Strauss hopes to be back at Leinster in April

Perspectives don’t change, they shift. Sometimes they narrow to a point where all that exists is an oval ball and a number on a shirt. There it is, the rugby world. It’s where Richardt Strauss had planned to live out his entire career.

Today in Leinster’s offices in UCD we are expecting something grim and stolid. Typical Afrikaans reserve has always seemed a little too Old Testament, can fill a room of journalists with the fear of hard labour. Too often it has taken a hammer and chisel to excavate words.

Stereotypes also cast long shadows and in Strauss an upbringing in the Lord Milner-founded Grey College in Bloemfontein raises high suspicion. A trademark of the elite school is a unique Masonic handshake, the alumni peppered with international rugby players, Springbok cricketers and military chiefs.

Charged and ambitious
Today the handshake is firm with no kinks. His perspective similarly so, although it has been shifting day to day and week to week from when he arrived in Dublin four seasons ago. Then it was charged and ambitious, but there has been another landscape movement and his career sits on hold. In April or May of next year the Leinster and Ireland hooker must start over again.

“The doctor came in and said just relax but it looks like there is a hole in your heart and you might have had a stroke at some stage,” explains Strauss. “To be honest I got a bit of a fright when they said that to me, not really knowing what’s going on. I said ‘what’s going to happen? Am I going to die?’.”

Outdoor lifestyles, Free State summer heat and a strong sense of place, the Strauss family world in South Africa was the game and it soaked gloriously into almost everything they did.

His brother Andries plays centre. Cousin Adriaan is a Springbok. Richardt, before he arrived in the RDS, had lapped up Super Rugby and Currie Cup with Cheetahs, all of it exotic to our ears. But Ireland wasn't that distant to him.

Keith Wood
As a kid his brother would point out the Ireland team on TV and particularly the shaven- headed player in the frontrow. Keith Wood was an innovative curiosity. Little Ireland was on the Strauss radar and Wood's redrawing of the role as a dynamic broken-running player captured the eye of a kid who loved to play ball.

“I’ve an older brother who’s a bit of a rugby geek and he always made me watch Keith Wood,” he says. “I can still remember Ireland playing South Africa and he (Wood) gave the ball a merciless kick down one of the touchlines.

“I would run outside . . . we were lucky enough to have a decent backyard in South Africa . . . and I would just run up and kick the ball down the side of it.”

At 23, Strauss became an Ireland project player. Detailed to be groomed for an international career in a specialised position, as sure as the gods have a droll sense of humour; in his first game for Ireland, in 2012, he scrummed down against cousin Adriaan.

But long before that cap there was a journey through the quaint provincial grounds of Ballymena, UL Bohs and the killing fields of Clifford Park.

Leinster was his club, Blackrock College the team he played for, the AIL his competition. Strauss’s only start that first season was a home game against Connacht in the Pro 12 league.

As an uninterested Michael Cheika farmed him out to keep him in touch with the idea of competitive rugby, Strauss was thinking he was “diep in die kak’’. Then Joe Schmidt arrived.

“I say, ‘Okay, I’ve played Super Rugby. I’ve played Currie Cup rugby. Now I’m in Ireland and I’m playing club rugby again,” he says. ‘What’s going on?’

“The first seven months I got a bit homesick. The rugby didn’t go as planned. It was a difficult time. I said to myself ‘I’ll give it a go for one more year’.”

The following season he played 30 times for Leinster, including nine starts in the Heineken Cup and for all but one minute of Europe's greatest comeback final, against Northampton.

There was no bunting or ticker but he was up and running. Declan Kidney picked up the phone and in late October of last year the project status was declared a triumph. Adriaan and Richardt Strauss shook hands in the Aviva Stadium.

While knee and ankle injuries recently tempered his charge, Strauss was on a come back trail this autumn. But he also had problems with concussion that demanded investigation. Leinster sent him for a scan in October.

Knocks to the head
"I have a bit of history with knocks to the head and our medical team got a bit concerned," he says. "Prof Tim Lynch and the radiographer picked up something in the back of the brain. It's going to sound weird but there was a bit of old bruising, blood and stuff, and that got them into doing more tests.

