Alone with Everybody: Life After Brain Injury

By Gary Chevalier

This short story is an autobiographical account of my experience of suffering a severe brain injury in January 2004 and the first years of my recovery from said injury. Many stories from my life before my brain injury have been intermingled throughout the book, as my life was very adventurous. I wrestle with my thought process throughout the book as I question everything that I have ever learned, often leading to the adoption new philosophies and new manners of doing everything. This is all part and parcel of coming to terms with the way that my brain injury has affected my life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Sep 16, 2016
• ISBN: 9781504988810

Gary Chevalier

At thirty-eight years of age the author has attained a wealth of life experience. Being a self-taught philosopher, an accountant, and also possessing a great knowledge of the street and urban lifestyle through being a skateboarder for more than twenty-seven years has enabled the author to develop a unique philosophy towards his life. Living each day with the purpose of making somebody else’s day better every single day enables the author to really make a difference in the world, no matter how small. Just imagine what kind of world we’d live in if everybody did that!

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2016 Gary Chevalier. All rights reserved.

Interior Graphics/Art Credit: Daniel Evans

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

ISBN: 978-1-5049-8880-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5049-8881-0 (e)

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Contents

Going Back to the Start

In My Place

Alone with Everybody

Fireworks

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Learning from My Mistakes

California Dreaming, Part 1

California Dreaming, Part 2

Tourist

London Calling …

Half-Light

Dreaming of You

Mind Games

The Journey

About the Author

About the Book

Going Back to the Start

I woke up from a coma on the second day of February 2004 with no memory. I was vacant. I would offer a better description, but there quite simply isn’t one. Really, there is no way for me to describe how it felt to forget everything that I ever knew, including all the people that I loved. It’s an emptiness that I know and am familiar with, yet I just can’t describe it in words that anybody who hasn’t experienced the same thing would understand.

The injuries that I received were the result of a side-impact car crash seven days earlier, in which I was a passenger. It was the day before my twenty-seventh birthday, and I have no recollection of my birthday whatsoever, even though my parents brought a cake into the intensive-care ward to celebrate it with me. They also brought along all of the usual birthday pleasantries—gifts and cards and the like. I just don’t remember any of it. You see, I have had and continue to have problems assimilating new memories. It’s not just limited to new memories; there is a good chunk of my long-term memory missing too.

Fortunately, my friends and family have told me many stories that have helped bring back some old memories. By all accounts I really lived my life to the full, and I would dearly love to be able to remember some of those experiences with a little more clarity. Maybe that would help to give me back a sense of history, something which I feel I am sadly lacking these days.

Right now it’s 11:18 p.m. on 17 December 2004. I’ll write this story as I go, kind of like a diary. In this manner, I hope, you will be able to see the evolutions in my thought processes as they happen. I’ve come a long way in the last eleven months, so who knows where I will be in eleven more? It is only now that I really feel capable of doing this, although ever since the accident I’ve wanted to do it for as long as I can remember. I’m hoping that by writing my story I’ll be able to start coming to terms with what happened, and maybe then I’ll be able to start building a new story.

It seems easier for me to type everything into a computer than it is to have all this information jumbled up in my head all the time. I’m never able to process an idea from start to finish because I’m unable to retain a single thought for more than a couple of seconds; my brain just seems to jump automatically to the next idea. Sometimes when I’m typing and thinking about what to write, it feels as if there is too much information for my brain to process physically, and everything just freezes for a split second and goes blank like a computer does when it has too many applications running at the same time. I’m sure that writing my story is going to prove to be a difficult task, but it’s not just something that I want to do. I feel that I have to do it.

My name is Gary Chevalier. I was lucky enough to be born and raised on the idyllic island of Jersey, a British tax haven just off the north-west coast of France, on 3 February 1977. The island is much like any city on the south coast of England in the sense that it has most of the same attractions—beautiful beaches and scenery, plus facilities for all manner of sports. The only difference is that everything is on a smaller scale.

I was told that the medical term for what happened to me is a diffuse axonal injury. In short, the nerve cells in my brain were starved of oxygen as a result of being knocked out in the aforementioned crash. Anyway, it lives with me forever in one way or another. I’ve been led to believe that what happened is as described in the next chapter, although I have no personal recollection of anything whatsoever that happened on the night of the incident.

In My Place

We had been out, my friends and I, in a nightclub called The Splash. It is a small beachside bar and nightclub, mainly frequented by surfers and skateboarders just like me. At times it can be a bit rough and tumble, but on the whole it’s a decent place where I felt pretty comfortable. I could talk to people with whom I had things in common, and this always made going out more pleasurable for me.

