed it.
“One of my goals I had kind of set months ago when going through the treatment was to try to get back and play 15 minutes of a championship match with the club this year – be it junior C, junior B, senior, I don’t really care. I’m not expecting anything, but I’d like to see if I can manage to get on the pitch in a championship game over the summer.”
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On a baking August evening last Monday, Simonstown played Navan O’Mahony’s in the first round of the Meath Premier 2 Championship. During the second half of a keenly contested match, the Simonstown management turned to their bench and asked number 27 to enter the fray. Moments later Níall Kane crossed the white line and took his place on the field.
