Jerry Flannery sits down at a picnic table out in front of the Sports Bar in the University of Limerick and unwraps his post-training lunch. It's homemade, sealed up in a clear plastic bag. A brown bread sandwich – no butter – with some thick slices of chicken inside, the bread cut diagonally. He takes the meat from one triangle and stuffs it into the other so that it's effectively half a sandwich now and when he's finished eating, he crumples up the remaining bread and bins it. Almost sixteen stones of hooker and he's eating like a schoolgirl a week before her debs.

It's the little victories that keep a man going all the same. A few months back, even that routine, rudimentary process was beyond him. For a couple of days at the end of May, he had both his arms in slings and had to carry them crossed over his chest as though he was permanently halfway through the Macarena. Feeding himself and dressing himself were hills that took an age to climb and he couldn't always make it to the top on his own. And as for more delicate matters...

"I had started seeing a girl who lived in London a couple of weeks beforehand," he says, laughing, "and she actually just lived down the road from the Lions camp. I wasn't going out with her that long as it happened so she was thrown in at the deep end a bit, with me there with both my arms in sling. I went to her at one point and said, 'Listen, I think I'm going to need the toilet pretty soon...' And she just went, 'Whaaat?'

"Ah no, the thing was that while the left arm was in a cast and a sling and couldn't be moved at all, the right one just couldn't be raised or moved laterally. I could lower it down alright. Within a couple of days of the operation I was able to go in and tell them I was fit to take care of it myself without the second sling. I was supposed to wear it for a fortnight but sure I couldn't go on like that."

That he found himself in that position at all ultimately came down to injuries picked up at training. The shoulder, he'd been carrying for a while. Since midway through the Six Nations indeed, the legacy of some training ground messing between himself and Donncha O'Callaghan the week of the Scotland game. Rory Best had been picked ahead of him and he found himself acting the goat during line-out practice. It wasn't like him but squad rotation still feels like being dropped when it's your number that's called without your name attached and he was sore about it. So he messed about a little and found an accomplice who turned out to be just that bit too willing. Paul O'Connell later said it was all his own fault.

"The line-out came and I took it at the front and grubbered through and dived on it. And I was there, 'Flannery's in for another try!' And Donncha – for no reason – just hammered after me and clattered me as I was scoring. I remember I hit the ground and rolled over and I could feel it straight away. I was going, 'Oh, please no, please no.' I thought I got away with it too because I was able to lift it when I stood up. But a couple of hours later it just locked up completely. I thought it was bolloxed altogether."

In the normal run of things, it was. He'd torn the cartilage in his shoulder (at least that's about as layman's-term a description as you can get for what had happened) and while it wasn't a massive operation to fix it, there was no question that it would need surgery. But this wasn't the normal run of things. This was just as the Grand Slam was reaching boiling point. It was a month before Munster's defence of the Heineken Cup resumed. It was the spring of a Lions summer.

So he worked his way around it, loading up on anti-inflammatories at night before training or a match and taking morning painkillers in preparation for a day's exertions. And he got by. Pained and irritated and not the most fun person to be around at times, but he got by.

"You become so selfish. I look back on last season and the amount of team success I was involved in and the big thing I think of is the rollercoaster of emotions that I personally found myself on. Like, I was talking to somebody about last year and they were saying how great it must have been to be in the middle of it and I was remembering going in to do line-outs the week of the Welsh game and I had no painkillers taken or anti-inflammatories and I couldn't throw. It was too painful.

"I'm telling you, that morning I was absolutely broken inside. And then they gave me pain-killers and I was fit to go and do a weights session when they kicked in. I remember after it, they were announcing the match squad and I had my head down and was so, so gutted because I knew I wasn't going to be in it. I was actually there taking the tape off my hands after the weights session and wasn't even looking up. And the names were called out – 'Marcus Horan, Jerry Flannery...' And I couldn't believe it, I just couldn't. Everything was rosy again. I was down at the bottom and then up at the top just like that."

