Brain injury has made my fiance aggressive and angry... but I'd never dream of leaving them
THE fiancée of a man who suffered major brain trauma in a fall three weeks after their engagement told today how she was still planning their wedding.
Lucy French, 30, revealed her battle to help Campbell Gibb -Stuart , 29, recover from his injury, sustained as he attempted to return home from a night out with friends in the City.
The exact circumstances of the property manager’s fall , in June 2 013, remain a mystery but he is thought to have climbed a wall in a drunken attempt to find a shortcut to Fenchurch Street station.
The 25ft plunge “broke the left side of his face” and demolished his left kneecap. He spent three weeks in a coma during three months of treatment at the Royal London hospital in Whitechapel and six months in rehabilitation at Northwick Park hospital in Harrow.
The brain injury affected his personality, turning him into an “angry, abusive and aggressive” person his fiancée no longer recognised. He is now at a rehabilitation unit in Colchester but spends weekends with Ms French at her family home in Upminster.
“He is having to learn how to do everything again,” Ms French, a recruitment manger, told the Standard. “I always thought it was going to be like a film, when someone wakes from a coma. He will be in recovery for the rest of his life. That is something you don’t know when you first go through it. It’s completely changed my life as well as his life.
“He doesn’t quite understand what has happened. He asks when he will get hi s job back . I have to say to him: ‘Unfortunately, Campbell, I don’t think you will be able to do that.’”
The couple’s story is one of a number of extraordinarily candid accounts told on a new website launched by Queen Mary Universit y of London’s Barts Centre for Trauma Sciences.
Ms French decided to write about their ordeal to help other trauma victims and is determined to remain positive. “It has been horrendous, don’t get me wrong,” she said. “You just get on with it. There was never any question I would leave him. We had just got engaged and bought a house. It’s just life. I would drive myself mad if I dwelled on it too much.”
She still hopes they will get married. “That is a big goal for me,” she said. “When it will be, I don’t know. I want it to be a day he can enjoy. His attention span at the moment is non-existent. God forbid what the speeches would be like.”
Another trauma survivor, Alison Lyddon, 31, smashed vertebrae in her neck after a bike crash in Greenwich Park left her trapped under a car that had been attempting a U-turn on a hill.
She spent three days at Royal London and 10 weeks at th e Roy a l National Orthopaedic Hospital in Stanmore. She had t o g ive u p work as a neuro-phys- iotherapist and is now an academic at the University of East London.
“I have no idea [what happened] — I blacked out,” Ms Lyddon said of the November 2008 crash. “The last thing I remember was braking and thinking: ‘I’m probably going to hit the car.’”
She had a plate and three screws attached to her spine and bone grafted from her hip. She managed to get back on her bike after 18 months and plans to enter a triathlon. “If I didn’t keep doing exercises and training in the way I do, I would lose strength and the capacity to do things,” she said.
An attempt to prosecute the driver was rejected and Ms Lyddon said the hearing at Bexleyheath magistrates’ court was like being “hauled across coals”. “That process was almost as t r au mat ic , i f no t more [than the injury],” she said. “You are vulnerable and you are trying to get your life back together. I didn’t feel very supported. “The After Trauma website is for supporting people through all the stages of the process. “Yo u do n’ t re ally know what is going on. To most people, hospital is quite an alien environment.”