The importance of friends and family, the kindness of people and learning to let go

Following a nice Christmas at home again catching up with friends and family it was back to Inverness in the New Year.  I was really excited, as the kids were staying with me for New Year and we were all heading to the Northern Meeting Park for the Inverness New Year party.  The weather ended up being great and we had an awesome time and it was good to be back doing something normal with the kids.  They loved the show with Tide Lines headlining.  I am still in awe of how well the kids handled the situation considering their age.  It couldn’t have been easy to see your old man laid out and badly injured.  They all reacted in their own ways and their own time to the situation, but on the whole the maturity they showed for their age was remarkable.  I’d imagine it got “easier” as I regained consciousness and came out of ICU and then hospital but incredible none the less.  A real inspiration to me and makes me a proud Dad :)   

As we headed into January, I was still busy with NHS appointments, solicitors’ appointments, NHS physio, Private physio from Jenny at Keys Physio Therapy and massage that Claire at Inverness Sports Massage from before the accident, was incredibly happy to provide me for free.  Claire was also in to see me in Raigmore.   Another thing I have learnt on this journey is the kindness and generosity the vast majority of people have in them.  If you believed the media, social media and the news you would think the world is made up of primarily egotistical and selfish people.  Thankfully not true.  Those kinds of people do of course exist, but in my experience, they are in the minority.  I make a conscious effort to limit myself to how much I expose myself to most media outlets these days and focus on what I can affect and directly affects me.  I find this approach serves my mental wellbeing far more positively. 

Anyway, I digress! My work was continuing to monitor my recovery and I was accessing counselling through them.  This meant I travelled to Elgin on the train every few weeks to see a counsellor. This was important as I continued to come to terms with what had happened.  The recovering brain made this challenging, and the counselling helped to talk through how I was feeling and processing things.  Peggy, my counsellor was brilliant, and I always came away from those sessions more positive and optimistic about the future.   It was also a nice day out with a trip on the train to Elgin and back and almost made me feel like I was returning to some kind of normal. I managed to catch up with my friend Chris, who lives in Elgin on these trips too, which was great.   

I have always been interested in self-development and undertaken a number of leadership courses with past employers.  All this was getting put to good use in a new scenario.   Part of the process from my work was to support me and continually assess my readiness for work.  To that end I had an evaluation from an occupational therapist in early 2019.  It was becoming increasingly clear that it would be difficult for my work to provide a suitable environment to return to work that would support my rehabilitation. I had a very independent role with SE, with Jan my manager based in Kilmarnock.  Jan was incredibly supportive throughout the process and had come up to Inverness to see me in the ICU. The team also came up to Inverness for a team meeting that I attended in November 2018.  Well, I was at least physically there!  It was fabulous to see them.  The Occupational Therapy team in the NHS has already said an ideal scenario for any return would be a phased return, with my line manager in the same office.  In reality we were at the early stages of my recovery, so to a large extent had to monitor my progress and see how I progressed. 

As mentioned earlier I had become aware of the Oxygen Works prior to Christmas.  In late January I started a 4-week total immersion course.  This sees you having 20, 45min sessions at effectively a 30m depth in the tank.  I can honestly say I had a huge lift from this treatment and was immediately feeling that my brain was operating better.  There is still a lot of research to be done on oxygen therapy to give it medical validation.  All of the anecdotal evidence is however positive, and the fact that athletes are now using it to recover more quickly from injuries speaks volumes.  And to me in a very simplistic way, your cells need oxygen to function and repair, so getting it in a more concentrated fashion can’t be a bad thing :)

I was spending an inordinate amount of time with brain training games too, as advised by the ladies in the NHS Occupational Health team. The games were really helpful as I was effectively trying to get my brain operating normally again.   I managed to make a trip to see friends in Stirling at the end of January and we made it to Glasgow to see a band.  It was challenging but I managed it.  Given the impact of the brain injury on my sensory system I had to keep pushing myself to see where the boundaries were moving to as I recovered.  This had to be done within safe limits, so ensuring I could exit a situation easily if it was too much was important.  The trip to Glasgow went well and I caught up with another old Uni friend at the gig.   I was tired on the way back North, but it had gone well. 

The EU project that I had been managing before the accident rumbled on.  The partners from Scotland, the Basque country, Belgium, Sweden and Italy were asking for me.  Jan asked if I would record a wee message to be played at one of the meetings.  So, I got online and recorded a message in one take.  I did ok (I think).  But by pure coincidence, some recordings for the project that we had completed the month before the accident were finished around the same time. To see the two recordings together was another reminder to me on one hand how much I’d recovered, but also the impact the accident had had on me.  A long road lay ahead.

The process with Digby Brown started more formally and meetings with neurosurgeons, neuro psychologists and orthopaedic consultants were being organised to assess the impact of the accident and my recovery.  As one of my counsellors helped me understand.  You have to let go of a lot of things in your recovery and trust that the professionals know what they are doing and have your best interests at heart.  Which they do.  This is no small challenge to a project manager I can tell you!! But once you accept it and let the experts get on with their job, you do feel a lot more relaxed and less anxious.  As you soon begin to realise, none of this is personal and everyone is just following a process and doing their job.  And it all takes time!! Patience (another thing I’m not very good at as anyone that knows me will tell you) has to be adopted and completely committed too.  

The one bit of advice I didn’t take (I was still learning cos I knew better!!) was to keep on with a once a week oxygen therapy session.  After my initial boost in February I nose-dived in March and was properly depressed.  Perhaps even suicidal. Well I’m thankfully still here so it passed. More on that bit of the journey later.

Overall though I was genuinely gobsmacked at the amount of support I was getting from all sides. It meant so much to me and really helped at a time when I was still in shell shock and coming to terms with what had happened. But letting go, letting people help you, listening to the experts and taking responsibility for doing what they tell/suggest you do was really important looking back.