Losing the physical self

One of the most difficult things about brain injury is the mental illness it can cause. Thinking back to the time Anita was on the wards I managed through my spiritual beliefs to take heart from most of the things I had seen there. That may sound odd but it is possible to find an incredible sense of peace, love and caring in these places. However one day I experienced something that messed with my head. There were two people in beds near Anita who had been affected cognitively by the brain injury they had sustained. I heard of a technique used by Darren Brown the magician who during a conversation will say something completely unexpected. That can have a huge psychological effect on an individual because it is not in the normal flow of the conversation. He uses it to manipulate people but something similar happens when you have a conversation with someone with memory problems. The conversation goes in strange directions that can play with your mind.

Although you see some gruesome sights on a neuro ward (like bits of heads missing) that never seemed to bother me, yet after engaging in conversation with two people who were cognitively impaired I found that shook me to the bone. I still find it very difficult to accept that brain injury can change you as a person. This is the sod that is brain injury, it is for this reason alone that it is like no other serious injury. Not just being changed through the result of experience but through alterations to your brain. Being someone who believes the soul is very separate from the body it starts to bring into question at what point the soul and ‘the person’ differ.

One of the patients near Anita was a young girl who had a husband and children who only seemed to visit occasionally. She had become very aggressive after her injury and constantly would try to get your attention. You could not help but feel incredibly sympathy for her condition yet because she was so difficult to deal with you could see the effect she had on people around her. The sympathy would eventually turn to contempt and although she could have been the nicest person in the world previously it would eventually lead to people hating her. This asks us all the question of how we relate to our fellow human beings.

Luckily Anita has avoided most cognitive problems, although that is not to say she has been unscathed (more on this in later posts). It is a fact that all of out there could sustain brain injury tomorrow and be a different person! People around us would suddenly have contempt rather than love for us. I found some facts about mental incapacity on the BBC website in a report today about ‘living wills‘:-

• Up to 2 million people in the UK are affected by lack of capacity
• More than 700,000 people currently suffer from dementia
• Ten to 15 per 100,000 suffer severe head injury each year
• An estimated 120,000 people suffer long-term effects of severe brain injury
• 1% of population suffer from schizophrenia at some time

Source: Department of Constitutional Affairs

During a visit to Wycome hospital yesterday, we discovered how badly it has been designed for wheelchair users. We first had to park, which was no easy feat as the few disabled spaces had had been taken. We need a large parking place or a proper disabled space to get in and out of the car into the wheelchair, so we ended up parking as best as we could. Anita got out of the car on a slope and we began the long push up hill. The pavements we had to use were not really wheelchair friendly, being too high to mount and descend. The hospital itself has very small lifts that are a tight squeeze for wheelchairs and there is no access to the canteen from the main entrance for wheelchair users.

Anita was told by the Dr`s that they were very happy with their operation on her lower eyelid, that it had healed very well, though she would continue to use some eye lubrication. We would need to visit them again in six months once her squint surgery was in hand.

She still has the dreaded MRSA bug! She was swabbed on Monday and we found out by telephone the test was positive! She had a negatve swab in the past fortnight, so was optimistic of another negative result, but this is not the case!!