The Laura Dowling Experience

In this episode, former Connacht rugby player Fergus Farrell tells Laura what happened after he lifted a metal bench in his own yard in October 2018 — and severed his spinal cord by ninety per cent.

He was paralysed from the ribcage down and told he had a five per cent chance of walking again, on the condition he moved within seventy-two hours. He didn’t move. Instead he lay in a bed for twenty-one days and built a picture in his head: a circuit board for his brain, a light switch for his big right toe, and a wire he had to run between them. At half two in the morning on day twenty-one, the toe flickered. When the doctor came round, he watched it move three times before he’d call it anything other than a spasm.

Fergus is candid about what recovery costs — pain around the clock, no balance, no feeling from his feet to his waist, and the hidden disability nobody sees in a big man walking down the street. He talks about the businesses he lost, the family who carried it, the guilt of being one who got back on his feet, and why he now calls the accident the best thing that happened to him.

In August he set out from Brooklyn Bridge to walk 4,500 kilometres to Santa Monica Pier for Spinal Injuries Ireland — six million steps, and each one as important as the next.

🔑 Key Points

The injury came from lifting, not impact
He carried a 60–80kg bench about fifteen metres, dropped it, took a breath and lifted it again. The second lift ruptured a disc into his spinal column and severed the cord by 90%.

The five per cent came with a condition
A 5% chance of walking again if he moved within 72 hours. He didn’t. The toe moved on day twenty-one.

Visualisation was a tool he already had
He’d used it to win selection and to build his business. In hospital he made it concrete: a circuit board as his brain, a switch as his toe, and the work of wiring them together.

The doctor called it a spasm — twice
Dr Cullen made him move it three times before saying “that’s most unexpected, Fergus.”

Not every disability is visible
He walks, so people assume he’s fine. Zero balance, no feeling from his feet to his waist, constant pain on 3,000mg of gabapentin a day.

The people around an injury carry it too
His then-wife finished the house, worked and raised three young children. “The person that’s left behind injured affects so many different people.”

He never visualised himself walking
He started with the smallest thing he could actually see: one toe, with the blanket off. Setting the finish line at walking would only have set him up to fail.

The walk is the same method at scale
Brooklyn Bridge to Santa Monica Pier, 4,500km, six million steps, 75 days as a target rather than a deadline.

📚 Resources

Fergus Walks
Fergus’s walk across America for Spinal Injuries Ireland

Spinal Injuries Ireland
The only Irish organisation dedicated solely to supporting people living with a spinal cord injury and their families

Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation
Supporting the American leg of the walk

National Rehabilitation Hospital, Dún Laoghaire
Where Fergus did his spinal rehabilitation

Fergus Farrell on Instagram
Following the walk day by day

⏱️ Timestamps

00:00 — Intro
02:10 — Lifting a metal bench in his own yard
05:35 — The disability nobody can see
06:44 — Pain 24/7, and refusing it attention
08:46 — A five per cent chance, and the seventy-two hours
10:00 — The circuit board, the switch and the wire
12:04 — Day twenty-one, half two in the morning
13:11 — Dr Cullen: “these could be involuntary spasms”
17:50 — The guilt of getting back on his feet
19:42 — What it did to his family
21:53 — Losing the businesses
25:09 — Walking across America
30:56 — “Every day is a new day to improve”
32:42 — Advice for young people, and the meaning of life
Thanks for listening! You can watch the full episode on YouTube here. Don’t forget to follow The Laura Dowling Experience podcast on Instagram @lauradowlingexperience for updates and more information. You can also follow our host, Laura Dowling, @fabulouspharmacist for more insights and tips. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave a review—it really helps us out! Stay tuned for more great conversations.
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Aimée Farrell-Courtney was six years old when she saw three girls playing the bodhrán in her school yard, the sun behind them and the sound going round the walls. She went home and announced she wanted to learn. Her mother's reply - "Oh my God, smelly pub" - is the first clue that this instrument arrived with a reputation attached, and with assumptions about who gets to hold one.

She learned anyway, was helping to teach by the age of twelve, and in 2010 won the World Bodhrán Championship. What she has spent the years since doing is quieter and, in its way, harder: asking why so many women take up the drum and so few are ever seen playing it.

