My road crash brain injury taught me the meaning of TRUE LOVE
TV presenter Sheena McDonald’s life changed in an instant when she was hit by a police van. The story of her recovery — and the support of her husband — is testament to the formidable power of the human spirit
I‘
dOn’T know why he didn’t leave me,’ says former Channel 4 news presenter Sheena Mcdonald, 66, smiling fondly at her husband of 13 years, Allan Little, 60, a former foreign correspondent for the BBC. ‘You could have just walked away.’
Seeing them together, teasing and bickering over the cryptic crossword in the cosy edinburgh members’ club where we meet, they look the picture of a contented midlife marriage.
But as a couple they have been tested far more than most.
Twenty years ago, on February 26, 1999, just before midnight, Sheena was knocked down by a police van driving on the wrong side of the road in London’s Islington, near the couple’s home. She was left in a coma, with massive head injuries.
It was a terrible reversal for the brilliant 44-year-old broadcast journalist, who at the time was on national radio or Tv almost every night — immaculately madeup, presenting Channel 4 news and Right To Reply, introducing opera from Glyndebourne, hosting discussions for the BBC on politics and art. She was at the peak of her career, living in London, visiting her then boyfriend Allan for weekends wherever the BBC had sent him, be it Sarajevo, South Africa or Russia.
At the time of the accident they had been an item for only five years. They had never lived together and led quite separate, independent lives. ‘We lived that fast, exciting, on-the-go life,’ says Allan.
In their new book, Rebuilding Life After Brain Injury: dreamtalk, which they cowrote with Sheena’s clinical neuro-psychologist Gail Robinson, Sheena admits that a year before the accident, she had asked Allan for some commitment.
‘I guess I’m just an old bachelor. A moody selfish old bachelor,’ had been his rebuttal. ‘Bear with me.’
When the accident happened — Sheena still prefers to call it ‘the injury’: ‘driving on the wrong side of the road is not an accident. You know you are doing it’ — Allan was working as the BBC’s chief correspondent in Moscow.
He flew through the night not knowing if she would survive or have irreparable brain damage. When he got to the intensive care unit at University College Hospital in London, Sheena was in a coma and on a ventilator ‘in a cage of wires and tubes’. She had a major facial fracture, running from above her eye, through the cheek and into the upper jaw.
Her head had swelled to the size and colour of a blue pumpkin, her eye was somewhere in the middle of her face. The left side of her head — where, it’s thought, the van’s wing mirror hit her with tremendous force — was a mess of tissue and bone. Allan only recognised her by her feet and hairline.
HeAnd her family kept a bedside vigil. ‘The damage to my brain had been caused by my head being hit, forcing my brain to ricochet inside my skull,’ says Sheena today.
doctors did not offer any kind of long-term prognosis of recovery. ‘For a while I lost myself. I was no longer Sheena,’ she adds simply.
When, after four days, she gradually began to regain consciousness, she was suffering from almost total memory loss (posttraumatic amnesia) and only able to speak nonsense. For weeks she existed in ‘ a sort of in-between state between consciousness and unconsciousness’, babbling in what Allan calls ‘dreamtalk’.
She didn’t recognise Allan, assuming he was a doctor or childhood sweetheart. She couldn’t remember what she had looked like, or that she had been a well-known broadcaster.
Having forgotten how to swallow, she was kept alive via a nasal feeding tube and lost 30lb.
Her recollection of the 15 years before the accident was at first non- existent. She had no idea Princess diana, whom she had met, had died. When Allan gently told her, she remarked thoughtfully: ‘You know I don’t think that’s widely known.’ Allan was torn between laughing and celebrating her new-found curiosity.
He took six months off work and, in April 1999, moved them back to their native Scotland. First Sheena was in hospital in edinburgh, close to her parents, then they moved into a friend’s cottage in east Lothian.
Life was calmer in Scotland, but he couldn’t leave her alone in the house for a minute in case she fell or choked. Mcdonald describes his care and determination as crucial to her recovery.
‘This remarkable man stood by me and helped me to piece my battered brain together.’
To improve her word skills and concentration, he played hundreds of games of Scrabble and Boggle with her and learned to do crosswords — before her injury, Sheena was a crossword fiend.
But he also had to live with Sheena when she was, as she puts it, ‘anti- social, intolerable and unattractive’.
