Tom Ryan-Elliott

I personally have epilepsy and aphasia after a TBI (Traumatic Brain Injury) back in 2014. Epilepsy is a condition that affects the brain and can cause frequent seizures, where bursts of electrical activity interrupt the way the brain works.

Aphasia affects speech and language and is caused by damage to the left side of the brain, where how we talk is controlled.I spent a month in a Las Vegas hospital where they fought hard to keep me alive after I fell down 51 steps and cracked a large section of my skull. Only when I was stable enough could I fly back to England in a private air ambulance.

The doctors were forced to remove that section to ensure the brain wasn’t damaged even more.

I was moved to Charing Cross hospital, then Kingston hospital and eventually to St George’s Brain Injury rehab unit, where I spent 22 weeks learning to walk, talk and regain all the skills he had lost because of the brain injury. I also had an operation to replace the large section of my skull that had been missing with a titanium plate.

Since then, I have dealt with frequent seizures, which range from focal seizures, where I can’t speak to tonic-clonic seizures, where I fall to the floor and my whole body starts jerking.

I also suffer from aphasia as well which is a word-finding difficulty due to brain injury. This can make daily tasks really hard when I know what I want to say but the words just can’t get out of my mouth. I sometimes feel like people must think I’m an idiot.’