And do you feel that you’ve had enough information?

No I didn’t, I didn’t know that I might even be entitled to some help some State benefit help. I didn’t know I was entitled to DLA for instance, which would have been helpful in the early years. But it’s all relative, and when you think what I’ve been getting paid it’s probably much more than any other head injured people have ever had, so I’m not going to complain about it. I just donate it to the country.

But in those early years my GP could have told me that I’m entitled to DLA. My sister told me that I was entitled to the highest rate. When I was in the wheelchair, I should have been getting the highest rate for mobility and for, for care apparently which would have beenIt would have meant about six or seven thousand pounds tax free benefit each year. For those years for about seven years, which I didn’t get, I didn’t even know about.

And have you since looked into that or have you ever had DLA?

Yes.

And how did you go about organising that?

I found out about it through Headway. They told me heard some, some people there talking about it.

Some other survivors of head injury?

Patients yeah. They told me that they had compensation, which meant that they were not entitled, you know, they got quite big compensation, they got lump sum compensation. And they told me that the DLA was not, it’s not a means tested. It was a disability testing really. It was basically on how, how your impairments, how your functioning impacts on your life. And that’s how it’s measured. So I applied for it and I get the, I get the lowest, the lower rate for one of the, for the mobility and I get the middle rate for the, for the care, for the brain injury.

I didn’t know that I might even be entitled to some help some State benefit help. I didn’t know I was entitled to DLA, for instancewhich would have been helpful in the early years. But it’s all relative, and when you think what I’ve been getting paid it’s probably much more than any other head injured people have ever had, so I’m not going to complain about it. I just donate it to the country. But in those early years my GP could have told me that I’m entitled to DLA. My sister told me that I was entitled to the highest rate. When I was in the wheelchair, I should have been getting the highest rate for mobility and for, for care apparently which would have beenIt would have meant about six or seven thousand pounds tax free benefit each year. For those years for about seven years, which I didn’t get, I didn’t even know about.

Well because, like most people, I think disabled people are people that are in wheelchairs and people that are blind or have got some other sensory impairment. I know now that I have, I do have, I have a mental disability and it is as profound as any other disability. And it should be recognised. That’s why I claimed the DLA. it’s not that I need the extra £15 a week as such. Really it’s not. it’s immaterial.

That’s not such a happy story to report. I did, I think publicity about the huge level of compensation I got, seemed to get out. It was in the papers. And I got lots of begging letters and lots of fair-weather friends. I gradually removed most of those. I found out who my real friends were and I’ve really quite limited the number of people I really want to know. And even, even a friend from before the head injury, someone I knew at university in the late 1980s, a man who asked me to be godfather to his child. He was borrowing, pestering me to borrow money all the time, and I’ve even fallen out with him now, because I don’t, I said, I don’t lend any money to anyone now And he hasn’t contacted me for about six years. So really, I’ve become isolated again.

That’s very tough.

Yeah. But I think that if people are going to be like that, I don’t really want to be friends with them. And I had lots and lots of fair-weather friends.

And do you see your brain injury as a problem or a journey?

Sometimes it’s a problem. I think the key is, you have to develop strategies to cope with it. You have to know your limitations, and know, like, for instance, certain aspects of my abilities, I’m actually better at now than I was before, before I know how, I know what my, I know what I can’t do, and I really focus all my energy on things that I’m good at.

And what kinds of things are they?

Well what I do now is, in work, I’m much better at motivating than I was before. Because I use my, the terrible adversity that I went through. I show, for instance I show the before and after pictures of my personal, physical rehabilitation to some of the elite athletes that I’m responsible for coaching. And I can completely change a session, with the approach that these, these athletes can have to their training. And they need stimulating and they need motivating, to move on to a different level.

I know now that I think I did at the time. I know now that I won’t make well I know my life is going to be different. But I will never give up trying to make improvements and to, because I know the brain is, I know improvements can be made many, many years afterwards and it’s not just limited to two years. You know, I’ve read some research to suggest that you make, you can make significant improvements, even ten, twenty years post head injury.

And also it gave me self-confidence which I’d lost completely. And it gave me a sense of, contributing towards my recovery and I was actually actively doing something to, or I could see, I could see each day that I was making progress. I was getting fitter. And it was helping me relax as well afterwards I would say.

I used to do a lot of reading in those days, even though I was finding it very difficult to retain the stories, because of my memory problems. I couldn’t watch a film for instance. It was so frustrating, because I couldn’t follow the story. My memory was so impaired. But there was one short book in that year. I think it was the Booker prize winner of that year in 1997. It was the editor of, of the French women’s magazine, Elle. Jean-Dominique Bauby, who himself, he suffered a head injury. I think he had a stroke and he suffered from locked in syndrome. He wasn’t able to communicate in any way, other than by his physiotherapist. He managed to learn by blinking his left eyelid. He used to dictate 40 pages of a book called the Diving Bell and the Butterfly and that book I managed to retain. I read that avidly and I retained what he was going on about. And that motivated me quite a lot. And I thought, if this man, who was suffering such adversity, it made me think, what am I feeling sorry for, and I used that technique as a strategy within work situations after that.

So I’ve always tried to, whenever I’m come across different stages of adversity, throughout this journey of rehab I’ve had, I’ve tried to find the positive in each of those instances and turn it round.

Whereas after the brain injury I feel that I became, my personality changed a little at times. I became more, much more gregarious and I think it’s come back to how I was before now, you know, fourteen years afterwards. I’ve read that many people suffering from a brain, like for instance my wife’s father who fell off his push bike in Ireland, he sustained a head injury and he changed, his personality changed completely. He changed from someone like me who was really reserved and quiet. He became the most, the life and soul of the party. He’s now, he is completely different. All because he hit his head on the pavement. And apparently this happens quite a lot with brain injury.

But you feel that you’ve got your personality back

Gone back to how I was before, yeah.

Yeah. And how long do you think it took for you to get back to who you were?

Ten years, which is a very short time in the context of head injury. What you need to understand is that head injury is a life time, it’s a life sentence, if you’d want to treat it as a problem, or it is, it’s a life journey that you need to negotiate. it’s the most important you really need to understand. Its, if this happens to you early on, like when it happened to me I was 30. And if I live for another say I live, what’s the average? Around 80. That’s a fifty year journey you’ve got. So ten years is nothing really.