On Wednesday the 10^th February 2021 my life changed forever.

At about 09:25am having finished a night shift working as a police officer in London I was just a stone throw from my front door when I suffered an unexplained blackout/fall and I ended up lying in the road where I suffered a seizure and repeatedly banged my head against the road, none of this I remember but cctv from the incident gives me a reminder of how lucky I am to still be here today. As a result of the fall I received multiple fractures to my face, skull and the internal bones of my left ear, this was accompanied by a Traumatic Subarachnoid Haemorrhage. I was very fortunate that this all happened near to my house on a busy road rather than on an empty train carriage or quieter road on my walk home, if that had happened who knows how it would all have ended.
Almost a year on i am still having tests and assessments and was recently diagnosed with having epilepsy, so whether this was the cause or the fall or the effect of the injury perhaps I'll never know.
So where am I today? I know that I am lucky to be alive, that I am not laid up in a hospital bed in a vegetive state, that I am still physically able and I am not suffering severe mental problems, that my wife, children and family are not left mourning the loss of their husband/daddy with a headful of questions asking why? 
So, if that’s all ok then what? Well, I know that there are changes to me as a person physically and mentally. Physically I look well and relatively healthy but what can’t be seen is that for every second of my waking life I have tinnitus a constant high pitched piercing tone in my left ear this goes together with a muffled tone of external sounds. After the injury I had more a less no hearing in my left ear and in July 2021 I had surgery to reset the tiny fractured ear bones in to their correct position, this thankfully improved my hearing levels but the other issues remain. Another one of my senses that is affected is my smell and taste, ever since the injury occurred and my olfactory nerves were severed my smell and taste have been severely impacted. At the very beginning I had no taste or smell whatsoever (Anosmia), as the year has progressed this has evolved on to distortions of smell (parosmia) this means I can detect certain odours but the smell is very different and unpleasant to what it should be, for example coffee is now a foul toxic smell while bananas give a horrible fruity pungent odour. I also suffer with phantom smells (Phantosmia) for instance I wake in the middle of the night and have a horrible burning smell in my nose and mouth. I am currently awaiting to see an endocrinologist with regard to changes found in my hormone levels, apparently this isn’t uncommon with a brain injury, this all came about after I noticed an increase in night time urination, the results of this remain to be seen but what I do know is that once I wake from sleeping to go to toilet all the smells/taste and ear issues hit me and it is very hard to get back to sleep which then has a domino effect on my mood and fatigue (which has also been affected by the injury) and then sadly impacts on those around me who have to deal with a snappier, shorter fused, less understanding and less loving me.  
Having all of these above-mentioned things going on is something that I feel I have dealt with relatively well; I think I adjusted to the hearing issues as well as I possibly could and while having a meal will never be what it once was I haven’t let it stop me eating and given up on trying to enjoy food. But as I said there are however aspects of me that I am aware of and that I don’t like. From my perspective the changes that have occurred to me might seem to be relatively small but they also have a greater impact on everyone and everything around me. I don’t feel that I deal with stress and workloads very well anymore and my attention/concentration span has lessened, an example could be that if I give myself 3 things to do and this gets added to 4 then 5 I seem to become overwhelmed and don’t manage to complete the tasks at hand.
I also feel that I am not as good a husband or father as I once was, I am sure I had my failings before but now I am very much aware of the failings I have now. I am so much more easily annoyed/irritated by the slightest of things, be that a word or look on someone’s face, I know that I am less tolerant of things too and I am snappier with my children while my poor wife has had to deal with seeing the changes take place and my mood being up and down and with me being distant and detached. The way I am as a husband and father is something that is more important to me than anything and knowing that I am not doing a good job of that is the biggest hurt of all, one minute I can feel good and happy and in an instant things can change and I feel down and can’t see anyway of shifting that cloud hanging over me.  
It has taken almost a year to get any form of counselling and at last that has started, with this I do hope that I am able to learn coping mechanisms/strategies to help me deal with my life better and to become a better person than I am today.
The reason I have given such a thorough story is because 90 to 95% of it is unseen but all of it is as a result of my brain injury and when i was discharged from hospital I was given very little guidance of what to do, what to expect and most certainly my family were not prepared for what changes and challenges may be ahead. My family have had to find a way to adapt to me and really that shouldn't be the case, there should be more help and guidance for families when a loved one suffers a brain injury. I myself have had to push, research and explore so many avenues to try and get answers to all the questions i have in my head and this is where SameYou come in.

After a brain trauma, there simply isn't enough being done to support survivors leaving hospital. Back home is where the hard work, frustration, fear, and challenges really begin.

SameYou's purpose is for brain injury survivors to feel they haven't lost the person they were before. When your brain is injured, it is called an Acquired Brain Injury (ABI). ABI is primarily made up of stroke, brain tumour and traumatic brain injury (where sudden trauma to the brain is caused by external force such as a fall, sports concussion or road traffic accident).It's estimated that nearly 1 in 3 people will have an Acquired Brain Injury (ABI) at some point in their life. Reports say that more than 135 million worldwide are living with brain injury. This is an underestimate of the scale of the problem due to the lack of focus on brain injury.You will know someone with a brain injury at some point, and they will not receive the care they need. SameYou is working to develop better recovery treatments for survivors of brain injury and stroke. 

Thank you for taking time to read my story x