Life-changing injuries

Overview

In this section you can find out about the experience of having a life-changing injury, by listening to people share their personal stories on film. Researchers talked to 38 people (including 5 carers) in their own homes in London. The kinds of injuries that people we spoke to had experienced included brain injury, spinal injury, limb loss, sensory loss and burns. Find out what people said about issues such as rehabilitation, mobility, benefits and thinking about the future. We hope you find the information helpful and reassuring.

Oliver Sacks introduces 'Life-Changing Injuries'

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I’m Oliver Sacks and I mostly see patients to whom something catastrophic has happened, either as a result of injury or disease. In a way, all of us live on a knife-edge and something can happen and we can be thrown, unexpectedly, into a catastrophic situation. But a catastrophe needn’t be a catastrophe. We are resilient creatures and we can learn to live with things and learn to do things in a different way and also the body and the brain and the mind have all sorts of ways of adapting. And one of the wonderful things about Healthtalkonline is that not only does it show a variety of conditions and a variety of people but it shows all of the different ways one can learn to live with things and live a good full life despite what one would have thought, was a catastrophe.

Life-changing injuries montage

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This section is from research by the University of Oxford.

Supported by:
The City Bridge Trust

Publication date: June 2013
Last updated: October 2015.