GAELIC GAMES: SO AS the season cranks up what news of Gizzy Lyng? Wexford’s charismatic captain, variously deployed as defender, midfielder and forward since breaking through in 2004, will be roving this summer. And possibly next summer too. Far from home.
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Rewind the tape. The Leinster final of 2007. He played midfield with his old friend Eoin Quigley. Kilkenny inflicted the sort of damage which was to become customary for a lot of hurling counties but which back then Wexford found hard to accept. Gizzy came off in a bad state. The play-offs and Tipperary loomed. He had the bright idea of speeding the recovery process. The cryotherapy centre in Wexford.
First thing the following morning himself and Quigley were there ready to chill. They gave it the full monty. Five minutes of intense cold. Gizzy came out and knew he’d made a mistake. The cold was staying in his bones, bedding into him. Cold beyond cold, is how he describes it.
He is an optimist, though. If the cold had done this to him then perhaps the heat could reverse it. Ten minutes later he was in the sauna. Ho hum.
“I knew it was bad,” he says. “I did the worst thing possible. I went down and got into the sauna ten minutes later and by that night I knew there was something majorly wrong with me.”
For the next week he couldn’t eat, sleep or drink. He went shivering through the nights chasing sleep which never came. He was freezing. He was roasting.
He couldn’t find a gear in training. He could get through it but it would leave him drained.
Soon after on a Saturday they played Tipp in the play-offs. Darragh Hickey skinned him. Hickey was top scorer for Tipp with four points. Gizzy can only remember what he looked like from behind.
So it went. Training but not sleeping. Submitting himself early on to the very Irish course of treatment, the belief that it would all just go away. They were beaten by Kilkenny in the All-Ireland semi-final. He absorbed that and the illness continued through winter. He went to a couple of doctors. No solution. No cure. Got very little or no help from his county board. That disappointed him a little.
By the time the 2008 season came about he was no better but had made a strange kind of accommodation with the illness. He was living with it. He was getting sick a lot. He still couldn’t keep food down. When sleep eventually came it offered no relief – he’d wake as fatigued as he had been when he’d gone asleep. He was cranky, Cranky with everyone. Friends, family, the kids he taught in school. He learned to cope with it on the field.
“Every game that we had I’d spend the night before just dreading it. I can look back at games and I know I’d be avoiding the physical pulling and pushing. I was exhausted most of the time. I’d be falling over a lot. I know I did okay for the past few years, I’m not making excuses or claiming anything but I know I’ve been off centre and with all the training I never got the system back up to what it should be. I know if I could get that right I’ll come back the stronger for it.”
Eventually Colm Bonnar put him in touch with Tommy Dunne in Tipperary. Bonnar reckoned Dunne once had a similar ailment. Dunne listened, then put Lyng in touch with two people in Limerick. Richard Rocker and his partner Andrea, sports physicians. They sent a series off to England. World came back. Well two words. Blastocystis Hominis
Blastocystis hominis is the health equivalent of a dangerous corner forward. A cunning parasite which attacks the body and creates trouble when it is under stress or weakened. The moment the body picks up a little, its powers are diminished. Gizzy kept running himself into the ground for Wexford hurling though.
He figures he contracted the guest in Mexico or Thailand, the parasite had no passport but had lain dormant until Gizzy performed the freezing, boiling experiment on himself. The parasite awoke and had three years of work done before measures were taken to evict him.
“Definitely it was the worst thing ever. I should have nipped it in the bud early on but you know the way you wait and see and hope. I got a little better and lived with that. I got very little help from inside hurling. It wasn’t an injury in the line of duty but it wasn’t unconnected with hurling. I thought the board would want its players in the best shape but they had very little interest. I kept going. Tried anything. Tried everything. Spending money hand over fist. The last three years were like that.”
He is recovering. He takes no gluten, no dairy. Sits across the table drinking green tea. He has to take shakes. Meat once a week. Fish, Fish, Fish. In his bags he has €300 worth of supplements. The eviction war goes on. Eight months more of it.
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