Please note: This story includes mentions of violence.
It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly when brain injury and damage has set in. I was born breached with a cord wrapped around the head of my fetus body. My parents once told me there were complications and I was lucky. The injury had caused permanent hearing loss.(This we won’t know until I am 3)
I would later suffer several concussive events in my early teens in sports and recreation. I was smart and used a helmet. But I remember this once, being pushed by a fellow kid in grade 7 elementary class, I was 11 years old. My head had come into contact with a metal chalkboard ledge. The sudden blow broke through the skin and I was taken to the hospital, given stitches and sent home. The concussion thereafter lasted a while.
I would continue to have unfortunate incidents where minor head trauma was passed off as a bump but it was in 2008, at 24 years of age, that I would be attacked once more. This time I wasn’t getting up. December 31, 2008, while attending a local neighborhood pub with my partner at the time, two unknown individuals decided to attack me while enjoying the New Year’s evening. The two men came out of the corner of the room, and without any delay, proceeded to punch me in the face several times, knocking me back off my feet. The collapse unfortunately collided with the back of my head, before I was found on the ground next to the wall, several feet from the incident.
I was woken by my partner, an unknown amount of time had passed. I would be seen by paramedics and taken to the hospital. The damage from this would be permanent and very serious. The sudden impact solely to the left eye severed my optical nerves, and my occipital lobe was injured in a compound hit to the back of the head on a pool table. My left eyesight would fail from this moment on and I would lose the ability to see from one side. It’s only a matter of time before the right side catches up.
What are some things that have helped you throughout your recovery journey?
It has taken a long time to adjust. Brain damage is a very difficult, stressful and ongoing journey for recovery. I haven’t had the luxury of time, finance or support systems in place to afford maybe a better outcome thus far, but knowing that I can make it on my own has been at the centre of my approach.
I can be very stubborn, but knowing that there is a problem is the first step I recognized in obtaining necessary skills to approach a potential solution. Patience and learning. Understanding what is happening to me and what I could do to help others if I was not injured.
If you could go back to when you first acquired your brain injury and tell yourself one thing, what would that be?
That it’s going to be a tough road. With lots of battles. A lot of which I will not win. I will want to give up. I will hate everyone I know and love. And I will end up hating myself. But the truth to the pain and sacrifice is not to give in but to grow from within. That such an extensive sacrifice to human life is not a consequence. That I am not at fault. That sometimes bad things happen to good people. Trust your gut and your honest heart.
What would you like people who don’t have a brain injury to know?
I would like them to know that brain injury is a complicated outcome. It changes you in time and the support that comes with the manifestation is by no means ever covered in a book or a classroom. But by real people. With real stories. Real conversations. The learning about brain injury will be a lifetime discovery for humanity. There is no quick fix. Only time.
For over 16 years I was a silent veteran on a front line somewhere, offering support to private investors. I maintain a security license. Learned to fire a weapon in combat and self defense tactics. Martial arts and dance. I’ve involved myself extensively in physical education my whole life, allowing me to keep shape and lose over 250 pounds over the last few years. My filming career involved lots of action, camera work, acting, stunts, special effects and long hours. It was an honor to learn a plethora of skills both mentally engaging and physically demanding that helped me in my years to continue to fight on.
My dream of getting to the Olympics or Paralympic Games grows silently quiet. I have ongoing attempts to grow a foundation of diversity and hope. And the staggering nightmare it has been to try and cross Canada in the last 28 years has only manifested a journal equal to the writing I’ve somehow overencumbered myself with.
My most enduring and profitable achievement to date has been allowing myself to be honest with the world, no matter how cruel, and in 2021, disclosed to the social media world that I was a proud, transgender and intersex human being. I am diverse and stand up to bullies and injustice. The world is cruel but not impossible to defend. My fight for diversity and inclusion does not render me powerless.
This has been part of my story. Thank you for listening
