EFNL 2024: South Belgrave’s Darcy Walls best-afield in grand final after meningitis-induced coma
In July, Melbourne’s Darcy Walls was in a coma fighting a potentially fatal illness. Last weekend he was best on ground in a grand final. Read his remarkable story.
Eastern
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“I’m going to come to training tonight,” South Belgrave’s Darcy Walls declared to senior coach Heath Black.
It was late in the season and the 27-year-old was mere weeks out of hospital following an ordeal he described as a 20 on a pain scale of 10.
Bacterial and viral meningitis – inflammation of the tissues surrounding the brain and spinal cord – had threatened to end the dashing half-back and soon-to-be father of four.
Remarkably, he won the best-on-ground medal in South Belgrave’s Eastern league Division 1 reserves premiership on Saturday.
But the euphoria of the September stage was a long way back from the spiral into the depths of despair, starting with what was initially thought to be a headache.
“I remember coming home from work one Friday night and sitting down for dinner with my wife, and saying that I had a bit of a strange headache – I’d never had migraines in my life,” Walls said.
“It was different from a normal headache – it felt weird, and that was the only reason I mentioned it.
“It got to bedtime, and I had to take some Panadol because it was increasingly getting worse … I’d had the worst headache I’d ever had.”
After suffering a broken leg against Bayswater the previous round, a couch-bound Walls found himself vomiting up breakfast for hours the next morning.
Wife Kelly, pregnant at the time, knew something wasn’t right.
“From walking to the couch to the car, I just looked at her and said: ‘I can’t go to footy today – there’s something seriously wrong here’,” Walls said.
A doctor referral soon whizzed the usually zippy defender, now sluggish and off-coloured, to emergency.
“That night, all I remember is sitting in one of the short-stay rooms waiting to be properly admitted, and just screaming in pain – I couldn’t control it,” Walls, heavily dosed up on morphine, fentanyl and ketamine at the time, said.
“A doctor came in to do a spinal tap because that’s how they test for meningitis … but I could tell straight away she wasn’t fully confident with what she was doing.
“She stabbed me in the spine over 30 times and couldn’t get any spinal fluid which was a horrible experience … I had up to four cannulas in my arms at one stage.
“Everything from there I have memory loss from.”
Word promptly spread to the football club – quick to organise a fundraiser – with coaches, players and everyone in between waiting anxiously on updates from Kelly, as her husband slipped into a coma.
“I reckon for about four days there, consecutively, we were hanging on to every word, because it wasn’t looking good,” Black said.
Walls added: “I know at some point, there were boys sitting in the change rooms before a game when I was in a coma, just crying, thinking that I might not make it.”
Like Walls, who “didn’t know the severity of it at the time or what meningitis was”, his army of finger-crossing mates at the Saints were also unfamiliar with the disease.
“No-one knew of meningitis, viral or bacterial, so what do you do? Everyone jumps on ‘Dr Google’ and then the assessment of it is not great,” Black said.
Maxed out on ketamine in a bid to relieve the excruciating pain, Walls said he would “wake up what felt like every few days”, surrounded by white coats.
Hopelessness hit rock-bottom – but the pending birth of his next child would keep him going.
“I’m a grown man and I’d be laying there with what felt like 30 (doctors) in my hospital room … I was just sitting there crying,” he said.
“They would sedate me again and I would wake up however many days or hours later.
“I didn’t feel human – it gets to the point where your body just shuts down.
“They ask you what your pain is out of 10, and it was honestly a 20 – it could not get more painful.
“My wife was pregnant at the time, we’ve since had the baby, and I was at the point where if I didn’t have all that going on, I just didn’t want to be here anymore.”
Fifteen kilograms lighter – or a “stick figure” as Walls described – he would discharge himself from hospital after a fortnight.
Sleeping around the clock and waking up only to vomit began the slow path to recovery.
“It’s different coming back from a normal footy injury, because you have physio, rehab, you have scans and you know what’s going on,” Walls said.
But the tide would turn, some three weeks to a month after coming home – with a showing on the footy field growing likelier.
“I called Heath and said ‘I’m going to come to training tonight – I’m not 100 per cent but I feel better … I feel good enough to run around and have a kick’,” Walls recalled.
“I trained the full night, I did everything. I spoke to him and Jake (Kidd) the reserves coach, and I said ‘I may as well just play this week’ (and) I played that week.”
That was August 3, Walls making his comeback against Wantirna South in a reserves match just three weeks from the finals.
“I kicked a goal, and even the full-back got down and got around me, so it was a fantastic feeling,” Walls recalled.
The race was on to prove himself for a top-flight return, playing two more reserves matches before earning selection for both of South Belgrave’s senior Division 1 finals.
Black said Walls – usually one of the Saints’ first picked with his booming 60m kick – “came out of nowhere” to pull off the unlikeliest of comebacks.
“I had him written off for the year,” Black said.
“He played some good development (reserves) footy and got his way back into the senior group.
“From a footy standpoint, from where he’d come from four weeks prior to bringing his boots (to training) was incredible.”
But with the seniors falling out in straight sets, Walls would find himself back in the premiership push with the twos – qualifying by the skin of his teeth with the minimum three reserves games met, and no more than 10 senior matches played.
With South Belgrave pitted against Montrose in the grand final last Saturday on a wet and muddy Tormore Reserve at Boronia, Walls admitted his initial outlook on getting a kick wasn’t great.
“I’m more of an outside player, a running half-back, so when I rocked up that morning and saw the ground under water, I thought ‘I’m not going to get a touch today’,” Walls laughed.
The Saints sewed up the flag early in the piece, romping to a 33-point half-time lead with Walls kicking a goal in the 9.5 (59) to 0.4 (4) victory.
A gargantuan roar arose from the South Belgrave faithful as the now-father-of-four was announced as the best-afield.
“We obviously play for the other (a premiership) medal,” Walls said, whose newborn son is healthy at a month old.
“But I guess you could say it’s the icing on top – it’s completely unexpected.
“A lot of the boys stood up on the weekend which I thought warranted the medal, but it’s nice to hear your name called out to show you played a part on the day.”
But from a coma to the premiership dais, it’s an ordeal Walls, a bank manager, won’t forget – much like the unwavering support of the South Belgrave community.
“Lucky that we live in Australia to have the healthcare that we’ve got here – even if you get treated as soon as I did, there’s still a 20 per cent mortality rate,” he said.
“The boys had my back and my family’s back the whole way through it.”
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