30th October 2014

The end of October, all those orange pumpkins are beginning to show their Halloween faces, the month is drawing to its Autumnal ending and, here in Lewes, preparations are in full swing for next week’s famous Bonfire celebration. All these things remind me of something considerably less festive.  Six years ago today, I suffered a major brain haemorrhage which I was lucky enough to survive. I’m one of those lucky people known as a traumatic brain injury survivor. I’m not sure how significant six year anniversaries are, I’ve heard of the seven year itch and how, every seven years our bodies totally replaces itself, or so they say, and this gives me hope that in another year, most of the remnants of this condition will have disappeared. Certainly, this October, I feel that I am definitely better than this time last year and a number of the last minor remaining symptoms seem to be disappearing. I still have a bit of a stammer and some back pain but those random feelings of vacancy have gone as has my optical sensitivity to flashing lights. I looked back at what I’d written on these pages, when I first started these blogs, nearly six years ago and, if you’re interested in such things, it shows how there can be hope for brain trauma survivors and that patience is needed for what can be a long recovery period.

If any of you are suffering from this condition, I hope that my story is encouraging. You can follow some of the other blog entries about my recovery by typing  ‘brain haemorrhage’ into the search window on the right of this page.

31st December 2008

2008 has ended as quite a tough time for me – I came out of hospital on the 15th. November after 17 days in quite a serious state. The doctors, nurses and all the medical and auxiliary teams were outstandingly professional and overwhelmingly kind through what was quite a disturbing period in my life. So thanks to them yet again.

I will take a few months to recover but I have been told that I have made a pretty remarkable recovery and that I have been “bloody lucky”…one of the doctors put it down to my fitness due to obsessive martial arts training. Whatever it was, I am so happy to be out of hospital at last and, if you want the truth, I am actually also really grateful that I am still alive and not brain damaged or paralyzed.

It was a dramatic old time as apparently I had a serious brain haemorrhage followed by two brain seizures that were powerful enough to fracture my spine. Ouch and ouch a few times more. At first I either remember nothing or very little. I was on loads of drugs…. morphine in great quantities plus anti seizure tablets and, in fact, a daily total of over 20 tablets. I do not have to wear a back harness which is fantastic and I was allowed to practice my 66 move taichi on the ward; apparently the first time anyone has ever performed a complete martial arts form within the hospital.

If I am careful I should be able to use Taichi as part of my recovery treatment. I will not be able to do Kungfu for at least three months (and have to cancel my planned trip to China), will be unable to drive for at least 12 months and will not be able to drink alcohol until I stop taking anti-seizure medication which will go on until at least after the results of my next brain scan are analyzed which will be in about four weeks. I may, of course, be on these drugs permanently.

I will be able to do practically everything else though so, considering, apparently I nearly died, I am one lucky guy.

I tried to test out my brain whilst I was in hospital as at first I was seeing multiple images and having quite a lot of memory loss but I seem to have recovered from that. One of my self tests was writing poetry. This is something I wrote for the hospital staff which they were very happy to receive and which they have published in the hospital:

The hospital staff were great and so were so many friends who send their good wishes and visited me – I was genuinely moved by such an overwhelming number of such very kind and caring people. Very strange how you can look back on a life threatening and extremely painful time as an enhancing and really happy experience.

Yes I am taking it easy but it is so good to be back in the “real” world. Mostly, I feel better every day. So much so that I am allowed to go to my taichi classes again – so better than any physiotherapy. Well I think so any way! I actually had a group of nurses as my fans when I started practising Taichi on the ward; they said if I was staying any longer they would really like me to give them some lessons.

Aww! They were so sweet.I shall miss a lot of the flirting and joking with the staff there…they really became like friends even though it was also a pretty serious situation where none of us patients on the ward were guaranteed leaving it alive…. and in fact three died whilst I was there.

It really was a reality check…the bad was very bad and the good was great. No bullshit and no euphemisms – a lot to be said for that.

I have never felt so happy about being alive. or had so many plans for the future. If I can offer you all a word of advice, albeit a well-worn cliche, live your lives for the present too and plan to achieve your dreams in the foreseeable future ‘cos you never know when you might be just wiped off the face of the Earth. Believe me, that is not as depressing a thought as it sounds, in fact it has been an inspiration to me. Let the present and the future reflect who you really are and what, deep down, you would love to achieve. Don’t let those things wait.

Hopefully that could be an inspiration to all of us as we face the unknown in 2009.

26th October 2009

Patient cure thyself. I think that is the right cliche but I often get my cliches in a twist.

This sounds mad I know but today I begin the last week in October remembering that a year ago it was not only the last week in the month but nearly the last week in my life.

On the 30th. October I suffered an apparently major brain haemorrhage which came out of nowhere, left me unconscious and alone at home for six hours and which was then followed by one or probably two “grand mal” fits which led to a fractured spine and a period of semi-consciousness in hospital.

Well, a year on, against some medical expectations, I am still around and quite possibly heading towards a full recovery.

The truth will be discovered on the anniversary of that fateful day because on the 30th. this October I am having an MRI brain scan which may show that the haemorrhaged blood has at last left my brain.

I have bored you all with stories of my recovery here all year but, keep patience, it will all be over soon – I hope.

A year is a significant time span. We mark their passing at drunken parties, celebrate an increase in our experience of them with birthdays and watch nature as it obeys their rules as the seasons change. I know it is ridiculous in many ways but I am forced to mark this anniversary: the imminent arrival of a date that could have been my deathday.

It is, I am sure, a remnant of the trauma which most people suffer if they have had undergo sudden unexpected and life threatening illness. Those disjointed memories are my only grip on a period which was mostly about being in a coma and later coming to terms with that moment when the lights just simply went out.

