Local First Dates man had narrow brush with death
Tyrrellspass man Thomas Maher, who was a big hit on First Dates Ireland, is thanking his lucky stars that he survived a life-threatening emergency the day after his First Dates audition.
On Thursday’s show. Thomas was matched with Regina from Mayo, and while romance didn’t bloom, the two have become friends and chat regularly by phone – but months earlier, Thomas was at death’s door when his gallbladder ruptured, and he wound up in intensive care at Tullamore hospital.
“The date itself took place in the middle of the fleadh: it was the Tuesday of the fleadh and I was working in Caffrey’s [Mount Street] and I had to take that day off to go to Dublin to do the actual date, but it was probably four or five months before the date night that I went up for the interview.”
Thomas hadn’t been feeling well on and off for a while, but when he went to get his health checked out, nothing showed up, so he was just carrying on as normal.
“The interview was in The Gibson Hotel. I was getting sick before I went out to do the interview. I just went out, I sat down and I went through it and the interviewer actually said to me ‘Are you okay?’ because my hand was shaking and I said ‘I can’t hold it’.
So she said: ‘Ah, you’re just nervous’. I said ‘yeah, that must be it’ – but I knew right well there was something wrong with me.”
Thomas felt really unwell to the extent that to this day, he can’t remember what he was asked, nor what his replies were.
The next day, he sent a garbled text to a friend of his, Karen Dowdall, asking her to get him tablets. Karen was alarmed by the text as it wasn’t making sense, so she called to his house. Thomas recalls her arriving – but remembers nothing between then and waking up in Tullamore hospital.
“She said: ‘Are you alright?’ and I said ‘I think so’ – but I was gone at that stage. I was yellow, and she put me into her car and took me to Tullamore.”
Little did he realise it, but his gallbladder had ruptured at that stage and he regards himself as lucky that Karen spotted that he was in serious trouble.
At the hospital, he was operated on, and it emerged he had approximately 15 gallstones.
To further complicate things, Thomas developed pneumonia, and all told, he spent a week in intensive care and another four or five days on the ward.
Happily, by the time of the fleadh, Thomas was fully back to himself and so was in fine form when invited back to the Gibson to meet Regina and they clicked as friends, going on in to town for drinks after their dinner date.
Thomas, a keen GAA and country music fan, is not a big fan of dating apps, preferring the idea of getting chatting to people in real life, and it was at the prompting of a friend of his, Kevin Carey, who had been on the show, that Thomas applied in the first place.
“I was slagging him and he said: ‘I bet you wouldn’t go on it!’ And I said: ‘Of course I will!’ And that’s how it all came about. I had no notion other than that of ever going on First Dates or anything like that.”
Thomas has had extensive experience in the hospitality industry both in this country and in the UK, where he ran O’Grady’s Bar in Seven Sisters.
He also ran his own nightclub. He has recently, however, opted for a change of career and is training as a bus driver with Go-Ahead Ireland.