‘I was in a coma for weeks. Now I don’t sweat the small stuff. I don’t suffer from despair’

It was a giant life re-set, Olga Barry’s Big Sleep.

A healthy, busy woman in her prime, she went rapidly from feeling under the weather to being very ill, in a coma for weeks. Double-pneumonia, sepsis and open-heart surgery. Amazingly, sitting across the table today she is again smart, humorous, chatty and opinionated, back in the saddle of her job as Kilkenny Arts Festival director. The same; but different. “It’s just over a year ago and look at me. I actually had age on my side, for powers of recovery.”

Rewind to March 2023, aged 48. Barry sardonically refers to it as “the year I slept through”.

Post-Covid, when things were not long back to normal-ish for the arts festival, Barry was in the US working with the Department of Foreign Affairs and the National Concert Hall on an event honouring the United State’s role in the Belfast Agreement. (“I got to meet Nancy Pelosi, four days before I hit the deck. Talk about charisma.”) She felt grim that week but ignored it. On March 23rd, back in Kilkenny, a GP immediately diagnosed double-pneumonia. She could barely stand in the pharmacy. Dosed with steroids and antibiotics, she went to bed, alone in her flat. She woke up in the middle of the night, thinking: “I can’t breathe. This is it, I’m dying.” She called an ambulance at 5am. “It was pretty acute at that point; actually it was sepsis.”

The ambulance took 35 minutes, with control on the phone as she weakened. “I couldn’t get air in. It felt like an eternity.” Somehow she had the presence of mind to open the front door. . She was unconscious by the time the medics arrived.

What happens next she’s pieced together from medical notes. “I went to the local hospital, St. Luke’s. The guards rang my sister Fiona. They did a brain scan.”

Barry was intubated, given a paralysing agent and sent by ambulance to St James’s Hospital in Dublin on March 25th. She was still unconscious, with sepsis, and on ventilation life-support. They also knew her heart wasn’t working properly. “How do you do a full heart assessment when somebody can’t breathe?”

The youngest of three, her sister Fiona lives in Dublin, brother Brian and sister-in-law Orla in Cork. Their parents died of cancer, her father when Olga was 11, her mother when she was 27.

For weeks they tried to wean her off ventilation, unsuccessfully. Eventually they discovered an underlying, undiagnosed “leaky heart thing”, mitral-valve regurgitation, possibly from rheumatic fever as a baby. Average mitral-valve function is 55-75 per cent; hers was under 20 per cent. It made the pneumonia and sepsis “10 times worse”.

“I ate healthily, but probably didn’t look after myself properly. Fags didn’t help. Running around, letting stress get to me. I got chest infections all the time.” Looking back, maybe she felt dizzy, or a decline. “Why was I not acting on that? You don’t join things together.” The leaky mitral-valve had been getting worse, forced to work harder to get oxygenated blood back out.

She spent nearly seven weeks in ICU, five of them in a coma, three weeks in a heart ward, then a week for open-heart surgery replacing the mitral valve.

She was in an induced coma, a ventilator breathing for her, with a tracheotomy and muscle-probes. “I basically didn’t move on my own for five weeks. Apparently my fists were clenched. A nurse said afterwards, we knew you were fighting. ICU was amazing. I would get down on my hands and knees for those people, unbelievable care. ”

In ICU far longer than is usual, her chart notes “persistent ICU delirium”. Fiona visited daily; nurses advised holding Olga’s hand, telling her everything’s okay.

Bizarrely, the first recognisable word she wrote, after the coma, was “Tanora”, Cork’s fizzy drink. “I did a lot of winking at people and thumbs-up. You slip into gratitude straight away. Also, you’re like, what’s really going on here? It was hard figuring out what was real.”

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She transferred as a public patient “as part of an overspill” to private Blackrock Clinic for the open-heart surgery. The view and the food were better, the bathroom wasn’t shared, the scrubs were “deep purple and teal rather than washed-out blue”, but she preferred the “wraparound” care she experienced in James’s, where she returned for heart rehab, warfarin clinics and ongoing bloods monitoring. .

After 10 weeks in hospital, she went to her sister’s home for a long recovery, immobilised in a brace for six weeks. “You’re not allowed to use your arms, but my legs weren’t working properly either.”

She’d nearly died three times. Barry is proud of her scars: the tracheotomy, right down her chest from the heart surgery, and two drains. “Scars are kind of your life lived. I consider myself very lucky. The whole crazy, horrible, first seven weeks of this odyssey, collapsing, being put on life-support, sepsis, coma, tracheotomy, not being able to stand on my own, or hold a pen or a phone – all of that saved my life because they discovered this heart thing.”

