Sinéad Desmond has a lot to fit in before her impending wedding. The TV3 presenter must pass her driving test in front of her Ireland AM viewers, edit a magazine and attend three hen nights. The hen nights are all her own -- a surfing weekend in Sligo, a party in Kerry and a reunion with pals in London, where she lived for a decade.

"This is the biggest thing I will have ever done in my life," she says, referring to her May 2 wedding to Corkman, Davy Ryan. "The whole idea of committing in front of everyone is nerve-wracking. I'm not good at finalising things. It took me four years to leave my last job, and God knows how many years to leave my last relationship. I take this very seriously and things matter more to me now."

Now, of course, means nine months after suffering a brain haemorrhage on live TV and being told she could die. A long, painful process of recovery brought Sinéad back to full health, thankfully. But in the aftermath of the death of actress Natasha Richardson, who died suddenly of brain damage after a seemingly innocuous fall, it's hard not to dwell on the negatives after any brain trauma. It could easily have ended so differently for Sinéad.

"I'm very conscious that I'm fine and plenty of people aren't," she says soberly. "You don't want to be banging on about how you nearly this and you nearly that, when you're fine. I do know that many of the people I was on that ward with... not many of them are still with us."

I wonder if Sinéad ever feels a touch of survivor's guilt. "I don't feel guilty," she says, "but I do feel very, very lucky."

There may be no better tribute to those other lost lives than the positive way in which Sinéad is now going about hers. As well as her busy career, she is up to her eyes in the business of becoming a bride. When I ring to arrange our interview, she is in the middle of trying on her wedding gown somewhere in the Midlands.

When we meet in the Westbury Hotel on a crisp spring morning, her mum is waiting patiently to go shopping for shoes to match the dress. Sinéad, glowing in a cream wool coat, is far from stressed. I was expecting 'Bridezilla', but instead I get a beaming smile and someone who is quite willing to help me demolish a plate of raspberry chip cookies.

She waves away worries about fitting into her dress for the

big day. "Everything is wobbly and saggy, so I'm going back to Pat Henry, the fitness trainer. I like it when he's all, 'Come on, let's go! No pain, no gain!'" Pat will have his work cut out, she says, as she hasn't taken much exercise since last June.

This passing reference to 'last June' masks the incredible journey Sinéad has taken in the past nine months. While today she is on the home straight of her wedding preparations, on June 10 last she was lying on her back in the studio of Ireland AM, waiting for an ambulance.

"I remember it all very clearly," she says. "I was reading the newspaper headlines on the show and, all of a sudden, my neck went very stiff and I felt this cramp -- like you would get in a muscle if you were swimming or running -- at the base of my head. And it moved down from my head, down my spine, and everything seized up."

The strong connection that comes from four years of anticipating each other's cues on live television meant that her co-presenter, Mark Cagney, immediately spotted something was wrong. He jumped in to finish the link and sent the show to an ad break.

"I said I just needed to lie down, and they carried me over to the side of the studio," says Sinéad. She didn't panic because she still felt so lucid. "I was chatting away, although I couldn't move my head or my neck and the bright lights were really hurting me. I thought I'd be grand the whole way through it -- that it was just a bit of a funny turn."

Even as the paramedics arrived, she was making small talk with her colleagues. "They were all standing, you see, and I was on the ground. I remember one of the girls was wearing a pair of sequinned pumps, and I was going, 'Oh where did you get the shoes? They're really cute'."

Things soon took a darker turn. As she was rushed to Tallaght Hospital, she began to suffer severe head pain, as if her head was going to explode. Davy arrived at the hospital and commandeered the situation immediately. "Davy was brilliant, he just grabbed the doctor, pulled him in and said, 'Do something now!'"

Sinéad, for her own part, was demanding answers from her bed. "I was pestering this poor young doctor. I said, 'What do you mean a bleed? A brain haemorrhage?' and she said, 'Yes'. I asked, 'Could it be fatal?' and she said, 'Yes'. I was really ....shaken up at first, but ....at least I knew the ......parameters."

A doctor at Beaumont outlined the best and worst-case scenarios for Sinéad -- an honesty she appreciates to this day -- and, after a major scan, he was able to deliver the good news; that she would survive.

