“I vividly remember one day waking up in the middle of a drive when a car was coming towards me on the opposite side of the road. It was just sheer exhaustion. I had to pull in then and sleep for 10 minutes.”
Matt Molloy (35) returned to work as a construction studies teacher just six months after undergoing complicated surgery to remove a benign brain tumour at Beaumont hospital in 2021.
The commute from his home in Carrickmacross, Co Monagahan, to his school in Oldcastle, Co Meath, takes about an hour driving.
He felt he had no choice but to return to work because his critical illness benefit had been used up after six months, and he could not afford to take a further six months on half pay.
RM Block
Molloy was speaking at the Teachers’ Union of Ireland (TUI) annual congress, where the union is on Thursday due to vote on a motion to increase critical illness benefit to one year of full pay and one year of half pay. It is currently six months of full pay and six months of half pay.
For Molloy, that was not enough to allow him recover fully without huge financial stress.
“The nurse from Medmark [an occupational health service for teachers] rang and said: ‘You had brain surgery, and you want to go back to work? Give yourself another month’. I said: ‘I can’t give myself another month. I need to get back to work.’”
Molloy was on the cusp of moving into a new house with his young family at the end of 2021 when a series of what at first seemed innocuous things started happening to him.
“I just remember one day I looked over the table, and I could see that the person across from me disappeared for a second,” he said. “It just went all white.”
At first he put it down to the stress of the house build, for which he did a lot of the work himself.
He cut his finger quite seriously on a saw, damaging nerves and tendons. When he looked in the mirror, the sides of it appeared scraped.
“It was then that I started to get worried, because I knew the mirror was fine,” he said. “What was actually happening was my eyesight, the peripheral vision, was gone in both my eyes at the same time.”
The came scans, and eventually surgery, to remove a 25mm benign tumour from his brain.
The surgery was successful and his sight returned, but he required radiation therapy to shrink what was left of the tumour. His pituitary gland was also damaged in the operation, which caused debilitating side effects for months.
“It was just as if you went from one highly stressful situation into another one and into another one and into another one,” he said. “And it never seemed like it was going to end.”
He described not being able to bend down and pick up his kids, putting on weight because of the steroids and the impact of fluctuating hormones. Old football injuries flared up and he could not get fit again.
“It took, really, until about May or June 2024 for me to say I’m very close to being me again,” he said.
At that point he had been back to work for more than two years, not feeling like himself, but unable to afford any more time off to recover.
He said his school was fantastic, and did everything they could to accommodate him; but teachers should be afforded more critical illness benefit in times of acute health crises such as his.
“It was one of the most financially crippling times,” he said. But even now, things have not got any easier.
“I’m just getting from one end of the week to the next. I have nothing in my account until I get paid on Friday.”
