My Husband’s Brain Injury Changed Our Life Forever

Alex Wood

(Metro News) – It hit me on our 10-year anniversary. As I sat next to my husband Alex, in his wheelchair, feeding him pureed spoonfuls of the picnic lunch I had brought to celebrate the event, I realised that he would never surprise me with dinner at a restaurant again.

Nor would he write me a silly romantic poem about our marriage. A landslide of grief buried me as I realised that my Alex, the man he had been before the brain injury, would never come back.

Perhaps that’s why, as I was watching the news this week, my heart went out to Kate Garraway, whose husband Derek Draper is in hospital, fighting coronavirus. To be facing this type of uncertainty about your partner’s life is terrifying.

You have to let go of the future and conserve all the energy you have towards focusing on the present, and just hold yourself together best you can. CONTINUE