During these often wet October days when the daylight gets shorter, it is easy to feel depressed. I have not avoided grim thoughts as I look back over this time. A doctor asked me when I came out of hospital if I needed counciling and I proudly said no – I guess I thought that counciling was for weaklings. Well, I don’t regret my decision except when I think how interesting it must be to have a serious one to one session with a psychologist.

I do think though that I have been counciling myself and this week, I have given myself some advice.  Don’t try to bury these irrational fears which have come flooding back at anniversary time, they are here for a reason. I have taken my own advice and embraced this often disturbing series of flashbacks.

Mixed with the gloom is a spirit of celebration because I have learnt a lot from my condition, become in many ways a new person who is now, with the passing of that anniversary, more than ready to begin a new life.

I think I have got here by looking difficult things in the face so I am not going to let these unexpectedly vivid images of a year ago come knocking me off my course. It is in this spirit that I say patient heal thyself.

You can follow some of the other blog entries about my recovery by typing  ‘brain haemorrhage’ into the search window on the right of this page.

The post Six years on and still alive after a major brain haemorrhage. appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

I’ve finally made it to the pages of my local newspaper, the Sussex Express, who have decided to run a “human interest” piece on the imminent publication of my novel, Stephen Dearsley’s Summer Of Love.  It’s always interesting to see what journalists home in on as their main tag. I’m now “the writer who cheated death.” Well so be it – actually it’s true.

I’m now officially excited about next month’s launch of the book. It comes out on 31st October, Halloween, the day after the fifth anniversary of the brain haemorrhage that nearly cheated me of my life. I’m doubly glad that I have a new and much jollier anniversary to celebrate in late October.

So thanks, Sussex Express, for taking an interest. Dare I go out though? Will I be stopped everywhere I go in Lewes today? I’ll let you all know.

The post I’m the “writer who cheated death” – if you don’t believe me buy today’s Sussex Express. appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

I met someone in town yesterday afternoon and he was amazed to see me. We hadn’t met since the bad old days of my early months of recuperation after my brain haemorrhage. He was genuinely surprized that I was looking not just better but well – bouncing was the word he used.

Now people often say you look better and it is usually a form of sympathy. You know, cheer him up and if I say he looks better we might get to talk about how he nearly died and all that grisly stuff. You know that one, you can see the curiosity written all over their faces.

People always used to say you look well when you put on weight too. Looking well was looking fat, in the days when the “First World” also had starvation and incurable outbreaks of tuberculosis. Nowadays, it is only a senior generation who thinks well means over-weight.

Sudden loss of weight is still a worrying symptom but looking fat is most definitely not a sign of health.

I lost a lot of weight immediately after my little incident and then, over a period of two years had to be careful not to raise my heart-rate and, consequently, along with the broken back that was the unfortunate side-effect of my haemorrhage, I was forced to lead a life for a bit like that of your average couch potato. consequently I began to look “well.”

If you have a serious illness that demands a long, slow and boring recovery period, you begin to look for signs of feeling better from day one. After year one, it was becoming a bit of a drag, after year two, I thought that maybe some symptoms would last forever. Feeling well can depend so much on what you expect. It is like replacing seriously out-of-date spectacles (eyeglasses) and realizing how much you had forgotten would you should really be able to see.

Well as we reach high Summer with Autumn peeping over the horizon, I have begun to think of 30th. October, the third anniversary of my brain haemorrhage. My neurologist discharged me into the hands of my GP last December with hopeful words of a more or less full recovery. My remaining symptoms, she said, could gradually disappear over the next few years but I should refrain from driving until I am sure that those “absences,” which, in her opinion, are vestigial seizures, finally disappear. She was hopeful that this could happen as my brain finally reroutes round the damaged bits in my left frontal lobe. This could also be true, if I remember to practice my speech therapy exercises, with the remaining neurological stammer which is now rarely noticed by other people but which is an annoyance when you can’t always say words you want to use.

These symptoms are hardly enough to invoke mass sympathy when the other outcome of my case could have been death so I am not only not complaining but I haven’t been that worried about the possibility that these cerebral injuries will remain as signs of the brain damage that occurred that day nearly three years ago.

After discharge, I was allowed to raise my heart-rate again and I have been working on getting back to “full” fitness ever since with a mixture of martial arts practice and visits to the gym. Thanks are due here to my ever patient and inspiring Kungfu instructor Neil and my sympathetically focused doctor-sponsored personal trainer, Ricardo.

Meeting that man, James, in town has confirmed something. His furrowed brow when he asked how I had been, said a lot just as his rather touchingly pleased expression showed that he really did see a change in me.

Something has indeed changed within the last two months. I haven’t been having those “absences” and, more than that, I am going through one of those new pair of spectacles moments. I think I had forgotten what feeling well really feels like and maybe you never do remember until it happens. I do believe that this is what I am feeling now. I may still stumble over a few words but, Hell, I feel great. You know, I might even forget that anniversary this year.

Whenever I think of feeling better though, I remember the movingly tragic ending to Verdi’s sublime opera La Traviata. Violetta is dying of tuberculosis but she is finally united with her lover and, in the moments before her death, she think she is miraculously cured and that life is returning to her. It isn’t of course, well this is Verdi folks. She is feeling the power of love. We all have to go some time or another but to go feeling the joy of life is the best that we can hope for.  Her final words, and interpret them as you wish, are “O Gioia!” – Oh Joy!

Here is the wonderful Mirella Freni as poor Violetta, the lady of the camelias:

The post I feel great but feeling better is not always easy to analyse when you have had a brain haemorrhage. appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.