Lifestyle
All fired up for latest awareness challenge

Lifestyle – Judy Murphy meets Nicola Lavin, a Galway woman spearheading the worldwide Chilli ME Challenge
First it was the Ice Bucket Challenge in aid of research into Motor Neuron Disease. Now things are going from freezing cold to red hot, thanks to Galway woman Nicola Lavin who has spearheaded the Chilli ME Challenge. This initiative is to raise awareness of and help fund research into Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, otherwise known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.
Nicola, who is originally from Menlo and now lives in Headford, is one of some 12,000 people in Ireland with ME – it has affected her life since her early 20s.
Nicola suffered from heart failure after giving birth to her son Aaron almost 14 years ago, and after that, she developed a mild form of ME. Medics thought that she had come into contact with a virus which caused her heart problems and also acted as a trigger for ME.
This is a condition which leads the body’s immune system to malfunction, affecting every organ, especially the neurological and endocrine systems. There are many theories about the cause of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, ranging from viral infections or psychological stress, but there are no definite answers and no single test to confirm a diagnosis.
For that reason it has often been dismissed as not being a real illness with cynics describing it as ‘the Yuppie Flu’.
Nicola acknowledges that, like many others, she would have been dismissive of the illness before it affected her.
“Somebody I knew had it, and I used to think ‘if she got out more or exercised more, she’d be fine’,” she says. But Nicola learned that with ME exercise wasn’t possible because she wasn’t physically able. If she tried to exercise, it simply made her worse.
Listening to this smart, no-nonsense, chatty woman who works as a Medical Science Technician at UHG, describe the impact of ME on her life, it’s perfectly apparent that all her symptoms were real and identifiable. And they were horrible, especially in recent times.
The ME Nicola experienced after Aaron’s birth was relatively mild, allowing her to “work and play sports, but I’d get a relapse for a week or two every now and again, and I found it hard to fight off infections”.
By and large, she coped well back then, but that changed when she got orthodontic work done five or six years ago. Afterwards, she suffered a marked deterioration and her condition went from mild to more severe, which had a profound impact on her life.
“It is extreme exhaustion,” she says of how it affected her. “You have no energy to feed yourself, you can’t stand up, you can’t brush your teeth. You are freezing all the time and the muscle pain is constant.”
For Nicola, the worst part was the impact on her memory and cognitive skills.
This articulate woman, who had spent five years in college, suddenly found she couldn’t remember certain, basic words. It made her job and her life difficult and resulted in total frustration for someone who is naturally chatty and sociable.
A cardiologist sent her to a specialist in myalgic encephalomyelitis, which wasn’t an entirely positive experience. Nicola was given anti-depressants, but they didn’t work because she wasn’t depressed. If she was feeling down, it was because she was exhausted and her life was restricted by her ME. The underlying illness needed to be dealt with, and no medic seemed able to help with that.
“You are going to from doctor to doctor, feeling like you could die and they say ‘there’s nothing we can say exactly is wrong with you’.
For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.
Connacht Tribune
Hope – as life slowly slips away

Lifestyle – Journalist and broadcaster LIAM HORAN has just published Making the Leap, his debut collection of short stories. Here, in an exclusive, is Hope, one story from the newly-released book.
Louis found his father propped up in his chair in the day room where they hung the children’s paintings of farms and grandparents and siblings and cows and sheep and football pitches and choo-choo trains. Board games were stacked up on a table in the far corner, beside Get Well Soon and Thinking of You cards. A spray of illuvial bands draped lazily from a hook a little to the right of the TV, on a bracket high up on the wall.
He was engrossed in a programme, volume at full. Louis heard him say “Africa” in response to a question. Green and beige rugs were wrapped tightly around his legs. The sunken holder on the chair had a cup in it – that’d be tea. Plenty of milk, the way he liked it. Two sugars. And the tea gone cold, probably. The presenter bellowed “so, what would you do with €50,000?”
Louis now saw his Dad as he was: a reduced figure in a chair, a fading signpost to what he once had been. When he walked to the middle of the room, Dad finally saw him, reached for the remote control, reach turning to rummage, until, eventually, somehow, he pointed it at the screen and turned the volume down.
“How are you?” Louis asked.
“Not too bad. My stomach isn’t great though, those new tablets aren’t agreeing with me. Would you ask them about a change?” said Dad.
“I’ll go looking for someone in a minute,” said Louis.
They fell into the routine.
That man in the room two up, did he die? Where was he from? That crack up north is worrying again. Ah, they’ll never sort that place. How did Jacqui get on in the job interview? Good.
When will she hear? Late next week, they said. She thinks she might get it. That’d be great. Yeah, a great start for her after everything.
A nurse came in, looking for something. “The day diary’s gone missing,” she said, “but it’s not here. I’ll have to continue my investigations elsewhere.” She left the room and turned right down the corridor. Dad didn’t seem to have even noticed her.
“You get the painting finished before the weather broke?” he asked. Louis had.
“I did,” said Louis, “are the pillows okay?”
“Yeah,” replied Dad, “they’re fine. Stomach is still bad though. Weld had a double in Roscommon – were you on it?”
“I wasn’t,” said Louis. “I’ll see if I can find someone about those tablets.”
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
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Connacht Tribune
A seaweed therapy as powerful as the landscape

