When he was 24, consultant trauma surgeon John-Joe Reilly received some news that would change his life forever.
He was on a night out with friends in London when he saw the message about his older brother on his phone: “It said, ‘Larry’s got a brain tumour, come home,” recalls the physician, who is known as JJ, now 48.
“When you’re 24 and you get news like that, your world falls apart,” he says. “Larry was 44 – 19 years older than me. The thing I remember most about him as a kid is how he’d pick us up and throw us around like a rugby ball. You think that your brother is Superman.
“I was on a train home the next morning. We agreed to meet up in the pub. I turned up with my younger brother and we all just started crying. Larry had been to see his GP a few times [about headaches] and was treated with some painkillers, then one day he collapsed.
“They scanned his head and found a golf ball-sized tumour. They took a biopsy and found it was a very aggressive form of brain cancer.”
The shock came before JJ had been to medical school, so he says he doesn’t remember much about his brother’s illness from a medical perspective. “I had to look it up on the internet, and seeing the prognosis was awful. But I do remember how the medical staff talked me through the scans, told me what was going to happen. I also remember how they dealt with Larry’s wife and two children.”
Larry’s tumour was diagnosed at Easter. By October he was dead. “I admire his bravery and how he dealt with what he dealt with,” says JJ. “You can’t take that away from someone. You can have any kind of terminal illness but how you approach it sort of defines you, and he was still him.”
JJ says the experience was the “final driver” he needed to push him into reapplying for medical school after having his dreams of becoming a doctor derailed by undiagnosed dyslexia as a teenager.
Today, JJ is the star of Channel 4’s latest series of 24 Hours in A&E, saving the lives of people who are experiencing their worst day. It’s a career he was inspired to pursue after the devastating loss of his brother.
“After Larry became unwell, I thought, ‘I’m going to do it, I’m not going to let anyone stop me’,” says JJ. “I applied to medical school again, and got the place. My medical career is his legacy, definitely. I miss him every day.”
JJ now works at East Midlands Major Trauma Centre, specialising in ‘damage control’, which means it’s his role to stop bleeding and control contamination in a patient before they’re sent to ICU.
It could be said he doesn’t quite fit the stereotypical image of a consultant – at six foot four and 18 stone, he was recently asked for a selfie by a woman who thought he looked like boxer Tyson Fury.
He might look tough, but JJ isn’t afraid to talk about the side of the job that impacts him most – admitting one of the biggest challenges is dealing with the emotions it can throw up and the fact the teams can never predict when a patient’s story will bring back traumatic experiences of their own during a shift.
In the latest series of 24 Hours in A&E, viewers witness JJ treating 50-year-old Jeremy, hurt after crashing his mountain bike. But when the results of his CT scan come back, the team finds a suspected skull-based tumour – which takes JJ straight back to his brother’s diagnosis.
“There’s not actually much in terms of clinical training that teaches you how to deal with people, to deliver bad news,” says JJ. “What I went through with my brother is in the back of my mind. I think, ‘What would I want to hear in this situation?’. You can’t fake it. You just have to take your surgeon hat off and be a human being.”
Learning how to compartmentalise has been vital, says JJ. “There are times when you have to do awful things to a human being to try to save their life, but it doesn’t always work.
“There are situations where afterwards, I’ve cried my eyes out. But when you’re doing the operation, you need to put that to one side.
“I think if you start to think you’re a one-man army, the most important person there, you’re on a hiding to nothing. Especially in trauma – it requires so many different elements to be able to give somebody good care. You’re part of a team of about 250.”
He recalibrates by playing guitar and going for long walks with his dog Trixie (“the love of my life”). “No matter how hard your day’s been, when you walk in and see that tail wagging, it’s the best thing in the world,” he says.
If JJ has made a difference in his career, he says that’s all Larry’s legacy. “I went through a hard time after he died and one of the people I worked with gave me some blunt advice – you can either give up or you can bite down on your gum shield and keep fighting. So I kept fighting. There’s always light, you just have to find it.”
24 Hours in A&E is on Channel 4 on Thursdays at 9pm
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