Luke Fitzgerald is slowly coming to terms with his enforced retirement from rugby.
The Leinster man was forced to bring the curtain down on his career due to the neck damage sustained in the Guiness Pro12 final defeat to Connacht in May.
He's spoken candidly about his plans for life away from the rugby arena as he embarks on the journey that most take at the age of 18-year-old.
He's thinking about college, a career and all the other obstacles that most try to overcome after finishing secondary school.
He knew instantly it was bad, and admits it was like no injury he ever had before. He is a man who's suffered his fair share of set-backs. If he thought it was bad, it was catastrophic.
To further compound Fitzgerald's misery he also damaged his medial knee ligaments in the same game.
For the first time since he ended his career on medical advice, Fitzgerald spoke about the innocuous collision that cut it short.
He told 98FM’s Darren Cleary why he played on knowing he’d suffered a serious injury, in the game that proved to be his final one as a professional
"When you get over a few hurdles you always feel like that’s you done that's your bad luck out of the way.
"For it to end the way it did in a tackle, in an innocuous enough looking tackle where I got literally tackled by one guy and fell into another guy’s hip and that’s it"
"I played on for the rest of the game, but I had a feeling it was pretty bad. Searing pain at the time and I knew it was different, which is what I said to the docs."
"I played on the rest of the game with pretty much one arm, and I tore my medial knee ligament after about 10 minutes. I was in bad enough shape finishing off that game."
Luke Fitzgerald was speaking at the launch of eir Sport, formerly Setanta Sports and the eir Sport Pack.
The eir Sport pack includes eir Sport 1 and eir Sport 2; BT Sport 1, BT Sport 2, BT Sport Europe and BT Sport ESPN.
The eir Sport Pack is now free to all existing and new eir broadband customers. eir Sport has also secured the rights to the 2019 Rugby World Cup and 2017 Women’s Rugby World Cup. eir Sport was formerly Setanta Sports.
