Serendipity or the hand of God

Last time I believed in the hand of God, Maradonna put a ball past Shilton but on Friday last I took the empty seat beside Don Campbell for the three-and-a-half hour train ride from New York to Boston.

Don's father was of Catholic Scots-Irish stock; there were 11 children in his family. Their roots have been traced to Ballymena by Don's brother. Don suffers from Parkinson's which is a degenerative condition which makes a mess of your motor skills but he plans to undergo a major brain operation before Christmas to restore his health. He'll be awake throughout the procedure which is the sort of courage you'd expect from a man who served as a medic in Vietnam in '66 and '7. Working from the bowels of a chopper with a marine toting an M60 on either side, Don saw 100 of his buddies die in his arms. "They knew they were dying, I knew they were dying. There was nothing I could do," he recalled.

Each year, his heart swells with pride when he joins the Marine Corps reunion in Boston. Now 61, Joe has spent over 30 years working in an area close to my heart: knee and hip replacement for the multinational Styker provider of artificial joints. "Let me tell you about my knee," says I. A moment later and Don had produced his laptop complete with 3-D imagery of a real knee taken from a cadaver. The skin had been removed to give a striking view of the knee, gristle, ligaments and cartilage.

Now, God forbid that I would piss off my surgeons before they raise a saw to my knee but that revolving image (with a roll of the mouse, Don could spin the knee round) was clearer to me than the X-rays and MRA images I've been shown to date. A doctor, even the great doctors I'm dealing with, can say all day, "do you see the white area" but most civilians like me have no idea what they're looking at.

But after seeing Don's video model, I know what I'm talking about. And now I've changed my mind, I don't want my miniscus removed, I want the tear repaired. Otherwise, says Joe, it's bye-bye miniscus, hello osteoarthritis. And, by the way, he says no-one should run more than three miles a day. (I'll be ignoring that latter piece of advise.)

As we pulled into Boston, Don's coastguard son was there to meet him to take him to watch a 10pm game of 'pick-up' ice hockey before a few beers. Now that's what I call family.

At 61, Don's looking forward to a post-Parkinson's new lease of life. I wish him well and I'm just sorry I didn't meet him before he visited the Stryker plants in Limerick and Cork to train the sales staff there so that I could have given him a bit of cultural protocol. "On my first night, I showed the guys there a picture I had taken with the President on the White House lawn when I was visiting my niece. The atmosphere just went sour."