Camoni’s brain injury story – short version

One day in April 2005 my life changed forever. Before that, everything was going pretty well for me and my family. I was in charge of our house and the primary carer for our 2 children. I also worked one day per week doing all the admin for a small research company. I was very busy, always on the go, doing something. I rarely had 5 minutes for myself, between cleaning, washing, cooking, shopping, and driving the kids to and from school and kindergarten as well as extra curricular activities. Actually, at that stage my son was not 5 years old yet and he was only a kindy boy.

The day that my world collapse was like any other Wednesday. I threw myself out of bed at .10am to be ready to leave the house by 8.30am. I had breakfast, prepared my daughter’s lunchbox for school, and prepared my son’s bag for childcare. Wednesday was the day that I worked so he was in childcare that day. The kids and I left the house. We went to childcare first to drop my son. I then went to school with my daughter. After the bell rang and my girl got in her classroom and settled for the day, I walked back to my car and drove to work. I spent the. day there, doing the usual things. It was a normal day; except I had a terrible headache (had had one for 3 days). At around 3pm I left work and drove to school to collect my daughter at 3.15pm when the bell rang. I got there a bit early so I sat outside with other parents waiting for the bell to ring and the kids to come out. I hugged my daughter and picked her bag. We were crossing the oval together to get to my car and go and get my son from childcare when I suddenly collapsed, and so did my world.

That day, I suffered a ruptured severe cerebral aneurysm and had a huge bleed in my brain. I am very lucky it happened then and there as people around me reacted very quickly and within minutes I was in an ambulance on my way to the ER of the city’s main hospital. There, I had emergency surgery to clip the aneurysm and stop the bleeding. I was in a coma for about a week. I spent 5 weeks in hospital, and then was transferred to the brain injury rehab unit of a local rehab center, where I spent 5 months as an inpatient. That was followed by 7 months in another brain injury rehab center as an outpatient.

Even now 2 ½ years later my journey is not over.

I am a survivor yes, but above all I am a fighter as surviving was just the luck of the draw, whereas recovering, that’s where a fighting spirit is needed. Luckily, I have that. I will never surrender and I will get there.

Early on, when I was in the inpatient rehab center and very depressed, I started writing. First it was about the brain injury and the little I understood and how I felt. That was very sad so I quickly decided I had to find something else to write about and decided to write my biography. The brain injury is part of it, of course, but it’s much more than that. It’s called A Challenged Life and it is published on demand at www.trafford.com it’s not Shakespeare, but it’s my masterpiece and I’m proud of t. It comes with a CD containing over 600 of my pictures from my many travels around the world.

Without the brain injury, that book would not exist. I would never have had the time to write it. They say something good comes out of even the worst situation. A Challenged Life is what came out of my brain injury.

I have come a long way since that fateful day in April 2005 but my journey is not over. As I said before, I will never surrender and I will get there, eventually. I believe that we (people with tbi) don’t stop improving. The day I stop improving is the day that I die. I try to always focus on what I can do, not the other way round.

For a few months now I’ve been visiting regularly a brain injury chat room. Although tbi is like fingerprints and no 2 are the same, I think we can understand each others. Going there also helped me realize how lucky I am that my deficits and issues are only physical. I have no memory problems, overload, fatigue, slow processing, and so on. My brain works just as well as it ever did. I just wish it would talk to my left limbs.