Living with Traumatic Brain Injury

Hello, reading all your stories has really helped. My ‘accident’ was oct 2007 when I was attacked and suffered brain damage. I have gone through loads of similar problems as all you others but I have been so lucky. I live in Cumbria in England and the NHS has been amazing. I have an Occupational Therapist from the Aquired Brain Injury team who visits often and helps in all sorts of ways. I have managed to relearn lots of things and those I know have gone for ever I am learning to adjust to. My life has changed I accept that now, I never ask why me, I do have lots of bad times but when I look round at all the care and love that surrounds me and all the people who have helped I feel so humbled and have to keep trying just for them.

My two grown up children have changed their lives to fit around my disabilities. For a long time there they lost their mam. I am still here not like I used to be but I am begining to find a life. A lot of the things I do would make you either laugh or cry, we choose to laugh, not at me but with me. It is such a lovely way of letting me know when I am acting inapropriatly, without upsetting me. We say I am doo-lally-tap an affectionate northern term for mentally challenged people.

Like the rest of you I also have memory loss,[my children only tell me about nice memories] cannot add up, [I use an adding machine not very well but who cares!] unable to calculate money [I only take notes out and the children bag up all my coins and exchange them for notes], get lost if I try to leave the house on my own [I go into the nearest public house and someone will contact my family], stumble and fall [people think I am drunk and I am tea total], don’t recognise people [they get upset when I ask who they are] mood swings that I cannot understand cos I don’t want to feel depressed and know I have no reason too, the list goes on for ever.

I lost the memory of feeling love. That was so hard but I look at it this way, I know I loved my children so much by the things they have told me and things I can remember and I have had the chance to learn to love them again. Not as the child that was put in my arms but as the adult who held me in their arms.

There have been horrible, cruel and uncaring people but they don’t count. I would not wish a brain injury on my worst enemy but the experience has made me aware of how many lovely, caring and kind people are around, family, friends, my childrens friends, ex partners, people in the local shops, on the telephone, professional people, a lady on the bus, even strangers once I learnt to admit to them I was brain damaged.

I was ashamed of what I had become but people who have never met me before just accept I am, what I am and those that knew me before accept what I have become.

What’s next? I don’t know but me and my ‘half full glass’ are going to ignore the bad days the good ones are so much more fun.

My advice for anyone else ‘keep smiling’ it really does help and look at all the things you can still do instead of the things you cann’t.