Recovery Journey Summary
I was a forty-five year old man from Newcastle-under-Lyme in central England, who in July 2015 worked as a freelance IT security consultant with London’s Metropolitan Police Service. While on a leisure ride from my home to Nantwich in Cheshire, I suffered a Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) following a collision between a car and my bicycle. I was flown by air ambulance to the nearest major trauma centre (Royal Stoke hospital), where neurosurgery relieved the pressure building up from a blood clot in my brain. I was assessed as Glasgow Coma Scale 3 (severe) during the first two weeks of a four-week comatose period. Upon emerging from my coma, I had locked-in syndrome for six days; I couldn’t speak or move my head, but I could move my eyes and hear spoken words.
I spent a further eight weeks in a specialist NHS rehabilitation centre (Haywood hospital), where I made significant progress in feeling more ‘normal’, before being discharged home.
Despite fantastic clinical support from the NHS, it was only after coming home that I understood I was now embarking on the real life recovery journey. I was incapable of doing much other than get through each day during the first nine months following discharge. This wasn’t due to any obvious clinical deficiencies, I simply had no confidence to engage myself to do stuff. I recognised that I needed a new purpose in life, so in June 2016 I began pursuing voluntary work opportunities. I started off in the local Midlands Air Ambulance charity shop, where I undertook the sorting of donated clothes. I then took up a befriending role with senior citizens via the Royal Voluntary Service. I progressed to become an ‘IT buddy’ at my local library, enabling me to leverage some of my IT skills. Of most importance, to myself, I felt useful again.
In July 2017, following a year of volunteering, I returned to professional work with the Met Police as an IT security consultant. The Met had pursued my availability since my period in the Haywood hospital in October 2015, during which time I didn’t feel capable of returning. My eventual acceptance was unexpected and unplanned for, so I was surprised and delighted to discover that I’d lost very little of my existing IT security skills. The biggest challenge I experienced in returning to professional work was my severe short-term memory limitations; however, I’d developed numerous note-taking coping strategies which I was able to rely upon.
In June 2018, I enthusiastically embarked upon a three-day training course to acquire new IT skills in Amazon Web Services (cloud technology). Despite immersing myself in the learning experience, I found that within seconds I lost retention of any new skills being taught. I worked on a variety of freelance IT security engagements leveraging my existing skills, before retiring in July 2019 after I’d scraped every last ounce out of my existing skillset.
Prior to my professional retirement, I became involved in voluntary work again. In 2018 I was engaged in charity work supporting the elderly with technology, which I expect to pursue indefinitely. I’ve also been involved in university / NHS research projects whose aims were to establish return-to-work programs for people who’d experienced traumatic injuries. In 2023, I acquired my dream volunteering role, in a befriending capacity on the complex care rehabilitation ward on the NHS Haywood hospital, where I’d made significant progress in my own early days of recovery.