Occupational Therapy Week 2020 - My OT Angels
Annie Ricketts fell from a horse, then fell through healthcare safety nets – but little did she know OT “angels” would be swooping in to catch her.
Global brain injury charity founder and Krysalis neurorehabilitation blogger, Anne Rickett’s uplifting celebration of OT Week 2020 here:
Occupational therapy lives inside of me to this very day. It isn’t like having an angel on your shoulder – it is like having one in your head.
It is over 20 years since I came off a giant-sized horse during a hack on a beautiful, bright Sunday morning. The temperature was ideal, the skies clear and blue, the breeze light.
But as we veered at a canter down a narrow rut, wild ponies make when they are roaming open heathland, my huge horse caught his feet and began to fall.
Time after time he would try to correct himself with a surge from the rear, only to fall again.
I had enough time to consider a flying dismount, but before I could, I was thrown into the air and came down ‘straight as an arrow’, landing on the top of my head.
I lost all self-awareness and experiential memory.
It is only now when I look back that I realise this event opened a whole new chapter in my life.
I couldn’t remember who or what I had been like before. I had nothing to which to compare the ‘different’ me.
I know a lot more about what it means to be human than I would ever have known if this event hadn’t happened to me. My perspectives have been vastly broadened.
Because of one human error after another, I wasn’t referred for neurological testing for four years.
But when, finally, I was referred, I remember my neuropsychologist remarking that the NHS had a term for what had happened to me: I had ‘fallen through the net’.
My mental response was, ‘Oh! There are other people like me.’
It has always been a paradox to me that I was able to think of others but unable to relate to myself.
Now that I understand more, I realise this was due to my total loss of self-awareness. I couldn’t even have told you whether I was kind or nasty.
I was like a four-year-old child living in a bubble of blissful ignorance, creating, but being unaware of, the chaos I was causing all around me all of the time.
My daughter came to my appointments with me and was able to act as a ‘collateral informant.’ There was very little that I could furnish on my own behalf.
To me, my world was peculiar, and I was oblivious to the world outside. I lived in my own confined space, unconscious and unmindful of any part of the prison, restricting my connections to real life.
I know, without any doubt or hesitation, that I wouldn’t be where I am now without the help of occupational therapy.
I recall my neuropsychologist saying another thing; that she believed I had only survived for this long because of my innate sense of humour.
And she wasn’t the only one to make this observation – my occupational therapist, Emma did too.
Many of my feelings are related to working with Emma, my first neurological occupational therapist. That she was the impetus for many of my insights into how my broken brain affected my daily living is an absolute.
The last time I had a series of OT sessions was only two years ago, and one of the first things Emma told me was that she had started a new file for me so that she could carry it.
I can picture her motioning the thickness of the file with her hands which were positioned around nine or ten inches apart.
It didn’t occur to me – as it does now - that this indicated a lot of work and time had been put into my rehabilitation. I only related to how carrying a thick and heavy file would be a nuisance for her.
My profound gratitude for the services of Emma and my local occupational therapy team remains at the very surface of my everyday conscious awareness.
There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t use a skill taught to me by my occupational therapy team. Some of these skills I’ve been practising for 15 years and have become part of my routine.
But I live in a world where ‘new’ or difficult -to-accomplish things still come up every day. To me, this shows how profoundly important these compensatory skills are.
Year-on-year, month-on-month, I develop another little nugget of understanding about how essential my occupational therapy sessions were.
Occupational therapy gave me the foundational tools I needed to be able to reclaim my sense of self. There can’t be anything more important in the universe than that!
Even now, all the way through writing this, I can hear my thinking voice saying to me, ‘Keep focused Annie, break it down Annie, don’t drift off Annie, start at the beginning Annie, work through the steps, sequence, what is my goal?’
As soon as I let that thinking voice switch off, I miss out words, or I repeat them, or I repeat what I have already said, or I type the completely wrong word or forget my point or why I am even doing what I’m doing and then my text ends up in the wrong order.
My gratitude for these tools runs so deeply that I could cry with joy.
Who would I be, how would my life be now, and what would my relationships be like if I hadn’t eventually found my way to this expert help?
To think of that breaks my heart, and this is why, precisely why, I am doing everything I can to support people following behind me.
The words I felt, ‘Oh! There are other people like me,’ didn’t stay in that moment. They became a part of me too.
Who I am today is a grander version of exactly who I was before. This has only been possible for me because I was given the expert help and support I needed to get me here.
I know exactly who I am now.
I may have lived for years not knowing one iota about myself but, I know, I only got ‘me’ back because of the patience, hard work, perseverance, and dedication of my occupational therapists.
I can’t tell you how OTs wield their magical tools into our lives, but I can tell you there’s nothing quite like meeting someone after a brain injury and finding that they understand exactly where and who you are, and treat you as if you are the original you.
Anne Ricketts is the founder of Global Brain Injury Awareness (GBIA); a not-for-profit community interest company she launched after sustaining a traumatic brain injury in July 2000. GBIA aims to inform and support people in need after brain injury. More here: https://www.globalbia.org/
Opinions and endorsements published by others on Krysalis Consultancy Ltd blogs or publications do not necessarily reflect the views of Krysalis Consultancy Ltd.
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