As Allan writes eloquently in their book: ‘ A barrier had descended cutting Sheena and I off from our past life. I didn’t know it yet, but there would be no going back to the way things had been before that day. You were entering a new country with an unfamiliar language and an unknown map.’
Sheena says 75 per cent of relationships don’t survive the type of brain injury she suffered. People lose their jobs, have to sell their house, their lives fall apart.
WeTALk about the stresses placed on the marriage of Olympic rower James Cracknell and Beverley Turner (now divorced) after he suffered a brain injury after being hit from behind by a petrol tanker while cycling. They express sympathy but stress every head injury is very different.
not only did Allan go from boyfriend to full-time carer, he was coping with Sheena’s extreme mood swings caused by her injury. ‘I got the blame for everything. I would come home from work not knowing which Sheena I was going to be greeted by.’
The only thing that kept him going was knowing this was not the real Sheena. ‘It was the injury talking and not the person you love.’ But would she ever come back?
Sheena cashed in a critical injury policy she’d taken out, and the BBC helped Allan out with studio work and assignments as close as possible to home. But he recalls a workaholic producer saying accusingly: ‘I think you’re hiding behind Sheena’s illness, using it as an excuse not to pull your weight.’
In fact, Allan had two full-time jobs. For years Sheena was chronically fatigued. There were episodes of compulsive internet shopping. When friends visited, Sheena would talk over them or indulge in what Allan calls ‘tangential talking’ ( disinhibited behaviour and lack of self-knowledge is part of a brain injury).
When he took 48 hours off for a trip with a male friend, she refused to answer his calls and he returned home to find her sitting in the dark. He apologised and she said in a monotone: ‘My mother said a leopard never changes his spots. She’s right.’
did she imagine her mother saying that about Allan? ‘no, she’d have said it. To this day she says what she thinks. She’s now 90.’
With no self-awareness, Sheena ignored mirrors and her weight rose to 14st (heavy for her 5ft 5in frame). Before the accident she rarely ate cake or chocolate. But the part of her brain that controlled her appetite was, and still is,
damaged by the impact, and she didn’t know when to stop eating.
‘Allan was so pleased to see me eating after I lost so much weight, he allowed me to have second helpings and finish his plate. But there must be some neurological lever that doesn’t operate.
‘One day I was in a taxi and saw a very large woman waddling past. I asked Allan: “Am I as big as her?” He said: “Yes, nearly.”’ It was a huge shock.
‘Denial played a very large part in the process,’ she says, ‘which is terrible for everybody else. Denial, luck and a lack of vanity.’
Always so independent, Sheena became clingy and controlling.
While all the attention was on Sheena’s recovery, few people recognised the toll her brain injuries and behaviour had had on Allan. Out for drinks with friends, everyone was discussing Sheena’s progress, when one friend asked Allan: ‘And what about you? Who’s looking after you?’ The question ‘hit him like a train’. He walked away, tears rolling down his face.
‘You have those moments of revelation when you realise how tired you are, and how much you are putting everybody else first,’ he says today.
‘And you had no reason to expect things would get better,’ Sheena adds softly.
On millennium eve, their celebration together with friends in Moscow was interrupted when Russian President Boris Yeltsin announced he was stepping down to be replaced by President Putin.
It was a major moment in world history; of course Allan had to report on it, but Sheena was furious. The trip was, as Allan later recalled, ‘a nightmare’. He’d only recently turned 40 — how was he going to have the working life he wanted?
One day after Sheena said something ‘barbed and unkind’, he told her. ‘I’ve got nothing left. I’m emptied out.’
He said he was going out for a walk and when he came back it was her turn to think of something to make it better. On his return Sheena hugged him silently.
Later that year, Sheena was referred to a psychologist at the Maudsley Hospital. ‘He asked me questions nobody had asked before, I went through a box of Kleenex.’
She came to understand she was depressed, a classic consequence of serious head injury. He prescribed a Serotonin antidepressant and within six weeks her motivation returned. ‘Being honest about it was important,’ says Allan. ‘ You told the psychiatrist: “But I don’t want to be depressed” and he said: “Well I don’t want to be short!” Which is a line I imagine he uses a lot.’
Fortunately, a neuro-psychologist, Gail Robinson, kept seeing the couple for a further five years. Her role is to assess and help treat problems caused by a brain injury, so the person and their family are better able to cope with the impact the condition may have. ‘I think she found us an interesting case study and she became a friend.’
