This is one tragic example of how an acquired head injury can dramatically change your life for ever.  Felicity Aston, the polar adventurer and Antarctica scientist, has described the terrible events which followed after her younger brother Spencer, now 21, was in a car crash while at grammar school and predicted good GCSE grades.

This is an extract from her moving account in yesterday’s The Sunday Times magazine:

The Spencer we have now is just as kind and lovely, but he’s different. At the time we were so grateful he’d survived, there was no time to grieve for the person who’d been lost. Spencer had been in a car with some older boys from school; the driver lost control on a corner and collided with another car.

No one was drunk, they all had their seat belts on, but the result was that the front passenger died and Spencer and his friend suffered serious brain injuries. I remember Mum and I walking into A&E in the middle of the night and seeing blood everywhere, then being shown Spencer, who didn’t have a scratch on him, yet he’d scored three on the Glasgow Coma Scale — as low as you get before you’re pronounced dead.

The urge to shake him and say “Wake up!” was overwhelming. We were told there was no brain activity at all. Everyone was preparing us to switch the machines off, but then, after about 24 hours, one of the nurses noticed a slight reaction in one of his pupils and suddenly it was “He may not recognise you when he comes round”. And we were saying: “You mean he’s coming round?”

But that initial burst of optimism didn’t last long. His brain scan was filled with black areas which were haemorrhages — he’d completely destroyed his thalamus. I didn’t leave the hospital at all for the first week. Mum didn’t come home for about a month. We willed him to breathe unaided, to swallow, to lift a finger.

He was given a board with a button to press for Yes or No, and he was so frustrated he kept banging this board: “No! No! No!” All of us thought: “Why Spencer?” He was the apple of everybody’s eye, the focus of so much love. It was more than “Why couldn’t it be me?” It felt so unfair. I’d done stupid things and taken all kinds of risks, but he’d never done anything wrong.

Considering the initial prognosis was that Spencer would remain in a vegetative state for the rest of his life, everyone’s been amazed at his progress. He still has his sense of humour, but his sense of what is or isn’t appropriate has gone. If you imagine every one of your thoughts or feelings being visible on your face, or suddenly blurted out, that’s Spencer.

Because he’s a young man, and he’s very large and direct, people think he’s drunk, and they find him intimidating. We’ve had a stream of eminent specialists here and Spencer will decide within five minutes if he’s going to co-operate or not. If they are patronising he won’t give them the time of day. I make clear to him where the lines are. If he’s being rude to me I’ll tell him. Sometimes he’ll understand and apologise; sometimes he won’t. Because he has a brain injury people tend to be too nicey-nicey with him and that doesn’t do him any good.

This is one reason why I find my work as chair of trustees with Headway Cambridgeshire so rewarding and important; it’s the fact that this kind of accident can happen to anyone without any notice. It can be the result of a fall, an attack or even a stroke or medical complication.

We were fortunate in attracting some very positive responses to my recent appeal for new trustees and I will be meeting some of them this evening.  It’s not too late to apply, so please let me know if you are interested. My press release has also been published on Ann Hawkins’ website; she is the networking queen of East Anglia and has all the right contacts 🙂

Pic credit: By Dirk Lindner, Sunday Times.