Have Hope!

One of the first things I want to write about here is how long recoveries from TBI take. And, therefore, how important it is to have hope. The brain is an incredibly complex piece of equipment that, when it works well, performs a massive number of functions seamlessly. When it stops working well, we suddenly discover the amount it normally does without us even thinking.


This is me, only a few hours after my accident! A severe TBI is a pretty good way of stopping the brain working well. :-)

As well as my accident, I picked up a pneumonia in hospital that also came close to ending it all for me. It's fair to say, the odds were stacked against me! But, as a garden-loving relative jokingly said to me, it takes more to kill off a weed than that! :-)

When it comes to TBI, we can rely on another activity of the brain - recovering! And, in many cases, the brain will do a good job of that as well - all it needs is a little time!


Here's me and my Dad on my birthday almost three weeks later! The balloons are because no flowers are allowed in hospital.

For me, it did indeed need a good chunk of time. I was in the coma-like state called Post Traumatic Amnesia for a total of 54 days. This photo shows the blank, vacant stare of someone in PTA. At least I'd managed a thumbs-up and a 'kind-of' smile! I'm so thin too! I dropped 20% of my body weight following my accident! Also, you can see my tracheostomy in my neck and my gastric feeding tube in my stomach.



But slowly I came back to the world...


... just in time for a good cup of coffee! :-)

Still, my recovery was far from over - you can see I'm in a wheelchair in the previous photo. I had to relearn almost every muscular function - all the way from swallowing up through to walking and finally to running. I'm still learning to do the latter properly now - almost three years after my accident!

I finally walked again unaided on my own Independence Day, 4th July 2005 - about 4.5 months after my accident. Still, my walking was far from perfect and there was a lot of room for improvement! Here I am shakily demonstrating my newfound ability to walk to my brother almost two weeks later:



My recovery has been a long road with many ups and many downs - if you want, have a read of My Regrets. In the end, though, I'm pretty happy with the way I've recovered. I do, however, want to make one thing clear - it is a long road and the end can be very different from the start. So, if you or someone close to you is also recovering from a TBI, have hope!


Time for a proper grin! Hangliding over Rio de Janeiro a little under two years after the accident.

In some ways, my recovery was as a pretty short one. I once spoke with another TBI recoverer who lost his sense of smell following his accident. It came back, all of a sudden, fully nine years later! There is no question of the brain's ability to repair itself given a bit of luck and the right amount of time.

But there is much that can be done while we wait for things like that to happen. And I look forward to talking to you about some of that stuff on this blog.

Cheers,
Mike