Life After Trauma

Everything changed for Irby’s Ben Thexton when a car crash left him with a brain injury. He has turned that impossible situation into a positive and is now helping others through hardship.

- Emma Mayoh

I was 24 and I nearly died.

I was crossing the road around lunchtime on a Saturday in 2012 when I was hit by a car. I went flying in the air, hit the windscreen and landed upside down, on my head.

I jumped up, animated, as if none of it had just happened. I don’t remember much after that – it is pieced together from accounts of other people, but soon I was in an ambulance to Birkenhead’s Arrowe Park Hospital. They did tests for all sorts of things, which were measured on a scale of one to ten. I scored one on all of them. One indicated brain damage. So they put me into a medically-induced coma.

A week before it all happened, my now wife Sian and I had bought a house in Bidston, Wirral. I’d moved from nearby Oxton where I’d lived with my parents. I laugh now at how in control of the future I thought I was. I had it all sussed out in my head. I thought I knew what life was all about.

The coma was there to stop the swelling. They drilled a hole in my head too in order to relieve the pressure in my brain. I spent nearly two weeks in that coma, in that hell where I hallucinated the most awful things day and night. Then I woke up and I didn’t know if it was real or not. Soon I realised I was covered in wires, I had something up my nose, too. I tried to sit up a bit but someone came running over. The nurse told me I was in the Walton Centre, the specialist neurology centre in Liverpool. I found out afterwards it was Father’s Day.

When I first woke up, I couldn’t walk. My brain knew what it wanted to do but it was as though it wouldn’t communicate with my legs. I had broken my jaw, fractured my collarbone, dislocated my shoulder and my ear canal had been crushed.