A mother’s desperate plea to teens after son’s drugs death

A mother’s desperate plea to teens after son’s drugs death

19 February 2014

PARALYSED, blind and crying out in apparent distress. These were the shocking images a mother played of her son’s last days before he finally died of a drug overdose.

Giving a talk at Tuesday’s Policing and Community Safety Partnership (PCSP) meeting in Newcastle, Theresa Burke explained how her youngest son Kealan had dabbled in recreational drugs but never recovered on the day he drank a bottle of methadone.

Slowing his breathing down, it starved his brain of oxygen to the extent that he was left severely brain damaged, quadriplegic, blind and unable to swallow.

Eighteen months later, on February 25, 2009, Kealan died. He was 22 years-old.

Ever since, Theresa, a teacher from the Ballymena area, gives talks to young people across the country. It is her hope that Kealan didn’t die in vain and that no other young person will have to go through the pain and suffering that Kealan did.

Her message to young people attending the Down District PCSP meeting was not to place their trust in those who offer drugs as a distraction from the harder times in life, and to know that there is always someone to listen.

“I have three sons, Kealan was the youngest, he was wanted, he was loved,” she said.

“I knew nothing about drugs. We were just one family out in the middle of the country, we just lived our own lives.”

Describing her son as “bright, but very, very lazy”, she affectionately showed video footage of the gifted musician playing his guitar before drugs took hold.

“I believe Kealan was born an addict,” she continued. “I think he had an addictive gene; he didn’t have one or two guitars — he had eight or nine.”

Theresa said her son was clever at hiding his intake, but that she believed he started taking drugs when he was 17. She recalled the distinctive smell of cannabis smoke, and him reassuring her that it wasn’t much and “most people took it”. Going to university, holding down a part-time job and with a steady girlfriend, she said there was nothing to overly alarm them at this time.

Later becoming aware that his problem was deepening with other recreational drugs, Theresa said they were relieved when Kealan appeared to have come to his senses.

“He was on holiday and he rang home and said: ‘When I come home I am going to turn my life around’. I was so delighted.”

However, he would shortly afterwards tell his mother: “I cannot give up the drugs. Nor do I want to give up the drugs.”

Theresa explained that this statement was made after Kealan’s girlfriend asked him to choose between drugs and their relationship. She believes it was possible upset from the breakdown of this relationship that led Kealan to try a new and stronger drug.

Initially thinking her son was having a very long lie-in one morning, she later realised her son’s body had been frozen in the one spot in his bed for over a day.

“He could not see, he could not hear, he could not swallow,” she said of the terrible scene that awaited her when she tried to rouse him.

“He was having the most desperate fits. I was looking at a rag doll.”

Showing shocking photos of one side of Kealan’s body, where blood had pooled on the side pressed against the bed, Theresa also presented distressing video images of her brain damaged son.

Often he cried out, she explained, recalling how one of the young nurses in the hospital could never bear to lift him when she heard his screams.

“He was completely quadriplegic,” she said. “He never spoke again. I do not know what he knew. He could not tell us what he knew.”

Kealan spent six months in the Musgrave hospital where he spent his 21st birthday. Theresa admitted it crossed her mind at one point that she should try to take his life, so unbearable was his suffering. It remained, however, only a thought.

“I said to them, please just let him die,” Theresa said. “This is no way for a mother to see her son. But they said ‘no, he is too young’.”

In the end a urinary infection claimed her son’s life a year later.

“Even if we get through to one person it will have been worth it,” she concluded, “Watching Kealan suffer the way he did, and to watch him die was the hardest thing we’ve ever had to do and we wouldn’t want anyone else to have to go through it.

“It’s had a devastating effect on those he has left behind and we, as a family, want to warn other young people about the cruel reality of what drugs can do.”