How a brain op made me speak Irish

NURSES couldn’t help laughing when Chris Gregory woke up in hospital after three days on a life-support machine.

OPERATION Nurses at hospital were shocked OPERATION: Nurses at hospital were shocked

For Chris, a Yorkshireman born and bred, regaled the ward with a spirited rendition of Danny Boy and spoke in a thick Dublin accent as he came to after emergency brain surgery.

His bemused fiancee Mary was greeted at his bedside with the ­exclamation: “It’s da broid!” (It’s the bride).

Even though he had no connection with Ireland, for the rest of the day landscape gardener Chris, 30, spoke in an authentic-sounding Irish accent.

But it had disappeared by the time Mary returned to the hospital with his relatives the next day.

Mary, 36, said: “I couldn’t believe it when I walked on to the ward and heard someone singing Danny Boy really loud.

“It sounded like a drunken Irishman and all the racket seemed to be coming from the direction of Chris’s bed.

“I thought to myself: ‘It can’t possibly be him…’ but when I pulled back the curtains Chris was sitting up in bed belting out the tune with all the right words and a thick Irish accent like he’d grown up in Dublin and lived there all his life.

“All the nurses were trying really hard not to laugh and I was, too. I just couldn’t take it in at first, it seemed so comical, but it didn’t matter at all because I’d been so worried about ­losing him altogether.

“At one point he looked at me adoringly and said: ‘You’re da fabbest gal oi know!’ with a perfect Irish lilt in his voice. It sounded crazy, but I didn’t care. It was just great to have him back in one piece after such a traumatic time.”

Chris, who had emergency surgery after a blood vessel ruptured in his brain, had recovered his Sheffield twang when Mary returned to the city’s Royal Hallamshire Hospital – and he couldn’t remember a thing about his day as a Dubliner.

Doctors have linked Chris’s experience to Foreign Accent Syndrome, a little-known condition that can affect control of lips, tongue and vocal cords in rare neurological cases. It was ­discovered in Norway in 1941 when a woman hurt in an air raid woke up speaking in a German accent.

Chris, now fully recovered, married Mary recently and they plan to take a trip across the Irish Sea — to hear what a real Irishman sounds like.

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