“If you’re moving around alot, having a consistent GP who might cop underlying issues is impossible. All these hidden costs to impermanency.”

A quarter-century in Irish arts and music, Barry operates at a high level, from project-managing Ireland 2016/RTÉ Reflecting the Rising, to managing the RTÉ Concert Orchestra and Crash Ensemble, to National Campaign for the Arts member, adroitly steering the sector through Covid. Even for someone at the top of their game, the arts are precarious.

“I’ve been renting for 34 years.” She started counting how much she’d spent on rent, but got depressed. From Cork, she moved to Dublin aged 30, moving rental-to-rental, often through word of mouth or subletting from friends. “Really nice places. I wasn’t earning massive money, but it was all affordable. I was in that great space in my 30s: learn as much as you can, to the next thing.” As she moved jobs “you could just find another place to live”.

At one stage she rented in Dublin from friends abroad, but it was feasible to also rent a room in Kilkenny for her busiest period. By 2018, Dublin housing was unsustainable for her. “I was like, I can’t pay this kind of money. And the lack of places. It’s 10 times worse now.” She was appointed festival director, and moved to Kilkenny full time. Her current place is well-located, but, she says, involves “a lot of grottiness” including a gaffer-taped cat-flap (“the height of irony: as tenant you can’t have a pet, but I’ve to live with a hole in the wall”).

But now, she says, the property is being sold, and: “I will be back again looking for accommodation at the age of 50.”

Barry is “a child of the public service. My dad was a guard, my mother was a nurse. They didn’t have a mortgage, they saved. In those days, you could save. I’ve spent so long worrying about housing. Having an up-close and personal moment with my own mortality, I realised, I have wasted so much energy. You feel a failure when you get to my age, you’re in your 40s, and you realise you have no capacity in the state you live in to house yourself, though you’ve paid rent for 34 years without fail.

“It’s making for a very vulnerable population. You lack purchase in society. I know there’s a postcolonial thing, but haven’t we been proved right, that if you don’t own your own house, you can’t rely on anything. Now, renting is the most precarious thing. You can be lucky and have a great landlord: I’ve had some really good ones, and I’ve had the worst ones.

“I thought, I am such a failure. Oh God, do I need to start looking at house-shares with strangers again? For a couple years I felt I made such bad choices. Why did I get into the arts? I could have done data analysis. When I should have been buying a flat in the old Irish way of it, I was completely priced out. Then because I didn’t have any cash because I work in the arts and was in my 30s, I couldn’t buy anything at the bottom of the market after the crash. There is a cohort in their 40s and 50s who, as a consequence of the last crash and Celtic Tiger are now in that slipstream. I’m fascinated by CSO figures, the percentage of the population with mortgages, outright ownership, inherited wealth. That inequity. I’m really lucky. I’ve always had a job, I’ve always been able to make my rent. I’ve had lots of advantages. I was encouraged to go to college. But I’m so much less secure than my parents’ generation, though I’ve travelled more, and have in many ways a richer [experience]. It took having that medical thing to go, I have to find a better way to deal with it.”

“What I’m trying to hang on to is, don’t sweat the small stuff. I don’t suffer from as much despair”, whether about her own living conditions or the wider world. “A version of the worst thing happened and I survived. I’ve taken on board the positives. I’m not smoking. Everything tastes better. Everything sounds better. I’m a bit isn’t-this-all-really-great, a pain-in-the-hole-Pollyanna. Not to suggest I’m cavalier, but I think I’m able to let go quickly of the irrelevant or inconsequential.”

She felt “overwhelming love from my personal community and my professional community. I’ve had an incredibly rich experience of humans, because of my job. I’ve really nice friends. And I’m not one bit surprised my Kilkenny colleagues pulled it all together and made that festival happen” when she collapsed.

With her siblings, “we didn’t realise how close we were until it was tested. My sister and I are different, but alike in ways. I think I always knew if the sh*t hit the fan I could call on my brother and sister.”

She attended Kilkenny Arts Festival in August 2023, in the audience. “It was a bit like going to your own funeral. Funerals can be great crack! I remember thinking, this is a damn fine festival.” She’s back in the directorial hot-seat for next month’s festival.

She was able to write the festival’s Arts Council funding application in September. By November 2023 she had a good echocardiogram and was told: see you in a year.

“Your whole life can get wrapped up in all these crossing paths, and it’s made me reflective about what makes a life a good life. Before, I felt like a sole operator. Now I’m more secure and connected. I have a better sense of it being a good life, with value.”

The Killkenny Arts Festival runs from August 8th-18th kilkennyarts.ie