Blindness, buddies & biking PADDY'S ROAD TO RECOVERY

Losing his sight led to dark times for the intrepid TV star, but when things couldn’t have looked any bleaker, a challenge from an All Black pulled him out of his misery

- Cloe Willetts

When beloved broadcast journalist Patrick Gower recently cycled into Taranaki’s WhangamoÌ„mona township alongside his good friend and former All Black Conrad Smith, onlookers cheered. The pair, along with 13 other men, had just spent five gruelling hours completing a 135km challenge to raise money for the charity So They Can, but it meant more to Paddy than their supporters realised.

After a traumatic experience with two major surgeries on his left eye last year, including a failed operation, cycling was the saviour that pulled the TV star from a deep depression.

“I was really down in the ditch and kind of lost all my spark. I had a first operation in February last year for a detached retina, but sadly that failed. It hadn’t stuck the retina back on the eye quite enough and it detached again. That meant a second operation, which was brutal but thankfully it worked. “

Anyone who has had to recover from big operations will know it’s hard to bounce back – not just physically but mentally. You end up in a dark hole and feeling sorry for yourself, and wondering why you can’t snap out of it. It was super-hard to get motivated to do work and people sort of knew that I wasn’t right.”

While it took the award-winning journalist 10 weeks to recover physically from the emergency vitrectomy surgery, the mental toll lasted much longer. Paddy, who also has glaucoma, was worried he was going to lose his precious eyesight again at any time – if a tear in the retina recurred and became too big, it could cause irreversible blindness.