Life after a brain injury teaches you a lot about yourself. But mainly it teaches you about the grind of illness and recovery.
A couple of weeks ago, I took a small stepladder into the back garden and climbed a few rungs to fix a light that had stopped working. It doesn’t sound much but I glowed with achievement for the rest of the day. Six months earlier, I would have been too unsteady to risk it, and tilting my head to do the repair would have brought on a surge of vertigo and violent sickness.
A year ago, I wouldn’t even have attempted it – or cared: I was lying on the sofa, intermittently vomiting and being pumped full of industrial-strength antibiotics to see off a mysterious brain infection that had nearly killed me.