On this day 10th of January 2019, I had a bleed on my brain. I spent several days in hospital during which I was diagnosed with Aphasia. For the rest of the year I started to rebuild my life.
My work stopped on that day. Initially I couldn’t speak properly and I was unable to read or write. Over time and with much help from my wife and speech therapists, I got my speech, my reading and writing back on track. Even now I find reading and writing difficult particularly if I’m tired and I still get words mixed up, but I’m a lot better.
During that first year, I met a number of people with Aphasia and people who look after them and I vowed to do as much as I could to raise the awareness of Aphasia. So over the next two years I developed the idea of making a documentary about Aphasia and some of the people who are affected by it.
In order to do this properly I needed some funding create to help pay people to work on the documentary. I did some fundraising and got some help from the Tavistock Trust. After that, I raised more funding through Just Giving and Kickstarter to finish the documentary. This also helped to someone to help with the PR to build interest in it before the film was finished in September 2022.
The film was released as planned, and currently I am showing it to people in the health industry as a training resource: it recently has been successfully presented to Carers UK.
So here I am four years later and I’m still wanting to put the word out about Aphasia so if you read this, please pass it on to as many people as you can so that we can keep the interest going.