‘A message for every day, not one week of the year’

“It all could all have been so different,” contemplates Cavan IFA Chair Elizabeth Ormiston of the near fatal moment when a “simple lapse in concentration” down on the farm led to her being placed in an induced coma suffering acute brain trauma.

Elizabeth remembers the lead up to the incident as clear as day, over 10 years ago on a beautiful sunny Sunday morning, the day of the Bailieborough Agricultural Show, July 5, 2009.

She was loading a pedigree heifer destined for judging at Killinkere Leisure Centre that day when the family's collie dog appeared just as Elizabeth was closing the gates of the trailer behind the heifer.

She surmises now in hindsight that the heifer, which was haltered, may have been spooked by the dog. Regardless, the cow kicked out, hitting the gate, which then swung to crack Elizabeth on the forehead and caused her to fall back hard onto the cement yard.

Elizabeth describes the collie dog as being “part and parcel” of the Ormiston family farm at the time.

“He never came in at night, just stayed at the back door step. That heifer had been at the ploughing, she had been everywhere, very quiet, as good as gold. You'd never think the likes of that were going to happen.”

But expecting the unexpected, and preparing for work with safety in mind, are among the key messages of 'Farm Safety Week' (July 20 to 24), which saw Elizabeth taking a forward facing role in promoting the campaign.

From radio to newspaper interviews, the Mullagh mum-of-five spoke of her experience - even the difficult details which included being anointed at Cavan General Hospital showing how serious doctors considered her condition.

Elizabeth collapsed shortly after getting to Cavan hospital. Before that, her main concern was still getting to the Bailieborough Show.

There had been a lot of blood. Initially Elizabeth hadn't wanted to get into the car for fear of messing the interior. She then remembers walking down the yard and getting into the jeep, growing frustrated during the journey at every missed turn for Killinkere.

Elizabeth's own sister nursed in Cavan and was on duty that night. Her condition deteriorated, and after six days in a coma, she was placed into the Hospital's Intensive Care Unit to continue her recovery. An earlier attempt to rouse Elizabeth from medical unconsciousness was not successful.

The next thing Elizabeth remembers was waking up in a private room, with no recollection of how she got there, or why.

Bravely, and perhaps brazenly, after nine days and fed up with sharing a six-bed male dominated ward, Elizabeth discharged herself from care and headed for home.

She attended physio in Cavan twice weekly. The traumatic experience meant she lost a lot of weight. She had to buy a pair of size four shoes as her previous size sixes no longer fit. Her sense of smell also abandoned her, and her sense of taste was dulled. She developed a taste for fish, which for the first 48 years of her life, Elizabeth could not tolerate. A consultant suggested the craving was Elizabeth's brain's way of trying to repair itself.

She missed the sense of smell most. It does, Elizabeth elaborates, help evoke childhood memories, like the smell of freshly mown hay, or her mother's stew on a cold winter's day. They are among the things she misses most.

Elizabeth also use to wake up screaming from from dreadful nightmares. She still does occasionally, while another side effect is that her right hand weakens and she has to rest it. There is a section to the back of her head that Elizabeth can't touch due to pain. Even her hairdresser knows not to go near it.

Important message

Elizabeth is not a person anyone could accuse of being shy or retiring. Fiercely determined, she often ducks the limelight, preferring instead to work quietly behind the scenes. It therefore took a couple of days before the hierarchy within the IFA managed to convince Elizabeth to put herself, so openly and so frankly, front and centre as part of the 2020 Farm Safety Week campaign.

“It took some convincing,” admits Elizabeth when speaking to The Anglo-Celt this week. “But the more I thought about it, the more I realised how important the message is to get across.”

Even now Elizabeth ponders going to the Month's Mind mass for a neighbour who had collapsed and died while out walking almost two months after her own accident. She was driven there and remembers the back and forth between family members over Elizabeth's well-being. But she believes that nobody appreciated her own determination to get life back in order.

The first journey Elizabeth made by herself was ironically to another funeral near Virginia. She made it, but had to be assisted home.

A week later, Elizabeth pushed her recovery even further, this time venturing as far as Maynooth where her daughter had started studying.

She stayed over, but had to stop both on the way there and back to rest.

Now Elizabeth has a coded lock on the gate dividing the dwelling from the farmyard to keep her four precious grandchildren safe. She also has a child friendly reminder about farm safety stuck on the inside of the back door at child eye level.

She makes sure that all machinery is well maintained and serviced, and is even more careful when animals are being loaded.

“It's an ongoing thing. It's not just a snapshot idea. It's something that we need to be aware of all the time,” Elizabeth says of the annual Farm Safety campaign.

Attention to detail

There is a “perception”, Elizabeth laments, that farmers “nearly cause accidents, but they don't. The thing is, if they just stopped and thought for a second at what's happening around them, I believe there'd be a whole lot less. Pay attention to detail, that's what I would say.

“If I had have closed that little dog in, [that accident] might never have happened,” she surmises with hindsight, admitting it still plays on her mind.

“It was second nature having the dog around. You could look out the kitchen window and he'd be down among them, no problem. They knew him, and the heifer, she was a pet of a thing. But it goes to show, you can never take too many precautions. It's when you have your guard down that the silliest and possibly the most serious accidents can happen.

“Anyone who knows me knows I don't like the limelight but, if by me telling my story, it can save one person from having an accident, that they take a second to think twice, I feel it will all have been worthwhile.”