The slam was grand, the defence of the Heineken less so but come mid-May, he was in London with the Lions squad and had been pencilled into most books as a test starter. And then, the Wednesday before they were due to fly out to Johannesburg, his season ended with one tackle in training. Worse, it was his own teammate who did the damage.

"I grabbed Lee Byrne and Jamie Roberts came in from behind to help me take him down but he hit my elbow and it just locked on and snapped back the other way. There's a ligament there that snapped in half. All the muscles attached to the tendon on my funny bone ripped off and took some of the bone along with it. The funny bone nerve just went into tatters and it's somewhere up around my biceps now. I have no feeling in the back of my arm around the elbow at all really."

And that was it. The season was over, the Lions tour was other people. Gary O'Driscoll, the Lions medical man, had been the Ireland team doctor for years and in the car on the way to the hospital, Flannery mentioned to him that his shoulder had been killing him for months. O'Driscoll said he may as well get it looked at now because he was going to have a few months out anyway. Two days later, he was a bed of blankets and pillows and slings.

"I had the operation on the 22 May which was a Friday and the Lions flew out on the Sunday. So I was left in the hotel on my own for three days. By the Tuesday, I was in the gym working on leg programmes that Paul Darbyshire, the Munster conditioning coach, had sent me. And even then, I was still sort of in Lions mode. I still felt I was on tour in a way. But then I flew home on the Wednesday and went for a walk around Limerick on the Thursday and I just started getting really, really depressed. I was just saying to myself, 'F**k this man, what am I doing here?'"

He rang Tomás O'Leary so that they could trade sob stories and sympathy and came away thinking O'Leary was in worse shape even than him. At least he was able to get up and go for a walk and, once the first sling came off, was fit to look after himself. O'Leary was wearing a huge boot to keep his ankle stable and needed crutches. He'd even had to move back in with his parents. A phonecall from Declan Kidney shook both of them out of their sorrow. He told them to come to the Churchill Cup in Denver with the Ireland squad and to get stuck into their rehab there. Another masterstroke.

"I have to say, that saved me really," says Flannery. "The other option would have been being here, back in the same gym that I was going to be in for the next 10 months, with maybe only one physio there each day. Nothing against the gym or the physios like, I love being in there, but you know what I mean.

"It was brilliant. I think without it I would have gone mad. Because half of your recovery is mental. At least half. And over in Denver, you got up in the morning and you were in a new place and everything was different and you were energised. It was good. It was good for my head, you know?"

All parts are in fine working order now – head, shoulder, elbow, everything. Even the calf strain he picked up in Portugal a couple of weeks back is ready for road. He found a way to find the silver lining in it all, figuring that the shoulder was going to have to go under the knife at some point and at least this way he's back in time for the first Heineken Cup match, away to Northampton next Saturday. He'll take that.

"This competition is still as big as it gets around here. You live for it. You ask any of the lads what it means to play for Munster and the first thing they'll mention is the buzz of big Heineken Cup games. As the Magners League develops, there's a chance it might become a more general thing across the board and the games themselves will be the occasions regardless of what cup we're playing for. But you wouldn't be telling the truth if you didn't say that the Heineken Cup was still the massive thing around here."

He knows Munster have debts to settle with the tournament after last year, a season in which they played some of the best rugby of their lives and still came away potless. That'll come though. For now, just suiting up in anger is a joy in itself. After a cruel summer, his winter can't come soon enough.

Curriculum Vitae

Jerry Flannery
Age: 30
Honours: Ireland – Grand Slam 2009, Triple Crown 2006, 2007, Munster – Heineken Cup 2006, 2008; Magners League 2009

Did you know? When Mike Fitzpatrick, the director of Limerick City Art Gallery, was asked last year to nominate six things he loved about Limerick, he chose Flannery above and beyond all the other rugby players in the city.

mclerkin@tribune.ie