I had to learn to talk again alongside my toddler son
RADIO PRESENTER CLEMENCY BURTON-HILL ON HER BRAIN HAEMORRHAGE...
BROADCASTER Clemency Burton-Hill was less able to communicate than her toddler son after suffering a massive brain haemorrhage.
A year to the day after she collapsed at work in New York, the radio presenter, actress and violinist revealed that her speech had been so badly affected, she learned to talk again alongside the two-year-old.
Mother-of-two Clemency, 39, said she had only been able to put sentences together in the last few weeks.
She woke from a coma 17 days after her collapse, but said yesterday: “At the beginning I had no speech, really no speech... I could only make sounds.
“As unbelievably frustrated as I might be now, it’s a miracle that I can even have a conversation.”
Clemency told BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour she could not describe the feeling of understanding what people were saying to her, but being unable to reply.
The BBC Radio 3 Classical Fix presenter said it was “beyond language because it’s so instinctive and then you can’t do it”.
She added: “In a way I’m still making sense of that, now as my reality. I might be processing that for my whole life because speech was my thing.”
Clemency said during her battle to regain her communication skills she and her youngest son learned together.
It is possible her professional love of speech helped her learn to talk again, but experts cannot be sure.
She said: “You just start at the beginning. You don’t just get it back.
“But in the first few months it was so unbelievably frustrating that one day, or even one hour, I could form a word and then in the next minute I couldn’t. It’s not a linear progression.
“It’s completely different as well because in my head there are no problems with my speech.”
Revealing the “most extraordinary experience” before waking from her coma, Clemency said: “I know that absolutely at that point I was given a choice... this way is going to be very hard, are you sure you want to go this way? Or this one is going to be very easy and it’s going to be fine.” She added: “I don’t want to sound like some people choose not to live. I know I sound crazy, like a lunatic, but it’s absolutely what it was.”
The broadcaster said when she woke up in hospital, she thought: “I just had a crazy... nightmare, I can’t wait to tell my husband [diplomat James Roscoe] about that.”
But then she realised: “Oh my God, there’s a hospital, I can’t move anything, where am I? Who am I? What’s going on?
“Then there’s the point I’m going to speak and I can’t speak. I can’t even make a noise at that point.”
Clemency, who is creative director of US classical radio station WQXR, said music has been the “most amazing and motivating factor” in her recovery but sometimes it is “just too painful and too raw”.
She said James and her sons were “the primary reason I keep going” but her injury means two young children are also “sources of tremendous anxiety” – her brain cannot filter different “threats”, with “everything at the same level”.
‘I could form a word and next minute I couldn’t... in my head there are no problems with my speech’