"Only for a fleeting second, as the doctor was walking towards the bed, did I realise that I was totally unprepared for whatever he might say to me," recalls Sinéad. "I think it was worse for my family than it was for me. Every five minutes, nurses were asking me my name, what day it was, to see if my faculties were deteriorating."

Despite her positivity, her unwillingness to "dwell on it", Sinéad still has strong re-collections of her ordeal. She has a very clear image of a nurse who would administer pain relief in the middle of the night. "She would come through like an angel, because it would be dark and the pain would be awful -- everything seems worse at night." Sinéad also lost her sight for a while, and suffered badly for six weeks as blood cleared painfully across the sensitive nerves on her spinal cord.

After just two short months, she was back on her live TV sofa. It was a little premature, she admits now, but she was going crazy with boredom at home. It sounds like a cliché, but I can well believe it with Sinéad. For 10 years, she worked hard and played hard as a newspaper executive in Rupert Murdoch's News International stable in London. A self-confessed "news junkie", her first move when she gets up at 4am every day is still to check the news wires for any story that might have broken while she was asleep.

"It was very cut-throat, very macho, very hardcore," says Sinéad of her former life as Features Editor and writer at The Sun. "I loved the straightness of it; if you had an argument, it happened there and then. Looking back on it, I don't know how I kept going at it for so long."

She never thought she would end up back in Ireland -- her high-powered career and her then-partner Ollie, also a journalist, were in England. "It was a journo's life; you work and drink, and every now and then you go on holiday and they ring you up anyway. But I thrived on it, I loved it." Then she came home to Dublin to help look after a family member. She spent some time working on the Irish Sun's features section, then the Ireland AM offer came along. "You can't say no to things like that."

Sinéad and Ollie were still an item at the start of her move to Dublin, and there were plans for him to follow her over. "With hindsight, we were going our separate ways. We had been together for 10 years; really, we had just been best mates for a long, long time. And, of course, I came over here and met Davy, and I had to make that phone call to say I'd met someone else."

In a sense, Sinéad had made all of her life-changing decisions four years before the near-death experience of her brain haemorrhage, an event that would have surely been the catalyst for change in any other case. "In the space of three months, I changed my job, my country and my relationship. It felt like the most natural thing in the world," she muses now. "If I had fallen sick in the UK and I hadn't changed my life, I think I would be going through what I did when I came home from Ireland."

I wonder if the warm, lovely woman I'm sitting across from could ever really have been a hard-nosed hack at heart. Certainly, she has lots of drive and energy and, as she says herself, leaning into my recorder for effect, she can be "LOUD"!

She confirms, "I was a bitch!" then corrects herself: "Well, I was hard, tough; I would fight a good fight and I didn't like the person I was becoming. I was cancelling on friends here, and cancelling on friends there. I knew I needed to change that and, thank goodness, I changed that before I got sick."

On the other hand, she can identify two ways in which her illness has definitely affected her. She cries really easily now. "If there is anything emotional at all on the show, off I go," Sinéad laughs self-deprecatingly. On a deeper level, she feels her brush with death has added a spiritual dimension to her life.

"I'm not saying I go to church every day, but I have a faith that I didn't have before. I felt the whole time I was sick that I was being cared for."

And, in an attempt to justify that care, she is not wasting a moment of her life from here on. Always a keen runner -- she ran the London Marathon some time back -- she says that she needs exercise to rein in her most manic excesses. She was going to swim the Channel with Pat Henry's fitness instructor son, Karl, "until he told me I would have to put on two stone in body fat to insulate myself!" she guffaws.

Her illness last year stopped her from joining the Niall Mellon Township house-building trip to South Africa but, true to form, she has pencilled it in for 2010. This September, she will climb Kilimanjaro with a group of friends, and fit in a belated safari honeymoon with Davy. Every detail of her upcoming wedding in France seems to be filled with joy, although she wonders how she will fit the French priest, English translator and sign-language interpreter for her deaf brother, Conor, on the altar of the tiny village church.

But Sinéad takes these minute obstacles in the same way she did the major one: with incredible stoicism. "I have had a totally charmed life in every single way," she says. "I can't grumble about this tiny bit of badness that came my way."

- Susan Daly