A Positive Outlook
by Caroline
I had it made. The boyfriend, the job, the new house, the friends. Then bam! It was like somebody pulled the rug out from under my feet and took it all away. 16/06/2006 - A lazy sunny Saturday afternoon, we decided to throw an impromptu barbeque and invite my parents, godparents and a couple of friends around to help us celebrate our new back garden. The evening was very relaxed and full of the usual stuff - father standing by the bbq doing his macho-chef cook off, boys talking football, girls talking clothes whilst the hostess (me!) ran around making sure everyone had a full glass and a plate to eat their dinner off.
As the evening drew on we moved into the kitchen, my boyfriend went off to bed early as he had to work the next day and I saw my parents and godparents off home. I was quite tired myself and at that stage, my two friends were still in the kitchen chatting and finishing off their drink. I went upstairs to check on my boyfriend and to close the bedroom windows. 3 weeks later I woke up in Beaumont ICU.
I knew I was in hospital but wasn't sure why. I couldn't talk or move but wasn't afraid (that must have been the morphine cocktail!). The last thing I remembered was waving my parents goodbye at the door, clearing up dinner plates and walking up the stairs to see Michael. What I didn't know was that I was trying to reach up and close a window at top of the stairs when I slipped and fell backwards, downwards. Michael awoke to a cracking noise, the full impact of my head hitting our wooden stairs and then again...ceramic hall tiles at the bottom. Blackout; loss of consciousness; fire brigade; ambulance; Beaumont emergency ICU.
"Have you any other children, Sir?"
"Yes, another daughter, she lives in England. Why?"
"Because you need to get her home asap on the next flight as she will most likely be going to a funeral in a few days."
Emergency surgery came next. Because I hit the back of my head so hard, the front part of my brain shot forward and bounced off my skull - causing massive swelling, haemorrhaging, bruising and ultimately, damage. Of course, the front part of the brain is also the part of the brain that makes you who you are - your personality, ability to understand, remember, and know what's right from wrong. The surgery involved removing the bi-frontal cranial sections of my skull to allow my brain room to expand and swell so as not to constrict the blood flow around brain cells. Imagine you draw a line from the start of your eyebrow, up your forehead, towards your crown and down towards the top of your ear. That's the piece of skull they removed from both sides of my head. The two skull segments were then placed back into my body somewhere between my right hip and ribs. A safe hiding place as they were going to be reinserted a few weeks/months later after my brain swelling went down. Sounds painful right? To be honest I didn't feel a thing and even when I was brought out of a coma and long after the morphine wore off, I still didn't really feel it. Maybe that's a white lie, I did feel it, but maybe I didn't fully understand it or realise how serious my injury was. Eitherway, I had no choice but to just get on with it. Despite the emergency blood transfusions, 30% chance of survival, incredible physical and emotional pain, chronic fatigue and muscle loos - I survived.
Yes, I was the doctors star patient - they labelled me "the miracle child" and strange to some as it may sound, the easiest part of my ABI were the physical injuries and being a permanent resident in hotel-Beaumont for 2 months. The hardest was to come over the next 12/15 months. The chronic tiredness, short term memory loss, indecisiveness, sensitivity to noise. It was all such an inconvenience to me. I genuinely thought that when they discharged me from Beaumont, I would go to my out-patient appointment at NRH, take a couple of weeks to rest and then go back to work....back to "normal". Boy! was I wrong. Bed was my new best friend.
"ABI tiredness" (as I call it) is difficult for many to understand. At the time, I found it hard to understand. Many months after being discharged, I was still zzz..zzzzz...zzzz... in Caroline-Land. I had good days and bad. Sometimes I would be plodding along, going about my day and then out of the blue it would strike. It was like stepping on a garden rake and suddenly, unexpectantly, the handle comes up, hits you the face and knocks you flat. I couldn't fight it, I had no choice, I just had to listen to my brain and sleep.
When my hair grew back over the scars and I went back to a normal body weight, people found it very hard to recognise that I was still living with a life-changing condition. She walks, talks, laughs, has no obvious changes - she's still the same, she's normal. I think that because not many people are aware of the condition nor how long recovery takes, they find it hard to understand. For me, friends that I thought would understand, didn't. I got blamed for "not making an effort" to go out with them or call them, they got bored of it. But I was lucky to have a couple of friends that really, fully understood my recovery and lifestyle changes that it brought. They listened to the subtle signs. Sometimes they knew, even just by looking at me, that I was struggling to hide my tiredness and that it was ok for me leave the restaurant early. They are the friends I will have for life.
Going back to work was the worst. Everyone told me I went back too early. But in hindsight, I'm glad I did. I gradually built up my days and within six months, I was back working a full week. But I would sleep all weekend. Work helped me feel like I was getting back to normal, getting my brain working again. It was the toughest aspect of my recovery and to say that it wasn't exactly smooth sailing is a grand understatement - I was bullied at work. I stayed there for a year, managed to do my postgraduate professional qualification and when the time was right, I applied for a new job.
Another 18 months on, I'm still working. I'm still living in the same house with my boyfriend. I am allowed drive again. I can meet friends for dinner and drinks. And despite the subtle changes and need for sleep, I've made a full recovery. No one fully understands what its like unless they have gone through it. And even at that, everyone's injury experience is as individual as them. But there is one common denominator which I believe helps us on our way - a positive outlook. Probably the hardest thing to have when everything has changed and your world feels like its crumbling down. But it does help and it does get better. There are certain things I can't change but I have now found them easier to live with.