A WOMAN who had to explain Motor Neurone Disease to her kids after they met Charlie Bird out walking has revealed her devastation when she got the same condition a few months later. The late RTE reporter raised huge amounts of money and awareness for the progressive disease, that attacks parts of the nervous system. For Eileen Butler from Meath, she first noticed her speech was slightly slurred and her GP sent her to hospital to see if it was a stroke.
When nothing showed up on her CT scan, she was sent to Beaumont to see a neurologist and they discovered the “devastating news” that it was MND . “We came home in a haze. It just didn’t seem real.
I looked fine, I was able to do all my usual things but only my speech and neck muscles were affected. "We cried and hugged and hugged and cried, trying to accept it. We then had the difficult task of telling our children.
We have four but they are all young adults or teens. “And the ironic thing is, in January 2022 I took our two youngest ones to Glendalough for a hike. "We had only commented that we hadn’t met anyone when a few minutes later we passed the late Charlie Bird , his wife Claire and their dog.
"I explained to our two boys the awful disease that Charlie had and how sad it was that his life was being cut short, little did I know a year later I would have to tell them that I had that same disease.” A year on, the 53-year-old attends Speech and Language Therapy and Physiotherapy. She also has a nurse from Beaum.