‘I couldn’t carry on hoping for miracles any more’

A freak accident changed Tamsyn Wood’s life for ever. Here, the 43-year-old mum-of-four reveals how she found the strength to keep going…

Their laughter erupts, loud and joyous. I look around the dinner table at the faces of my children, Monty, 18, Lola, 16, Mitzi, 15, and Esmie, 13. They are bantering with one another in the way that only teenagers can and I feel a rush of pride at their spirit and resilience. Their laughter matters. It matters because there should be six of us gathered around the family table, not five.

Every day, I seek out the ordinary, but beautiful moments like these. Food in my fridge, a cold swim in the sea, a kitchen full of the laughter of my children. I cherish these simple things because there was a moment when I thought we would never laugh again.

Ten years ago, my husband suffered a massive brain injury while playing rugby and our lives changed for ever. At 42, Alex now requires round-the-clock care and currently lives apart from us in a specialist home for part of the week.

How different life was back in 2000, when Alex roared into my world. I was working in London for a PR firm and we met at a party. He had such extraordinary energy that it felt like I was being sucked into him.

FAMILY LIFE

On our first date, I drove two hours to see him and never went home. ‘Marry me?’ he asked after 48 hours and I said, ‘Yes’, without hesitation. It sounds crazy, but we had a shared vision of our life together.

Nine months later, I was expecting Monty, and when he was six months old, we got married. Monty was followed by Lola, then Mitzi. Alex had always longed for a family-centred lifestyle in France, so in 2006, we headed from our home in Whitby, North Yorkshire, to a new life in Les Landes, south-west France, with three kids under three, a dog and a cat.

To begin with, it was tough, but gradually, I grew in confidence and made friends. Alex flourished under the hot French sun. He started sourcing eco-friendly surfboards and developed a business selling them online.

Fitness played a big role in his life; he surfed for hours and decided to take up rugby again to help him feel more involved with the local community.

We thrived, with weekends spent on beautiful beaches. We grew our own vegetables, and were surrounded by children, dogs, ducks, cats and chickens. It was happy, hectic, bliss. By the time Esmie came along, our dream was complete.

But all that was shattered on 4 October 2011. Alex came home from a rugby training session in agony. He explained that he’d been knocked on the head by someone’s knee in a rugby scrum.

That night, Alex started to vomit and I called the emergency doctor. When he arrived, he called an ambulance. An MRI scan revealed a blood clot and Alex was admitted to a neurological ward. It was terrifying seeing my rock of a husband weak and vulnerable.

Nine days later, he suffered a major epileptic fit and a brain haemorrhage. I watched horrified as he was rushed away for emergency surgery. Afterwards,

I was told that they had been forced to remove a quarter of his skull, but a further brain bleed the following day left us with little hope.

‘You must prepare your children for losing their daddy,’ medical staff told me. Alex remained in a coma and I sunk into a deep state of shock. I tried to explain to the children. I prayed, I wept and I clung to the hope that if Alex came round, I would find something of the man I married.

After 15 weeks, Alex emerged from his coma, but the damage was catastrophic. He was blind, paralysed and would need constant care.

COPING WITH LOSS

I existed in a state of pure survival. There were the practicalities to tend to, such as raising enough money to get Alex airlifted to a hospital in the UK, so I could be near my family in Oxfordshire; finding a new home and schools for the children… The logistics of it all merged with my agony and swamped me.

It didn’t hit me how much I’d lost until I boarded the plane with the children in February 2012. Tears streamed down my face. It was like my heart was left on French soil and I could feel the pull on it as we took off.

My sister, Allie, did an incredible job of raising the £7,000 required to get Alex flown home to the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford. I survived on a treadmill,

‘There was a moment when I thought we would never laugh again’

caring for my bewildered children, then racing up to the hospital to be with Alex. I truly believed I could love him back to full health, but the man who emerged from the coma was aggressive and abusive, nothing like the calm and confident Alex

I had known and loved before.

There was one solitary moment of lucidity in hospital that I will never forget. Just before he went for a cranioplasty to replace the part of his skull they had removed with a prosthetic one, he turned to me:

‘I’ve only got a couple of seconds. I’ve come back to tell you that I love you. I always will and it is going to be okay.

