How I met my partner: Secret to sharing work and family – ‘you must be friends’

Laura Cuddy from Cork and Turlough McNally from Meath met in college in 2003, and despite a somewhat slow start to their relationship, they now live very fast paced lives together.

Turlough told The Echo: “We met on the first day of college, we were in the same class — obviously I caught Laura’s eye, she couldn’t wait to talk to me.”

Laura added: “It took him two years to work up the courage to ask me out.”

Turlough explained: “We were friendly for the first couple of years, then one thing led to another and we started going out — we were both very motivated to be veterinary surgeons, and we decided we’d do whatever it took.

“We worked hard and both travelled the world in different directions to get the best connections we could — we were both offered internships at opposite ends of America; I went to Kentucky and Laura to Florida, which were the best places in the world for our respective fields, Laura as a small animal surgeon and me as an equine surgeon.

“It was weird, we only saw each other for one or two days in the year after being in each other’s pockets the years before that.”

Laura said: “Distance is hard, luckily we only did proper distance for that one year — we were a 12-hour drive apart. It was difficult, we were both working long hours though which was maybe a good thing — we didn’t have too much time to dwell on it.

“There were times that Turlough would find some way to visit. He’d hear someone was driving to Florida and he’d find a way to be on that trip. He’d only get to see me for half an hour — it would be a 12-hour drive up and the same down for a half hour rendezvous.”

The next year, they both ended up doing residency programmes half an hour away from each other.

Once they graduated, Turlough said “we had a bit of a grá to come home — more me than Laura. We were looked after extremely well out there and had some great mentors, but we didn’t have family support, so we decided to come back to Ireland.”

Turlough went back to his family home in Meath in 2013, and Laura followed shortly after, where she worked in UCD while Turlough worked as an equine vet.

Laura said: “He came home six months ahead, then we moved into our own place but it’s amazing how quickly an Irish mammy can untrain a man — his ability to cook and look after himself, I had to retrain him!”

The couple married nine years ago in Castlemartyr in Cork on July 4, and lots of their American former coworkers and friends travelled over for the ceremony.

Turlough said: “With a little bit of persuasion, I convinced Laura to leave her job in academia which she didn’t feel really pushed her, and to open our own hospital — the American way didn’t really exist in Ireland, so we decided to go for it.”

Despite a lot of vets they knew saying the American model wouldn’t work in Ireland, they pushed on, and their state-of-the-art 8,000 sq ft hospital opened in June 2019.

Their first child, Hugo, was born while they were in the process of building the practice, with Turlough saying: “It was a tough year, Laura was pregnant and we didn’t know the first thing about actually running a business,” but they had great family support.

They started with just two staff, having spent a lot of money, “so it was a bit of a worry, but as they say build it and they will come, the business grew rapidly, I’d come in and there’d be more staff every time, people I’d never seen before — Laura would have hired them and not told me.”

Laura is the optimist of the pair, but she added “I was right,” and their business became hugely popular, to the point where Turlough left his equine surgery job in 2020.

“Then covid came. We saw animals on an emergent scale only, but people still needed our services, dogs still got sick — us and our staff were like hermits,” Turlough said.

“Then another baby was born in the middle of covid, the business was getting busier and now we had two babies — Myles was born on a Thursday and Laura was back at work on Monday, he lived in the office for a bit and we would tag team in and out.”

Within four years, they had 75 staff, and they started looking around for other opportunities — as Laura was originally from Cork, they decided to open another hospital there.

Their hospital in Little Island opened in July of this year, twice as big as the first one.

Turlough said: “Laura and I share an office which can be claustrophobic, but if we have a disagreement it’s always short lived, we know we have the same end goal.

“Our rule is that if one of us wants to try something new and it doesn’t work out, the other never says I told you so.”

Laura said: “I think to work together and be in a relationship, you have to be friends — that helps a lot when you go through hard times, because we’re trying to balance kids, work, we travel a lot but we have a very equal partnership. When we all spend time together it’s full on — it’s always going somewhere fun or doing an activity.”

The practice in Cork means Laura gets to see her family there more often and their kids have built relationships with their cousins.

Their kids also spend a lot of time in the hospital, to the point where Turlough jokes that “a trip to the zoo would absolutely bore them, they come in and we say do you want to see a snake or a turtle but they want to see the x-ray machine!”