Health, Beauty and Lifestyle with Denise McNamara
It was the wildest of Autumn days when we set off for the depths of Connemara where the landscape is so rugged and the lakes are so mesmerizingly blue it makes your eyes water. I had never been to this part of an Gaeltacht before, known locally as Ceantar na nOileán or the island district. The three main islands Leitir Móir, Garmna and Leitir Mealláin are connected to the mainland by bridges.
Our destination was the latter, or Lettermullen in English, known in recent years as the ancestral home of the playwright and filmmaker Martin McDonagh. The locals hit the headlines for erecting three billboards as Gaeilge congratulating him on his 2017 Oscar-winning film Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri staring Frances McDormand.
We head here to experience what first made this hamlet of paradise famous – seaweed.
The Seaweed Centre was built by a community cooperative as a way of creating local employment and encouraging people to visit and spend money in the local economy. With 80 per cent funding by Bord Iascaigh Mhara, the remaining cost was put up by the islanders to create a local hub.
The first part of the project was the opening of a museum to seaweed, which was exported far and wide as early as early as the 16th century for the healing properties of iodine, recalls tourism officer for Údaras na Gaeltachta Padraic Mac Diarmada.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App
Download the Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App to access to Galway’s best-selling newspaper.
Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
Or purchase the Digital Edition for PC, Mac or Laptop from Pagesuite HERE.
Get the Connacht Tribune Live app
The Connacht Tribune Live app is the home of everything that is happening in Galway City and county. It’s completely FREE and features all the latest news, sport and information on what’s on in your area. Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
Connacht Tribune
Learning to accept the stones alongside the fancy diamonds

Country Living with Francis Farragher
There’s a ‘not-so-old’ country ballad that I occasionally have a go at singing when the ‘next-up’ call is heard in the local, called ‘Some days are diamonds (Some days are stone), written by a Dick Feller around 40-years ago, and recorded many times by people like John Denver, Bobby Bear and of course ‘our own’ Marc Roberts.
It’s a song that that seems to rustle through my brain during the drearier days of October when the light of day gets tightened up with each passing day and many of us just feel a little bit down as the Winter approaches.
As most people are aware of now it can set in motion what is known as the SAD syndrome or Seasonal Affective Disorder, which is a form of depression, felt by many people as natural daylight gets scarcer and the gloom of Winter looms.
Of course, the wonderful thing about living in Ireland in 2022, is that for the most part, we can talk about such things quite openly and candidly, without any fears or stigmas being attached.
The story of Dick Feller is a tale in itself for another day as he made a transgender transition from male to female and is now Deena Kaye Rose, something that in my younger days we wouldn’t have even heard of. One of the lines from the song is: “Now, the face that I see in the mirror, more and more is a stranger to me,” and it just have to an autobiographical vein to it, given the inner conflicts faced by the author in his his/her younger days.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App
Download the Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App to access to Galway’s best-selling newspaper.
Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
Or purchase the Digital Edition for PC, Mac or Laptop from Pagesuite HERE.
Get the Connacht Tribune Live app
The Connacht Tribune Live app is the home of everything that is happening in Galway City and county. It’s completely FREE and features all the latest news, sport and information on what’s on in your area. Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.





