The friends that I had arrived with decided to go home on the coach, as I would have done under normal circumstances. However, my night and ultimately my life were destined to follow a different path. I’d decided that I was going to get a lift back from Katie, a girl I had met the day before. There were some other people in the car too—a friend of mine named Daco and two of Katie’s friends. Katie and I had gotten along famously when we had met the night before. At least, that is what she told me. We spent most of the night talking in a bar in St Peter’s, and we even kissed in the car park where she had parked her car. This happened before we headed back to my friend Daco’s house. It’s odd really. I know now that Daco is Katie’s ex-boyfriend, and I find it hard to believe that I would have wanted to get involved with her for that reason.

Anyhow, back to the night in question. We all got into the car. The first stop was to drop off a friend of Katie’s whom I didn’t know and cannot recall. Apparently, that stop went without incident. There were still Daco, George (who I didn’t know), Katie, and myself. Apparently, everyone was still keen to party, so rather than go back to Daco’s house, we went towards my flat at my suggestion. I had a litre of vodka at my place, and somebody needed to drink it. Unfortunately, we never made it that far. On the way between Katie’s house (where Daco and I grabbed cans of beer out of her fridge) and my flat it began to hail quite heavily. I do not remember the crash itself, so what follows is a picture I have built up from the information that has been provided to me.

It seems we were rounding a gentle bend in the road at about thirty miles per hour. The road surface had become very slippery due to the hailstorm, and this caused Katie’s car—I think it was a Renault Clio—to turn and skid across the road, resulting in a side-impact crash against a granite wall. The car spun almost a full one hundred and eighty degrees before colliding with the wall. I was sitting next to the window in the back of the car behind George, who was in the front passenger seat. My side of the car hit the wall first, so it follows that all the force of the crash was directed towards me. To my right was sitting Daco. He and I were not wearing seat belts, which could possibly have made the situation worse. Personally, I don’t think that it would have made much difference if we had been wearing our seat belts. It was, after all, a side-impact crash, and the research I have done has proven to me that in side-impact crashes the use of a seatbelt doesn’t really help.

Daco was flung into the boot of the car when the car hit with the wall. I think he may even have forced the boot of the car open, he hit it that hard! He had had some nasty bruising as a result of the impact, but nothing too serious as far as I know. This demonstrates, to me at least, that the forces involved must have been considerable. It’s only natural to assume that he must have hit me on his way through. Having seen a photograph of the car, it seems blatantly obvious that I was going to come off worse than the others due to where I was sitting. George had some nasty cuts to his face, and Katie had some bruising to the kidneys or the liver. I forget which it was now, but I think you get the point.

Ultimately, all the others who were in the car were fine, and they were released from hospital within a couple of days. I have to be honest and say that I am glad of that much. I don’t feel bitter in spite of what happened to me. It wouldn’t do me any good to feel that way, not now. There’s no point in crying over spilled milk, as they say. It’s bad enough that this should happen to one of the four of us in the car at the time. It’s just my bad luck in this instance. I try to look at it like a hurdle in my life; it’s just something that I have to get over. I am not there yet, but then I suppose that is why I am writing this.

These days, it feels as if my friends and family know me better than I do. I lost a lot of my personal memories, the things that I knew and thought about the various people in my life and the parts that they played therein. It may sound like a strange thing to say, but I don’t really know who I am. I don’t remember many of my likes and dislikes. I don’t really know what things make me tick, if you like. In every situation I feel that there is something is wrong. I don’t know why, nor can I explain it. I just know that everything is not quite right. It never is. To put it simply, I feel as if I am lost; I’m not really sure of my place in the world. I don’t know where I am supposed to fit in with the different aspects of what used to be my life.

I am a shadow of my former self. Some people still see the old Gary, but what they see is a young, confident, and capable man. In reality, I have no self-confidence nowadays, and I struggle with every little day-to-day task. My current impression of the ideal solution would be for things to go back to how they were before the accident. However, I have to be realistic and accept that this just isn’t going to happen. In some way I have to come to terms with the fact that what happened to me in that accident has changed my life forever and I may never be able to get back certain parts of my old life. In light of this, I really struggle to maintain an optimistic point of view. It’s made even more difficult because things such as physical prowess and mental agility, the abilities which I held in the highest regard, are no longer available to me. My newly inherited cognitive deficits together with my lack of balance and coordination do, in essence, make me slower both physically and mentally. I hate being this way—slower, I mean.

Fortunately, I had my family there at my side throughout my stay in hospital—my parents especially. They’d try to encourage me and make sure that I wasn’t getting depressed. I’m very grateful that I had them close to me. Not everybody who goes through this kind of ordeal is lucky enough to have that kind of support.

At first I was completely unaware of myself. By that I mean the things that I was doing and saying, but slowly I became aware of my actions and my words. As my level of consciousness gradually improved, my deficits became more apparent to me, and I began to see just how much of a challenge lay ahead of me. Soon after my release from hospital, I learned that my judgment of speeds and distances was also pretty poor. I have now lost count of the number of times that I’ve almost been hit by cars whilst trying to