NeuroDivine

I was born on 3 May, eight weeks early, in the old Waveney Hospital in Ballymena—a building that has since disappeared, though its memory remains stitched into my own beginning. I had barely arrived before the world tilted into urgency. Within an hour I was lifted into an ambulance and carried to Belfast, the capital, the place with the machines and hands that could keep me alive. Not yet an hour old, and already on the road, already entrusted to strangers who chose to fight for a child they had never met.

Every year, that story sits beside another: Northern Ireland’s own birth on 3 May 1921, fifty‑seven years before mine. One arrival planned by legislation; the other an unexpected, fragile interruption. And yet the dates align, as though history and my own small life briefly touched.

But the deeper truth is this: I survived because people cared.

My parents, suddenly thrust into fear and hope in equal measure, said yes to every intervention, every journey, every risk. The nurses in Ballymena who steadied their voices. The ambulance team who drove with urgency and gentleness. The staff in Belfast who received a tiny, premature infant and refused to let him slip away. Their hands, their decisions, their skill—these became the first blessings spoken over my life.

So when 3rd May comes round each year, I find myself holding all of this together: the accident of timing; the shared birthday with a complicated place; the vanished hospital where I first opened my eyes; the road to Belfast; and the love and labour that kept me here.

It becomes, in the end, a day of thanksgiving—for my parents, for the medical teams who carried me through those first uncertain hours, and for the quiet miracle of being alive at all.