Running for those who cannot walk

IT WAS a disease Elaine Tolan never wanted to get.
For most of her life, the Foxford woman worked as a nurse in Dublin, where she and her husband Pearse (also a Foxford man) reared their family.
“I would say we almost had an idyllic life. We were a happy family. We were close,” her son James told The Mayo News.
“I was 15 when she was diagnosed. I had no real experience of a difficult situation as the one we were put into. I think, I would say, I was protected from the pains of the real world with the parents that I had, in a positive way.”
As an ICU nurse, she was often the last thing standing between life itself and the point of no return. Then one day in 2014, she tried to put on her seatbelt and felt a sharp pain. From then on, life would never be the same. In fact, life itself was about to come to a long, agonising foreclosure.
Elaine Tolan had seen Motor Neurone Disease firsthand during her years nursing the sick. She knew what was in front of her; it was just a question how long she would have to bear her cross.
Eight years, as it turned out.
Within a year of being diagnosed, she needed to use a walking stick and, occasionally, a wheelchair.
Inevitably, she eventually lost her ability to walk and needed assistance getting in and out of bed and getting dressed.
“Around the same time, you would begin to notice small changes in her speech. And maybe after two years with it, a lot of people outside the family or who didn’t have consistent interactions with her would no longer be able to understand her,” recalled James.
After about four years she was completely bed bound.
For her final two years, she could only breath with the help of a machine breath and could only communicate with her family through her eyes.
“We got to the stage where we were sounding out the alphabet ‘A, B, C, D’ and she would blink on a letter, and then we would start again and eventually build out a sentence,” explained James.
It was no life. For the woman that Elaine Tolan was, it barely constituted an existence.
“She was the rock that kept the ship steady, was always on the go, always making dinners, always had the energy to make sure we had everything we needed for school or whatever other activity we were doing. She was just a doer and a goer,” James recalled.
“And then to take someone like that, and then take that energy away from them, and that ability to do things away from them, where they begin to become dependent on other people is extremely difficult for us, but extremely difficult for the person, because of the mindset she was in.”

Run for mum
Around the start of this year, brothers James and Oisín Tolan began thinking of ways to honour their mother. It would involve a journey from Dublin to Foxford, they decided – a journey she made many times before. A cycle was first mooted, but the two lads eventually decided to run the 220 kilometres – which stretched to 231 kilometres with all the twists and turns.
It took them four days, an average of 57.7 kilometres each day.
Every step was taken in memory of the suffering endured by a woman who fell victim to the cruellest of all diseases.
“It was a difficult journey,” said James. “There was times I thought I wouldn’t be able to finish but somehow we were able to pull through.”
In many ways, their journey mirrored the progression of their mother’s disease.
“Every step along the way [of her illness], as it gets worse and worse and worse, you’ve to accept this new low, and it’s just a consistent downhill journey because there’s no up again,” said James.
“Once her ability to walk was gone we had to accept she would no longer be walking with us, she would always be in a wheelchair. Then eventually, when, say, she couldn’t eat any more, we had to accept with her that she could no longer eat with us. They are very small things, but they really do add up over time.”
Their arrival into Foxford on the final day was met with a flurry of music, cheers, fanfare and tears. An occasion of ‘relief, sadness and also happiness’ is how James recalled it.
“You were also being reminded of the fact that we should be thankful that we ever got to experience life with her because there’s plenty of people in this world that haven’t experienced life with their mother, or have had shorter periods of time with their mother. Focusing on the positives is always extremely important.”
In completing their 231-kilometre trek, the brothers also raised over €41,000 for the Irish Motor Neurone Disease Association and St Francis Hospice in Dublin – two organisations to the forefront of assisting those living with Motor Neurone.
It’s a disease that nobody wants to get. But for those who do, they can be confident that help is at hand.

• Donations are still be accepted to the Voyage For Elaine fundraiser page at www.idonate.ie/fundraiser/voyage4elaine.