Tim & Tom’s sister and one of Nick’s best buddies, Alice Collier, suffered a traumatic brain injury in June 2020, when she was knocked off her bike on a busy London road. Alice was 37 at the time and almost lost her life at the side of the road.  She spent the next ten days in a coma in the intensive care unit at Kings College Hospital in Brixton. She spent a further two and half months on a specialist neuro ward, having a shunt fitted and a cranioplasty to fit a titanium plate to her skull. This was followed by a further ten months in rehabilitation at brain injury clinics in Blackheath and Leatherhead.
Until someone that you know and love suffers from a traumatic brain injury, it is difficult to understand the impact that it can have on the life of the person who sustains the injury and on the lives of their family and friends.
Alice is having to re-learn all her life skills and it’s an incredibly long process. With a support network of family and friends and a great team of physical, cognitive, neuropsychology and speech/language therapists, Alice has made remarkable progress over the past two years. She does however face daily challenges with cognition, memory, fatigue and speech and has many more years of recovery ahead.
In the early days following Alice’s accident, Headway provided a massive source of information and reference that we were able to turn to, to understand what had happened to Alice and to start to appreciate the likely impacts on her life. We set up a page for Alice on the Headway website, to share her story and to provide a forum for friends and family to post messages and photos and to share memories.
Nick, Tim and Tom are running the 2022 London Marathon to raise awareness around brain injury and to support the fantastic work that Headway does, to help many of the 350,000 people that are admitted to hospital every year with an acquired brain injury. Whilst Tim has run the Sydney marathon, neither Nick or Tom have run a marathon before – so it’s going to be a slog! But we all thank you from the bottom of our hearts for digging deep and giving generously to this amazing cause.
Please follow the link below to watch a video that tracks Alice’s recovery so far.

https:youtu.be/vNYK3yjWiHY