By Michael Downing
with Reilly Fitzgerald
Reilly Fitzgerald was born September 13, 1967 in St. John’s, Newfoundland & Labrador, Canada. His mother had been staying with her parents in Cupid’s Crossing for the latter part of her pregnancy, and his father was in Wabush working at Wabush Mines to establish the family’s future home.
When the nurse brought Reilly to his mother, his mom noticed a lump on the wrist of his right hand. It turns out Reilly had been born with an Arterial-Veinal Fistula (AV Fistula) malformation.
He had his first surgery at ten months, where Dr. Richard Kennedy, a renowned orthopaedic surgeon at the Janeway Child Health Centre, worked to remove the lump.
Unfortunately, as Reilly grew older, more lumps formed and more surgeries followed. By the time he turned 14, doctors had performed 11 surgeries on his hand and arm in a variety of attempts to improve its use.
Reilly tells me that–likely as a result of his surgeries–doctors learned that each time they removed lumps of body tissue, arteries, and veins, new channels were opened for more lumps to form.
“I like to think I contributed to the knowledge of this unique condition,” he said. “Because of me, future people born with an A. V. malformation would not have to go through the same surgical process which actually exacerbated the problem, causing the malformation to worsen.”
Reilly said that his arm and hand have a lot more veins, arteries, and “body tissue” than the normal person, and the bones in his arm are also malformed, resulting in “very limited movement” in his right wrist and elbow. His hand and arm are also very tender and any impact will cause massive bruising and pain.
“I also developed arthritis in the joints of my right hand and arm,” Reilly said. “As a child, I regularly dealt with severe pain and remember trying to lessen it by running it under water, sometimes cold, sometimes hot, and wrapping it, usually in a towel.”
Something as simple as “sleeping the wrong way” would result in Reilly waking with severe pain in his arm and extreme electric-like shocks as he would try to straighten out his locked elbow.
Despite the ongoing pain management, Reilly participated in pretty much everything any able-bodied boy would do, such as various sports in his school’s physical education program, along with one of his early loves as a Canadian boy in the 1970s: hockey. He said, “after a particularly painful physical contact with another player’s skate,” he had to make the hardest decision of his life and quit playing hockey at 14.
Though Reilly’s talent is God-given, he has also worked to improve his skills through formal instruction. During his final two years of high school, he earned his Honours Diploma in Fine Art through a correspondence program. While attending Memorial University in St. John’s, he took advantage of “whatever art education the St. John’s campus had to offer at the time.” He attended extra-curricular oil painting classes, and completed the only two art-related courses offered on campus, Arts 1000 and Arts 1001.
Reilly tells me that the two arts courses were new, and he was a student for the inaugural term of both courses, which became “an elite distinction.” Upon completing Arts 1000, he enrolled in Arts 1001, for which Arts 1000 had been a prerequisite. Initially only three students signed up for the course and the university decided to still offer it, as it was the first year and would serve as a break-in the course.
Eventually two of the other students dropped, and Reilly had the distinction of being the only student in Arts 1001. He would meet with the instructor, Dr. Duane Starcher, once a week in the professor’s office for three hours. They would view and discuss art history and the essential elements of art. Reilly completed a section of the course on photography, from camera composition to developing film in a dark room. He completed two major papers, one comparing William Blake with Piet Mondrian, and the other, an in-depth paper on physical and psychological aspects of colour.
Reilly says he learned more about the perception of art from that one course than his entire other studies combined. He earned a 93% in the course and, said that, seeing it would not be offered again for the next few years, he was, for quite some time, “the only person in the province to have completed both Arts 1000 and 1001.”
Eventually, Reilly would use the knowledge he’d gained to teach his own private art lessons. He also volunteered, teaching art classes at schools throughout Conception Bay North. This helped him realize, at a later point in his life than most people (married with children), that he was meant to teach.
Pursuing his artistic and teaching goals, he completed his university education, earned his teaching degree, and applied for jobs in the province, eventually accepting a full-time position as an English teacher. He moved his family from Spaniard’s Bay to Clarenville, where he still makes art and which he now considers home.
For more on Reilly’s life, see Pam Pardy-Ghent’s article on Reilly from The Newfoundland Herald.
Follow Reilly on Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, and Bluesky.
My Writing Wanderland 
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