Life-changing injuries

My main recollection after that is of waking up every morning to a group of medics and the doctor would be saying to me – I was quite drugged up and still in a lot of pain – and they started saying to me, “Well, Mr Black, you can either have a reconstruction, or an amputation. It’s your choice.” And I just remember saying, “Don’t be stupid, of course I want a reconstruction.” But as the days drifted by, it became increasingly apparent to me. And this is another lesson for anybody – somehow get some proper advice. I do feel that I need a one-to-one consultation with a doctor. Instead of talking to a group of people, first thing in the morning in a crowded ward.

 

I was absolutely very depressed, and I owe a lot to my friends and particularly my son for trying to cheer me up.

 

 

Well talked to me basically. Talked to me and came to see me. But the problem is with this, is that what I really needed was somebody to tell me what to do, what to say to this question, “Would you like a reconstruction or do you require an amputation, Mr Black? It’s your choice.” And I think I would certainly advise anybody else in that situation to insist that you go and see the doctor on their own, in an office, not surrounded by lots of other people, confidentially and just go through the options, which I didn’t do. 

 

I think the reality is the doctors know better than you what they should do, particularly at a world class hospital like [hospital name]. But I think they had this, probably quite correctly, this culture – can I call it that? – Of offering you a choice. This word ‘choice’. I’m very cynical of the word ‘choice’, because you’re not informed enough to make a choice unless you are of extremely clear mind and not bursting with pain and all the rest of it. So I would have welcomed somebody just saying to me, “Look mate, you ain’t got no option, you’ve got to have an amputation”. And in the end it was a very good friend of mine, a woman, who said, quite forcefully, “Look Nick, the doctors are saying to you you’ve got to have an amputation, that’s what they’re saying between the lines. So just get on with it. And so that’s what I did, thanks to her advice. 

 

Information, I want to get information. I found the magazine that I happened to pick up very informative. There was mention of you. I think that was on the front cover. I’ve just have a package of stuff actually delivered from the Limbless Association, because I joined. I paid £200 to be a life member. I thought, “Accept it, Black. You’re limbless, mate. Just do it”. So rather than pay ten quid a year I did the life one.

 

And in this month’s edition were four very interesting things. There was you, there was an article about Blatchford’s, which is the limb fitting company that does the limb fitting, you know, it’s a contract deal with the NHS you know, but there was an article about Blatchford’s that I found really interesting. It’s a British Company, for once they are actually doing things that are made in Britain. It’s quite an informative magazine, much more so than the others, which are called things like Disabled and something else and they’re full of, they’re quite good, but, you know, buy a Volkswagen and get your wheelchair in the back – that sort of article.

 

Myself, personally I’m glad I’ve done it the way that I have. Because I think if you have a manual there to say, right you’re supposed to do this and you’re supposed to do that. I think things wouldn’t be quite so natural and you would be thinking all the time, oh but the manual says this, so I mustn’t do this, I must do that. Yeah, it’s nice to have guidelines. And it’s nice to have little suggestions of what to do. But I think with brain injury that, I mean everybody is so individual, in regards as how bad the brain injury is, and then what the brain injury has left them with, whether it’s physical or anything like that. So I think that, basically, it’s just one big learning curve. Everybody, you know, everybody’s brain injury’s different. You can have two people who’ve got their brain injury exactly the same way – say, for instance they’ve both got it in a car crash, and they now have brain injury – but they can have completely different lives, live their lives totally different. Perhaps their carers are different in the way they do things. So, yeah, I think is very individual to your own case the way you live your life, the way you deal with it. And the way the carers deal with it yeah. It’s very individual.

I don’t think that there is an understanding about what brain injury means for many people. I’m sure there isn’t. And you either can work or you can’t, can’t you? And it’s very black and white. In a way, it’s much easier to deal with people who are physically disabled than who’ve had brain injury and as an aside I can see this with my daughter. If you’ve only got one arm it’s quite clear that what you need to do is to modify things to accommodate that. But if you have brain injury, what does that actually mean? What have we got to do? People don’t understand. And because it’s different for everybody, you can’t necessarily say, well here’s a sheet of things that we have to do. I can quite see that’s why it was a difficulty for my previous employers. Even though I had been there for 33 years.

 

 

I’d never heard of it before. I had no idea what it was or how it might affect you. And I don’t think, if anything, my immediate reaction if you talked about brain injury was about somebody who was a little bit stupid. My terrible shorthand. I think that was probably one of my greatest concerns about recovering from brain injury.