"Can I get you a cup of tea?"
That was the last thing I remember on December 6th 2002 for four days. I was working at the University of Leicester and was speaking to one of the P.A.s with whom I shared an office. Apparently, this was closely followed by me sitting down, doing some every erratic doodling, fitting and collapsing.

Following immediate admission to Leicester Royal Infirmary, closely followed by transfer to Queen’s Medical Centre in Nottingham, I was eventually operated on, following numerous tests and scans for a suspected deep brain bleed. This proved to be a heamangioma. The staff were wonderful but a neurosurgical ward can be a daunting place despite committed staff.

After a relatively short time in hospital, twelve days, I returned home to start the process of recovery, which for many following neurosurgery can be long and arduous and, in the early days, often frightening. Two steps forward, one step back.

Learning to cope with the fact that your brain will not do what you would have expected from it before surgery, together with the physical and emotional demands is a difficult time that, thankfully, few people have to experience during their lifetime - why could I not find a simple word when I knew my brain had produced it before?! But, as trite as it may seem, there really can be positives to come from such an experience. Those early weeks of recovery for me in early February, whilst often difficult, were punctuated with the realisation of just how beautiful the countryside appeared as I walked my dog with my husband; the colour of the fields, the shape of the horizon together with the sound of the birds, they all seemed far more beautiful than I remembered, no doubt due to the fact that early on I had not expected to see them again! I could, however, revert rapidly to my senses feeling over-stimulated far too quickly! Often to hear more than one person talking was too much for my then fragile brain to cope with. Both fear and anger playing a role in my recuperation process - the anger surprisingly more so than the fear.

I have been lucky enough to make an excellent recovery from my unexpected trauma, and now try and fill my life with as much as I can, valuing every day and accepting those limitations on the days when I may unexpectedly feel fragile and accepting that occasionally my brain still refuses to understand something very straightforward-I just have to let it go and ask a friend to explain it to me again.

I am a stronger person for having experienced this trauma -we find strength in ourselves that we
may never have had to tap into and, as a consequence, develop other aspects of our personality
- some find creativity, others tenacity and much, much more.

I would now like to be able to contribute to the work that Headway does in Leicestershire in some way during the future and help those who, in many cases, have not been as lucky as I have in the outcome of their trauma and I hope that my next article can relate where this has taken me.

Kimm Cover