All about me

All about me

How I got involved in healthcare.

Back when I was 11 years old, I suddenly landed in hospital with osteomyelitis of my right hip, bedbound on traction and talking heavy anti-biotics. I soon realised that I LOVED hospitals and I definately wanted a career in healthcare since then. Initially, I wanted to be a doctor, but being from a large family on a single salary, I opted for physiotherapy , as it was a shorter. It was a good choice.

Me as a physiotherapist

My career been varied and I still like it after 35 years, so it must have been the right choice! It also allowed me to indulge in my deep character flaw of moving around when I get bored. As a result, I have moved around a fair bit in my work life.

I spent the first 8 years of my career working in hospitals: orthopaedics, elderly rehab, balance problems, respiratory physio, stroke and neurological care and general surgical and medical rotations. This included working in Australia and Texas, USA. It is very interesting to work in other settings: our medical system in Ireland might not be perfect, but it’s not bad either.

The next 9 years were spent working privately in clinics ( including my own): backs and necks injuries, whiplash injuries, joint injuries, general sports injuries. I did the whole running on-to -the- field at rugby and GAA matches, which was a blast but very hard work.

To be honest, I hankered to get back to hospital physio, and through a stroke of good luck I found myself working for the next 15 years in Milford Hospice in Limerick. This involved what is termed ‘palliative rehabilitation’: rehabilitating people who are terminally ill, and also providing supportive care for those who are nearing end-of-life. This was mainly for cancer patients, neurological patients ( such as Motor Neuron Disease) and respiratory patients ( end-stage cardiac and lung fibrosis patients). The biggest thing I learned here was how to communicate with dying patients and have the bravery to be honest at times you'd rather not be.

It was also at this time I trained as a lymphoedema therapist, as many end-stage cancer patients have problems with lymphoedema and we needed these skills to be effective. It might sound strange, but it was lovely working in the hospice and home-care environments and I had brilliant colleagues, even if it was challenging emotionally. But all things have their time, and after COVID and a bout of chronic fatigue (see below) I finally moved on to another acute hospital job: this time in lymphoedema prevention in University Hospital Limerick. My current job is to monitor high-risk patients for the onset of lymphoedema and teach them how to prevent and treat it themselves. It has been so interesting to move from end-stage care to preventative care- a definite mind shift for me. Most of my patients are recovering from breast cancer operations, including mastectomies.

My research career:

Just after I started in Milford Care Centre, I started a Masters in Clinical Therapies ( Physio) in the University of Limerick. As part of this, I conducted research and this led me and my colleagues down a path of researching and publishing a number of papers on physiotherapy in palliative care. This was badly needed as there was so little to guide us or anyone else doing physiotherapy on palliative care patients so we found ourselves becoming experts by default! See our research papers here. During this time, I was invited to write a book chapter on fatigue in the first book on palliative care physiotherapy, which ended up being quite ironic ( read further down!). I thought I had put all of that writing and research to bed, but in my current job, there is very relatively little to guide us in terms of research so we had to do our own. We only recently published a paper on lymphoedema prevention after breast cancer, and we had a presentation on this at the Sylvester O Halloran conference 2026 in Limerick.

How I fell into teaching Yoga and Somatics:

My mother had done a bit of yoga in the 1980s ( go Mammy Cobbe!) and I taught myself yoga from a book at least 15 years before I trained as a teacher. I dipped into this and meditation for anxiety, which I had lived with since being a teenager. Just before the COVID pandemic, I trained as a yoga teacher on a whim: my physio friend Cormac asked me if I’d do it with him and I said yes - It wasn’t really part of my plan! But I found that I loved it and gradually it changed my career path a bit. I also became interested in somatics, purely by chance: My partner had suffered from a really traumatic childhood and I started reading about trauma in a brilliant book called The Body Keeps The Score. It was here that I first heard about somatics. Co-incidentally, my training studio was running a somatics course, so I signed up. I thought I was doing a workshop, and then discovered that I had inadvertently signed up for a teacher training course (!!!) so my first somatics class ever was done when I was training up to be a somatics teacher with Living Somatics…talk about putting the cart before the horse ( an old saying in Irish for doing things backwards).

I have found yoga and somatics helped me with a lot of my physiotherapy patients: yoga was the lost link I needed to provide really good exercises for rehabilitation of injuries, as well as brilliant breath techniques for reducing stress and slowing down the nervous system ( many people have a stress component to their injuries). Somatics was really useful for some of my chronic pain patients, also to reduce the sensitivity of their nervous system to control pain and anxiety. So I continued to binge out on yoga and somatics courses during the COVID pandemic. See my Yoga credentials here. I also started to do youtube videos during the COVID pandemic, mainly to keep boredom at bay for friends (!) AND to instruct my lymphoedema patients on techniques they needed , as they mostly had to self manage during lock-downs. These are great fun to do: I’m a talker so I did them all in one shoot AND because I’m too lazy to go editing them..Ha! My youtube channel can be found here.

Me and chronic fatigue:

In the midst of COVID, I was off work for the first time in my career, with fatigue/burnout and a medical condition. For the first time in my life, I couldn’t exercise ( which I loved), instead it made me worse. I now had to rely on gentle yoga and somatics, breath techniques, meditation and other low-grade body work to keep me occupied. I also had to practice fatigue management (sigh!) – the same techniques I had been sermonising about when I was writing the book chapter on fatigue – the irony was not lost on me. I got interested in the gut-biome after reading a book on inflammatory conditions ( remember my long course of severe antiobiotics as a child?) and I tried lymphatic treatments and all kind of everything to improve my situation. It’s 5 years into a projected 5-year recovery plan, and I’m about 80% better. This new development got me more and more interested in the effects of long-term stress on the body and nervous system and it’s really exciting for me to see the science catch up with the age-old wisdom that we are a body/mind entity and that gut health and mental health is central to our overall health.

My latest venture with Thrive Breast Rehab

Myself and my work partner/research partner Kathy Nugent have now become Thrive breast Rehab, providing online video courses for people recovering from breast cancer treatments. We are due to launch our fist courses in July 2026 so stay posted.

What I’m offering:

- Yoga classes in-person locally, specialising in beginners because I love it best

- Somatics classes on-line: it’ll take some time but I am hoping to expose more and more people to somatics for body awareness and stress reduction

- Youtube videos on yoga and lymphatics, infusing my offerings with my physio knowledge I hope

- Advice sessions for people with a particular issue that I can help (post cancer recovery, mastectomies, sports and muscle injuries, chronic pain, lymphoedema, yoga injuries). I'll point you in the right direction

Book here

- Monthly blogs on different conditions…giving my tuppence worth, and checking in on the science

If you’ve made it this far….well done! That’s me and thankyou for reading.

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