“That’s when they really found that little hole in my heart. They came to the result that the stuff they found on the brain was a small stroke I had at some stage in my life. I didn’t even realise.”

“Then they obviously found the blood flow . . . and with the type of training we do in the scrums it can build up pressure in your body and blood can escape from the top left [atria] to the top right [atria]. It doesn’t go through the lungs.

“If people get little clots and stuff it can get stuck in the lungs. Mine [blood] can skip that whole system so it can go from the top left to the top right and back into the system and I think that’s what had happened. The thing is the blood clots can jump and that’s where the trouble came in.”

Strauss had a hole in the septum, the wall that separates two of the four chambers of the heart. A closed system except for a series of valves that allows the blood to pump in just one direction, he had a leak from one of the main chambers back into one it had recently come from. Given his position and the physical nature of rugby it was a potentially fatal condition.

“He [the doctor] said ‘Listen, relax it’s not that bad, we can fix it’,”says Strauss. “I gave my wife a call and I gave my parents a call back in South Africa to tell them what’s going on, not knowing too much.

"They [the medical team] had friends in the States who had dealt with this before in an NFL player. They corresponded with them and that whole process eliminated what to do and what not to do."

On February 15th, 2005, Tedy Bruschi of the New England Patriots woke with numbness in the left side of his body, a lack of balance, and the beginnings of a headache. The linebacker had suffered a stroke due to a clot caused by a hole in his heart.

A condition that had been with him since birth, the aperture doctors call Patent Foramen Ovale (PFO), had opened between two ventricles, allowing blood to pass between then.

A clot then formed, and travelled up to the right side of his brain. Like Strauss, luck determined where the blockage would come to rest and as with Strauss, there was no permanent damage.

Through the femoral artery in his groin, a small device was sent up the bloodstream and into to his heart and released over the hole. In Bruschi's case, an umbrella-like object expanded and the heart was allowed to heal in and around it, sealing the hole.

Full-on stroke
"Ted Bruschi actually had a full-on stroke and then recovered," says Strauss. "He went back playing and they won the Super Bowl after that." Bruschi played for four more seasons and retired in 2009.

As sub-texts go Strauss is a powerful endorsement of Leinster’s medical competence. His story is the game that could have killed him also may have saved his life. As the IRB remains confused on how to address concussion, the diligence of the medical staff and the expert back up of well-connected doctors prevented what could have been a catastrophe.

“Yeah, you can say it,” he says. “They say a load of people live with the hole in the heart without knowing it. They say it’s pretty common. It’s just the line of work we’re in with lifting weights and scrums and all that where you build up the pressure in your body then the blood kind of pumps. I suppose that is what happened to me.”

There is no famously guarded Bloemfontein conservatism. Rather he is an open book, garrulous, relieved, frustrated, cursing his luck that Rory Best is injured and back-to-back Heineken Cup matches and the Six Nations will pass him by.

There’s an unmistakable celebration of a life traumatically changed but now back to a more familiar place. He is hoping this hurdle won’t define him, that the patch in his heart and the blood-thinning medicine he takes will be a footnote in a long international career.

For now, South African summer sun on the coast with his family for Christmas, a friend’s wedding and the New Year are harbingers of a new beginning. Looking only towards springing to action in April, seems almost to trivialise the diagnosis.

Any serious knee injury would have tucked a player into rehab for longer. But no one would have lined out at team training, as Jamie Heaslip did, with STRAUSS on his back. Instinct tells us the heart is another matter.

“The first while in hospital, like when you just get the news, you go ‘I don’t care if I don’t play again’,” he says. “You don’t want to be afraid of dying when you’re 35 or 30. You kind of go ‘Let’s get healthy first and then worry about the rest.

“Once I realised okay, you’re going to be alright, you think okay, six months, that’s a bit long. Can’t we get them down to five months? That whole battle is going to start now. I’m seeing the cardiologist and I’m going to ask him can I get back a bit sooner.” There it is again. Another changing landscape. Again back to the shirt and ball.