Christy Dignam has opened up about his illness and the recent losses in his life.
The singer, who has a terminal illness, revealed that it has been a difficult few months due to several tragedies.
“The way things have been happening for the last few weeks with our keyboard player [Patrick “Fitzy” Fitzpatrick] passing away and then Grace McDermott, who was doing all our social media, she was killed in a fire down in Limerick and then our manager was killed a few weeks ago.”
Aslan’s manager, Svenn Braamark died after trying to extinguish a fire in his native Sweden.
“He was a farmer and the heat was scorching the earth, the wind changed and the flames were coming towards his house.
“He was running with buckets of water trying to put it out and he had a heart attack.
“But that didn’t kill him. While he was lying down he inhaled a load of smoke so he was in a coma for about a week and when he came out of a coma he was brain dead.”
“Life is f*****g weird, I swear to God. The older I get the more weird it gets,” he told the Mirror.
“Fitzy was diagnosed with cancer two years after me and if you had said to me five years ago one of the band is going to be dead in three years time I’d have picked me.
“Life has a way of throwing curve balls.”
Discussing his own illness, a rare blood cancer called Amyloidosis, Christy admitted that there is no cure, but chemotherapy ‘holds it at bay’.
“I know it’s an inevitable thing, it’s an incurable illness so it will probably catch me eventually but until it does I’m kind of carrying on as was.”