She and Laura go from goat skin and tuning systems to the survey Aimée ran into women's experiences of trad sessions - the player left standing at the bar while everyone else is asked what they're drinking.

She talks about being told she only got a Royal Albert Hall booking because she could wear a dress, about designing a drum that fits the body holding it, and about the two communities she has built for people who want music without the judgement.

🔑 Key Points

She was six, and three girls in a schoolyard decided it
Aimée watched them rehearsing with the sun behind them and thought they looked like superwomen - with no idea yet that the bodhrán was a male-dominated instrument.

"My youngest student is four, my eldest student is 94"
The bodhrán is unusually easy to start, which Aimée sees as its gift and also the reason some people dismiss it without ever learning it properly.

A survey put evidence behind what women already knew
Working with a UK researcher, Aimée surveyed bodhrán players worldwide and found most women reported poor experiences bringing their drum to sessions.

"You only got that because you could wear a dress"
After a 2014 gig at the Royal Albert Hall, a peer told her the booking had nothing to do with how she played.

Male players are described by technique, women by appearance
Read how the two are written about online, Aimée says, and the difference is immediate.

The instrument was never designed around the body playing it
Smaller drums with deeper frames chase a sound, not a posture, so Aimée has been designing a bodhrán that works with the body rather than against it.

Music can be used, not only performed
Trained as a sound therapist, she works with frame drum, gong and singing bowls — and says three minutes of a slow, steady rhythm is enough to settle yourself at home.

Trad Drum and Drummy Mummy exist to take the judgement out of it
Trad Drum grew out of lockdown check-ins with her students; Drummy Mummy, launching shortly, is a drumming space for mothers — no children, no competition, nobody marking you.

📚 Resources

Aimée Farrell-Courtney
Bodhrán lessons, workshops and Traddrum Productions.

FairPlé
Campaigning for gender balance in Irish traditional and folk music.

Rhythm2Recovery
The Australian drumming programme for social and emotional development Aimée is certified in.

Basic Income for the Arts
The Irish scheme behind the conversation about supporting artists.

⏱️ Timestamps

02:30 — Three girls in a schoolyard
03:24 — "Oh my God, smelly pub"
08:02 — "It's just a frame drum, essentially"
10:32 — Designing a drum that fits the body
15:23 — Winning the world championship in 2010
17:32 — The survey into women and the bodhrán
18:50 — "My youngest student is four, my eldest is 94"
24:39 — "You only got that because you could wear a dress"
27:04 — Sound therapy, and what entrainment does
41:08 — Trad Drum, and the new Drummy Mummy
51:00 — The woman nobody spoke to at the session
01:01:44 — Trust yourself
Thanks for listening! You can watch the full episode on YouTube here. Don’t forget to follow The Laura Dowling Experience podcast on Instagram @lauradowlingexperience for updates and more information. You can also follow our host, Laura Dowling, @fabulouspharmacist for more insights and tips. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave a review—it really helps us out! Stay tuned for more great conversations.
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In this bitesize moment pulled from the Laura Dowling Experience back catalogue, consultant anaesthetist Dr Anne Doherty offers two simple, evergreen pieces of wisdom from the close of her conversation with Laura.

Nothing is as permanent as you think — the good times and the bad both pass — and almost every hard choice people make, even the ones you disagree with, comes from a place of love.

🔑Key Points
• Why the good times and the bad times both pass
• The freedom in not needing an answer for everything right now
• How love sits underneath even the choices we disagree with
• A gentler, more compassionate way to see people

🎧 Listen to the full episode here.
Thanks for listening! You can watch the full episode on YouTube here. Don’t forget to follow The Laura Dowling Experience podcast on Instagram @lauradowlingexperience for updates and more information. You can also follow our host, Laura Dowling, @fabulouspharmacist for more insights and tips. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave a review—it really helps us out! Stay tuned for more great conversations.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Daniel Buckley was thirty-two before he had a name for what was going on in his head. For as long as he could remember he had been restless, discontented, unable to sit still or hold his focus on anything that didn’t grip him - and he had simply assumed that was him. That was the way he was, and the way life was.