I’ve got to go now, bye.’ And he turned his head back again, and that was it. He never managed such a coherent sentence again. I sat motionless, blinking, my logical brain saying that what had just happened was impossible. A friend was with me and we looked at each other silently, in disbelief. Then, tears erupted as I took in the words he had said, confirming he wasn’t actually ‘here’ any more.

After two months in hospital, he was transferred to a rehabilitation centre, where he raged against the frail body he found himself in.

‘Where’s Tamsyn?’ he shouted.

‘I’m here, Alex,’ I replied. ‘No, if you were Tamsyn, I’d be able to see you.’ He just couldn’t fathom the blindness and trauma to his brain and thought he was being tortured in some kind of conspiracy plot. It was devastating to see.

FUTURE PLANS

It wasn’t his fault; it was the brain injury. I told myself that time and again. The worst damage was to his frontal lobes, which control emotion and reason. I came home from days at the hospital with bite marks and clumps of my hair pulled out where he had attacked me.

The children were so young and I had to be very careful with my use of language, telling them Daddy had a really poorly brain and we had to help him by sending so much love and healing energy. I told them things like this so they felt they could help.

Nine months later, Alex was discharged from the rehab centre to a nursing home, but after two years of non-stop battling for improvements in his care, it dawned on me that I also had to secure our long-term future. Alex loved the water, so in 2013, we moved to

North Devon and Alex moved back in with us. I believed being by the sea would at least offer us something of our old life in France.

LOVE AND UNDERSTANDING

We had the downstairs adapted for his wheelchair and a hospital bed installed. Sadly, though, he was still prone to aggression and I had to make the heartbreaking decision that being in a care home was best for him. On our 10th wedding anniversary, as I sat in the care home spoon-feeding Alex a picnic

I had puréed, a moment of clarity dawned on me. ‘Who are you kidding, Tamsyn?’ I told myself. He didn’t even know what day of the week it was, let alone that it was our wedding anniversary. I couldn’t carry on hoping for miracles. I had to accept that

‘old Alex’ would never return and learn to love the new Alex.

Ten years on from the accident, I have reached a new level of understanding that’s included learning to become a carer as we are hoping to have Alex home four days a week soon. And when he’s home, it’s all-consuming. Alex is now able to form very basic sentences, but his speech is hard to understand. He doesn’t know when he is hungry or thirsty, hot, cold, or in pain. Thankfully, though, he is calmer. He recognises the children’s names and knows who they are, especially when they give him kisses and cuddles. Their care and tenderness fills me with emotion. On a practical level, they give him haircuts,

‘I’m so intensely proud of how my children have handled it all’

shave his beard, help feed him and make him cups of tea.

But their care is therapeutic, too. They cuddle and massage him and do some stretches to help ease the tension in his muscles. I’m so intensely proud of how my children have handled it all. Instead of being incarcerated by their grief, they are flourishing. I compensate for what they have lost by thinking of what they will gain: they will be strong, tolerant, compassionate human beings as a result of this.

I have learned so much over the past decade, too. How to deal with the bureaucracy of a life on benefits and to fight for Alex’s care, to accept that we can no longer afford holidays or luxuries of any kind. But walks in the countryside and swimming in the sea are free. I have learned that honesty, not least with myself, is vital. I have gone through stages of not wanting to go anywhere near Alex, but now I realise that in those times I’m suffering carer burnout and I know that it will pass if I look after myself in the right way.

LIVING ALONGSIDE GRIEF

Most importantly, I have reconciled myself to the fact that I have lost the man I married. I don’t love Alex romantically as a husband. Instead, I have opened my heart to who he is now. I love him unconditionally, like I do my children.

My heartache hasn’t evaporated. Instead,

I live alongside my grief. Of course, I still feel moments of rage or self-pity, but I don’t wallow there too long. I have to let the light perforate, otherwise I will exist in darkness. I have to become the person I would like to see my children become, because they are my whole world. It’s all for them, the four beautiful souls who fill me with love.

The past decade has taken me to places of unimaginable darkness and I have spent so much time trying to ‘fix’ my broken family, only now to realise, it’s not about being fixed. It’s about loving all the broken pieces so much that we are bonded back together in a new way. Their jagged edges have shaped us into something unique and beautiful.