Life-changing injuries

Yeah. You know, I’ve lost my sight and it’s not an option for me that I’m getting sight back; I know I’m not getting my sight back. So I can either throw in the towel and be miserable or I can get up, I can be motivated. I can do what makes me happy and I can still seize life. I can take every opportunity I need to take and you know, be happy where it’s possible for me to be happy. I mean it’s still life and I’m still going to have the usual ups and downs that life brings, but, you know, I’m alive and happy to be here. And I appreciate being alive. 

Stage return. I would certain encourage people not to return full-time straight away, maybe part-time, or if they lose their job, start volunteering. Or start finding a way back into the working world. Because it brings, it brings a whole new life to you. If you’re not stuck, if you’re stuck indoors seven days a week because of disability and not leaving the house, you’re probably depressed because you’re stuck indoors as much as you’re depressed because you’re disabled. So to have something to get your teeth back into is, is important, I think. So I found that although work can be quite demanding and quite hard, I think it’s, in many ways, something that I’m really glad I’m engaged in. Because everyone needs something to get out of bed for. And for me, I like my job, so I don’t mind getting out of bed for it. 

Julie: Photograph albums. Do a photo, do photos through the process, especially from the beginning, that they’ve got something visual to see because if you don’t have a memory of something and somebody’s telling you something it’s not the same as being able to visually look at something, and I think because they’re already coping with what’s happened to them, I’m glad we did the album. When ready, when Wesley was ready to look at it, it gave him a pictorial process I suppose.

No I think the biggest thing is to realise that you don’t have the same person that you had. You don’t even have, I know you shouldn’t have to say that, because you’ll know that, you can tell by the way things are working in the house, but from there then you have to say, all right. How am I going to make this marriage continue? What do I have to do without compromising what I know is right and what my spouse knew was right before? How do I make sure we don’t compromise that? But how do I talk to them so that we can work through this? And the thing is that with anybody, but especially a person with a brain injury, once you realise you’re wrong, whether you admit it or not, once you can realise you’re wrong, then you can start to make adjustments. And I think probably the biggest thing with a spouse is that, this is where we have to be extremely careful, is that for instance if I was a spouse and I knew I wasn’t speaking right, and I’d made a decision not to speak wrong again, that doesn’t mean I’m not going to speak wrong. But if I told you that I’m not going to speak wrong, and now I’ve spoke wrong, your immediate reaction is, or the spouse’s immediate reaction is, “Why’d you do that? You said you weren’t going to.” So we have to be careful because they can’t always do what they know they should do. And they may have even made a decision to do it and not told you. But then if you criticise them, in a harsh way, their immediate reaction is don’t tell me what to do. So you, you, you have to learn the balance of trying to, don’t compromise what you know is right but how do we talk to the person, and you can have some serious fights, and we did. But I believe because we made it a conscious decision when we first got married we would never be separated. 

Yeah, well health and social professionals. I think if they show like [name] and [name], these two ladies, as far as I am concerned they’re icons. Because they have a way in which they deal with people with brain injury or people with disability. They never make them feel worthless or useless. They make them feel valuable. I think if health professionals get that over to patients then I think they can, they will help those patients, they will help patients or people with these issues to really get back on a road to some form of recovery or whatever. 

Corrie: I think that’s true in a number of cases, they just seem to get very focused on what they need to achieve but sometimes they probably don’t even realise that their mannerisms and the way they’re speaking because they’ve come across this situation a hundred times before, actually the family members that are there, this is their first time and it’s a very emotional time and to, just someone’s tone of voice or tainted attitude or eye contact or communication can make a huge amount of difference in reassuring the family members, and just being honest and say look, you know, there’s not a lot else that we can do. We need to figure out a plan for going forwards, we need to make sure that his day to day cares are looked after. Don’t have any answers for you. Just having that bit of time. And it’s not, it’s not true in all cases, it’s just we came across a number of different doctors and nurses and therapists with the various hospitals Wesley was in and it was quite clear that the people that took the time to do that, reassured us an awful lot more than the people that may have given us exactly the same factual information but didn’t give that element of reassurance. And you don’t expect people to say, “Don’t worry, everything’s going to be absolutely fine.” You just want people to be a bit open and honest and you know, at the end of the day some of the health care professionals, they’ve got their own lives and they’ve got other things going on that are going to impact how they behave at work, but it’s keeping the focus on, I need to remember the fact that this person has got their son lying there and they’re worried sick about him. I need to make sure that I give the right message to reassure them and not to upset them any further. Which some people are fantastic at it and some people aren’t, and sometimes it’s not in people’s natures anyway [laughs].