His wife Simone saw it long before he did. For more than a decade she told him something wasn’t right, that he couldn’t rest, that he had no structure. He wasn’t ready to hear it. The day before she died, after years of illness, she went through his symptoms one by one and asked him to get help for his ADHD.

Daniel tells Laura what happened next - the newspaper article that felt like a tap on the shoulder, the Irish clinics that never rang him back, the trip to England to be assessed at all. He is open about drinking to escape thoughts he had no other way of managing, about the day he stopped, and about the ordinary moment months later when he heard his son laughing outside an open window and realised he had never felt peace before. It’s also the story of what he built out of it: a service designed, in his words, to get people to a clinician in weeks rather than years.

🔑 Key Points

He spent thirty-two years assuming that was just who he was
Restless, discontented, unable to focus — Daniel had no framework for any of it until he was assessed at thirty-two.

Simone saw it more than a decade before he accepted it
He only heard it the day before she died, when she went through his symptoms and asked him to get help.

Undiagnosed ADHD and alcohol are closely linked
Daniel describes drinking to escape feelings he couldn’t regulate. He stopped in August 2022, so he could be the father his son deserved.

There was no route to a diagnosis in Ireland
Public waiting lists ran to years, and not one of the private clinics he rang or emailed came back to him. He was assessed in England instead.

He chose therapy and coaching over medication
Having stopped drinking, he worked weekly on emotional regulation, learning to recognise emotions he’d never had names for.

Peace arrived as an ordinary moment
Months after his diagnosis he heard his son laughing with friends through an open window and felt, for the first time, that he was all right.

A diagnosis is a turning point, not an end point
The piece of paper changes nothing on its own. What matters is the understanding and the support that come after it.

He built the service he couldn’t find
ADHD Now offers access to a clinician within seven days and has grown to over a hundred clinicians across ADHD and autism care.

📚 Resources

ADHD Now
Daniel’s online ADHD assessment and support service

AutismCare
The autism and AuDHD assessment service built alongside it

ADHD Ireland
The national charity, with support groups and information

Samaritans Ireland
Free, confidential support, any time, on 116 123

⏱️ Timestamps

02:54 — Diagnosed at thirty-two, and the bottlenecks he hit
03:38 — “That’s the way I am, that’s the way life is”
04:24 — Illness, Joey’s arrival, and Simone going on dialysis
07:33 — Drinking to escape, and the day he stopped
09:38 — A decade of Simone telling him something was wrong
10:05 — The day before she died: “please get help for your ADHD”
11:45 — The newspaper article that felt like a tap on the shoulder
12:23 — No one called back, so he went to England
16:55 — “A diagnosis is not the end point. That’s the turning point.”
19:35 — Hearing his son laugh, and feeling peace for the first time
21:12 — The stranger outside the hospital who became his business partner
40:00 — Advice for young people, and what he thinks life means
Thanks for listening! You can watch the full episode on YouTube here. Don’t forget to follow The Laura Dowling Experience podcast on Instagram @lauradowlingexperience for updates and more information. You can also follow our host, Laura Dowling, @fabulouspharmacist for more insights and tips. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave a review—it really helps us out! Stay tuned for more great conversations.
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In this bitesize moment pulled from the Laura Dowling Experience back catalogue, comedian and content creator Dympna Little shares how humour helped her family carry her mother's terminal illness and final days.

She describes laughing together even in the palliative care room, the moment her mother noticed and said "it's lovely," and the voice message her mother recorded that became her legacy. Tender, warm and bittersweet.

🔑Key Points
• How humour can hold a family together through the hardest time
• Why laughter and grief are not opposites
• The moment her mother noticed them laughing and said "it's lovely"
• The voice message her mother left, and what legacy can look like

💛 If you're grieving, be gentle with yourself. There's no right way to do it.

🎧 Listen to the full episode here.
Thanks for listening! You can watch the full episode on YouTube here. Don’t forget to follow The Laura Dowling Experience podcast on Instagram @lauradowlingexperience for updates and more information. You can also follow our host, Laura Dowling, @fabulouspharmacist for more insights and tips. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave a review—it really helps us out! Stay tuned for more great conversations.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.