This is one I have been intending to write, and put off writing , for years.
The account of my brain haemorrhage in 1991.
I have been intending to write it down as a catharsis for myself, a purging of a memory which is very painful, also as perhaps a help for people who have gone through a similar episode and who would be helped by discovering that it is possible to get out the other side.
I have been putting it off for some of the reasons above but also because it is much more difficult to write about a painful experience than it is about a joyful one.
I have been spurred to put this together by knowing that there is a friend of a friend out there going through much the same experiences as I did, after a brain trauma, in the hope that it might help, and indicate that there is a light at the end of the tunnel.

On the 12th of March 1991, easy to remember the date, the day before my birthday, I got a headache.
I am a person fairly used to headaches having had a history of occasional migraines, often, but not always, post red wine, which would lock me in bed, in the dark, a bit of a gibbering wreck for a few hours until I regained humanity.
I knew fairly immediately that this was not one of those.
It was of an intensity that instantly let me know that this is no migraine.
If anyone of you has ever experienced that sharp intense but quickly transient pain when ice hits a nerve which lights up in the brain for a few seconds, that’s it but in my case there was no let up.
After some time (I have absolutely no idea how long, it felt like days) I rang my doctor, he heard my terror and promised to get to me as soon as he could.
Then Sile came home from school and the next thing I can remember I was being wheeled in a wheel chair into A&E in the hospital.
(The remembrance thing is important, from that moment for the next about three months there are large parts of my life which I have totally forgotten and have never come back, total amnesia in fact)
I can remember being wheeled into the hospital because of the relief I could feel, even through the pain, that I was at last going to be properly taken care of.

The next about four days are a complete blank.
Apparently I was rushed by ambulance to the University Hospital in Cork, a nurse (who has since become a friend) had to accompany me to Cork in the ambulance, she was supposed to talk to me, to keep me out of unconsciousness on the way down , she has since told me that from my condition she was sure I wouldn’t last to Cork.

My next memories are of being in the hospital, being out of pain, of being aware that people who saw me and talked to me were having difficulty holding back tears.
I had no understanding really of what happened.

But then in a very quick time I started to give an impression of being (nearly) normal.

A brief medical word.
What I had had was in fact an aneurysm, this meant that the bleed went into another blood vessel rather than into the brain itself (I think)
This meant that despite two brain scans they couldn’t find the source of the bleed and so they were not able to repair the damage with an operation-not necessarily a bad thing, the operation often produced more trauma than the original bleed.

I need hardly tell you that brain haemorrhages are often fatal, I was one of the lucky ones.

After about a week in Cork the surgeon took me and Sile aside, told us we could go home , that I would be fine, and then gave me my entire post traumatic counselling in one sentence “I wouldn’t take up squash!”

Two weeks later I was cooking in the restaurant, and doing this, apparently, in just the same way as I did before.

My memories of the time, and they are very few, was that I was tired all the time and depressed but life wasn’t too bad.

Sile was incredible.

Let me give you a couple of examples.

About a year after I found some mouthwash in the bathroom cabinet, I asked her what this was for, told me that that was to counteract the effects of the medication I was on to stop me having Epileptic fits.
Apparently I had suffered from one of these after the haemorrhage
but as it hadn’t recurred I had, after a while, been taken off the medication.
I have no memory of any of this.
On another evening apparently I got extremely agitated about the way the books were arranged in the bookcase and Sile had to spent the evening re-arranging them to soothe me.
(She called the doctor after this and he told her this was “par for the course”)

About a month after I came out of the hospital I was organised to bring my daughter Deirdre to the hospital in Cork for a minor dental procedure. It speaks volumes for my appearance of normality that no one doubted my ability to do this. (I discovered much later that I was certainly not insured in the car, nor would be until six months after the episode-ignorance in this case was bliss!)
On the way back in the car I had one of my scariest moments.
I suddenly totally forgot how to drive.
I knew intellectually exactly how to do it, but all my automatic pilot skills were gone.
I was about twenty miles from home when this happened and totally rational.
I crawled home on back roads, crunching gears and rarely going over twenty miles an hour.
The next time I got back into the car, just as mysteriously my skills had returned.

We shut the restaurant for a fortnight at Easter and went to stay with my brother in his new house in Schull.
All of this holiday has been completely forgotten.
A few years later I made a pilgrimage to Schull to see if seeing the house would bring it back to me, but no, it was as if I was seeing it for the first time.
At around this time I had another incident which upset me, and this one I can remember perfectly.
I always have done crosswords and so I sat down one Sunday morning and decided to do one of my favourites the cryptic, but not too difficult, Everyman in the Observer.
I ended up, about twenty minutes later, in tears.
The crossword was totally Greek to me, for the first time I began to harbour the thought that I was losing my intellect, that this illness was going to reduce me to a brainless idiot.

But then something told me that this just wasn’t the case.
I knew that my brain felt as agile, if more easily tired, than before.
I had a memory of reading an article about Roald Dahl and his work with his wife the actress Patricia Neil.
He had absolutely refused to believe that she was permanently disabled by a stroke and, knowing that we only ever exercise a small part of our brain, that she could relearn her skills all over just by working on them.
For over a year he worked on her constantly, teaching her to relearn her lost skills in a different part of her brain.
He was proved right and she made a marvellous recovery.

So every week I kept the solution from the crossword and then meticulously worked the solution back with the previous weeks clues.

Bingo!
Within about three months I was doing the crossword with as much ease as before.

(I was afterwards told by a London based brain consultant that I had fallen exactly on an exercise they used there for post traumatic brain recovery, they even used crosswords!)
I was consequently able to relearn some forgotten skills by this method but mainly, things just returned to normal slowly in their own time.

Within about six months I could operate more or less as normal.
I still felt that I was living with a severe handicap, rather like a race horse carrying weights.
I could do what I used to do before but it was certainly more effort.
I found this very depressing because it didn’t seem to be getting any easier.
Then I had a very lucky encounter.

A customer, a friend in the restaurant, told me that their companion had also had a haemorrhage years before.
I fell upon this woman and said “When did you feel totally back to normal again ?”
Her answer was, for me, enormously reassuring, she said that, whereas thing got slowly better all the time she reckoned it too five years to get totally back to normal.
To me that meant another four years of healing and improvement to look foreword to.
I can still remember the relief and joy I felt at that moment.

And yes, she was absolutely correct.
Five years later I was strong and recovered again.

Around that time I was at a parent teacher meeting at my daughters secondary school.
I found myself sitting next to an acquaintance, a parent of a friend of my daughter.
She looked at me quizzically and said,
“You were sick there a while ago weren’t you, are you the full shilling yet? ”

She shocked me a bit I must confess, by the directness of her question but then she had asked me no more than I ask myself.

The answer is that yes I suppose I am the full shilling but there are some differences.

My reading and watching of TV habits have changed, I can no longer bear to waste time reading or watching stuff that doesn’t strike me as believable.
In fact I am much happier with non-fiction and documentaries.

I now panic, yes full panic, hyperventilation and pounding heart, sometimes when I get a headache.
The strangest of these happened exactly ten years after the first attack, practically to the minute.
I already wrote about this here.
The twentieth anniversary will be in just three years time but I intend to be ready for it.

I think I get less upset about stuff, all minor incidents of annoyance remain minor, once you have experienced major trauma .
The fact is that it has now become a part of my life history, it is one of those things that has made me what I am today and I no longer resent it.

I have a feeling that my life would have been much easier if someone had explained to me that recovery was both possible and slow.
This is the main reason why I have written this piece.