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Hi, My name's Gilly.
I want to tell you about a car accident I had
Just over five years now, and
unfortunately, I had severe brain injury...
but I'm doing pretty well, so I'll just go through it with you
at the end of a long day, we were driving back in the car
and we stopped at traffic lights. I was sleeping.
I was asleep in the back of the car, lying down.
my head to the side,
and a drug addict had stolen a car
and drove into us at 70 miles an hour.
It was just, wrong place, wrong time.
but we were very lucky, all three of us to get out of it in one piece.
Came home after three weeks
really wasn't very much good to anybody!
slept an awful lot of the time. Got very tired.
Slowly, I suppose, started coming round.
It took a while for me to understand that I really wasn't like other adults
and I was more child-like
and all of a sudden I'm thinking. Ok, yes, I'm having to start again
and your emotions, your character, your whole makeup, has to...
to grow up again.
Talking about emotions
It's very hard to know if you have...
the same emotion or the depth of emotion
that I should have or I might have had before.
Very early on,
I had overwhelming despair,
fear
completely overtakes you.
and the doctor said it was perfectly normal, because
it was something that the brain hadn't come to
up until then.
and all of a sudden, this new thing it hits you like...
an absolute train!
It did put me down and I just couldn't deal with the
immense emotions that came over me.
I lost, for quite a long time,
all my memory, and
my life really started about every ten minutes.
I couldn't really think further than ten minutes back.
Closer to the accident
I was, and still am, more vague about.
So the two or three years before the accident,
I'm still terribly vague about.
The further back you go, the more I understand.
The more I remember.
Many people come up to you and for quite a while...
you know, would sort of say, Gilly How are you doing?
and I would look at them blankly and wouldn't know
who they were.
People I knew really quite well.
For me it was like, somebody took your
memory bank, your filing cabinets, and
threw them up in the air, into the wind.
and they're somewhere. Five years on, I'm still
catching things out of the clouds and trying
to put them together.
When it happens, and you say to people
that you've lost your memory or had amnesia
they immediately say "ooh, how much did you forget?"
or "what type of thing did you forget?"
..well you don't really know because you've forgotten it!
and it's an ongoing problem.
inasmuch as you have to live life day by day
just working things through.
you come up with, still come up with things that you don't quite understand.
and have to work them out as you go along.
I still have to have down time.
every day.
my head starts saying: come on, you've got to sit down, have a rest
and my concentration gets worse.
and I start to limp.
The limp shows me quicker than anything that I
that I really have to stop.
Our brains are so complex
so clever,
that an injury affects us all
in completely different ways.
The good thing about it is that
brains seem to be pretty good at
finding ways around just about any experience
Because, it's very much living for the moment.
You don't have a lot of past to think about
you haven't got enough time to think about
what's going to happen in the future,
You're dealing with Now.
So, you just do it.
It does give you a far greater insight
into life.
It's in a curious way. It does make you
appreciate life more.
I do, I think