‘Sweet, that’s sound!’

“I woke up and thought, ‘Shit, I’ve overslept’ – I could see the alarm was flashing but there was no sound coming from it.” Former Irish national road race champion Morgan Fox is reliving the moment in late 2008 when a bike crash came back to haunt him. “I picked it up, played around with the volume, then suddenly realised it was me, not the alarm.” Overnight his world had fallen silent.

There had been no warning – “no symptoms, no headaches, no sniffes” – but immediately Fox suspected a link