Reading Gail’s notes at the time, she was clearly something of a relationship counsellor, too. She could see Allan was holding on by a thread and offered a safe space where the couple could speak freely. ‘She was our neuro-psychologist. I was her patient, too, in a sense,’ says Allan.
You work as a team, Gail tells me: ‘It was like a contract, we agreed on goals. Instead of doing a very short intensive period of rehabilitation, it made sense to space it out, because Allan was sometimes overseas, and Sheena was trying to return to work, and because her injury was so severe, though most people wouldn’t realise that now. Her recovery is extraordinary.’
Sheena began to diet and exercise. Gail had begged her to keep a food diary. ‘If you can’t address your problems, everything I’ve done will be useless.’ SOOn
Sheena started freelancing again and was well enough for Allan to take up the post of South Africa correspondent (a job he’d loved six years earlier). The plan was for Sheena to join him in Johannesburg.
But she had so much work in London, she stayed put. She visited him, but worried she was driving him away. One day, she assumed, he would simply wake up and think ‘this is not me! I’m a lone wolf.’ Lesser men have crumpled.
‘I never spent even a minute thinking about leaving,’ he insists now. In fact, Allan was missing her in South Africa. It wasn’t the same on his own. He told his BBc boss it had been a mistake. They allowed him to leave after a year to become bureau chief in Paris.
She tells a story of rushing out of the shower to take Allan his passport that he’d forgotten for Paris to the railway station. She hadn’t blowdried her hair so the angry, jagged scar across her right eyebrow was visible. Allan blanched when he saw her. It made her realise she had to do something about her appearance if it upset him, so she saw a plastic surgeon and had two procedures done on the nHS.
Today, you’d never guess Sheena is a trauma-survivor. Doctors have described her recovery as ‘a miracle’. Some credit her no-nonsense Scottish upbringing.
‘When I was in intensive care, my poor mother sat by my bed every day and one day lent over and said: “Get a grip, Sheena.” She felt so guilty about it afterwards. But, ridiculously I think something in me heard it.’
Getting justice has been in some ways harder. The cPS charged the police officer who hit Sheena with ‘driving without due care and attention’. At the end of 1999 a trial was held and the case was dismissed. Worse still, the police evidence highlighted Sheena’s drinking. In fact, she had consumed just one glass of wine after attending a scholarly talk at BAFTA.
Later, she brought a civil action against the police for negligent driving, and the Met settled out of court. It wasn’t enough to pay off a mortgage, she observes dryly.
Today, she’s still working on forgiveness. ‘It’s a very difficult thing to achieve, full-stop.’
Was it painful remembering that awful time when writing their new book with Gail to help others with brain injury? ‘no, it was useful,’ says Allan. ‘It was like packing it away and saying: “This is what happened.” When I was going through it, I wanted to read someone else’s account of walking the path and there was nothing.’
The last thing they wanted to write was misery-lit. ‘I said we can’t sugar coat anything. We have to be absolutely brutally frank,’ he adds. ‘Self-pity has never been part of our lives.’ Designed as a resource to help other brain injury victims and their partners, the book reads like an emotional thriller as you wonder if the couple will be able stay together.
In fact, going through the accident brought them closer. Sheena is less of a workaholic; Allan says it made him more emotionally intelligent. ‘It makes you think of your own vulnerability in ways you wouldn’t be expected to, especially as a man.’ It also led to a proper commitment.
In Scotland on christmas Day 2005, they hosted lunch for her family. After the guests had left they exchanged gifts. Sheena can’t remember what she gave Allan, but will never forget Allan’s present — an engagement ring. She has never taken it off since.
They were married on June 24, 2006 — Sheena’s father, the Rt Rev Dr Bill Mcdonald, conducted the service. ‘I knew we had to be together. I understood it was the only way I wanted to live,’ says Allan.
‘This wasn’t a conversation he had with me,’ says Sheena airily. ‘So I was genuinely absolutely amazed that christmas Day.’
Both she and Allan accept they now live in a ‘new normal’. She has lost her sense of smell, can’t drive and will take the lift, not the stairs. But 20 years later, the couple insist they never really think about the accident any more. ‘We’ve never let it define our lives.’
Rebuilding life After brain injury: dreamtalk by Sheena Mcdonald, Allan little and gail Robinson is published by Routledge at £19.99.