Life after brain injury – one small victory at a time.
Quick summary: A medication mistake revealed that my problem was not simply forgetting tablets. I was losing my place in the sequence. A new pill organiser, bought for travel convenience, unexpectedly offered a simple solution: raising the next compartment so the organiser remembers the process when my brain cannot.
One of my hospital consultants once explained my condition to me in a way that, although difficult to hear, turned out to be unexpectedly helpful. That was in 2008.
He told me that from that point onwards, all my care would technically be palliative. At first hearing, that sounds extraordinarily stark. The word carries enormous emotional weight. Many people hear it and understandably think it means that death is imminent, or that medicine has somehow “given up”.
What he carefully explained, however, was something rather different.
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There are moments in life when something remarkable happens “out there” in the world…
and yet it feels strangely close to home.
Recently my nephew Jonny Huntington became a three-time Guinness World Record holder. He is now recognised as the first disabled person to ski solo and unsupported to the South Pole.
That sentence alone feels almost too large to take in.
But for me, it lands somewhere quieter.
Because Jonny and I share something that doesn’t make headlines.
We have both had strokes.
And we both live with what that leaves behind.
Half a Mind to .. 