Brain injury education

One of the most important thing that you do when you go to Headway is the Brain Injury Education course. They aim for you to be the expert in your brain injury. Over the last year I have been taught everything you want to know about brain injury. The anatomy of the brain, what can cause brain injury and the consequences of having one. This is a brilliant course as it has taught me so much, all the things that I didn’t know I needed to learn about the brain. When I started the year after my brain injury I was really struggling with the realisation that my life had changed and would be very different. The brain injury course helped me to understand and realise this. I guess in the first year I was still in the rehabilitation stage of my recovery and my hands were being held. This allowed them to be let go as I gradually realised that my brain was injured. What is a brain injury is probably the thing that people would say. My uncle had a stroke years ago but I had no knowledge of what a brain injury is. I guess you only really need to know if your life is impacted about it. The brain injury education course starts out quite easy but as the weeks go on you learn about all the problems that it may cause. Things that were probably happening to me and probably other people realised, but weren’t apparent to me. Such as memory problems, fatigue and the lack of insight. But when I started learning about them I did think to myself that I do have all of these problems. The brain injury education course has not just helped me to realise that I have many of these problems but to also show me that it is ‘normal’ to have them. But it has also taught me that some of these problems do not always get better. You have to adjust your life to work round them and learn new skills to help you ‘survive’ day to day life. The brain injury education course has also made me realise that although I spent a year saying’ I am recovering from a brain injury’, I now realise you don’t recover from a brain injury you just have to live with it.