Headway Surrey is a charity very close to my heart. After my brain injury they have supported me through the dark times as well as through times of hope and recovery. They helped me recover enough to get back into work after 2 1/2 years, and they are supporting me into the next chapter of my life as it has become a blank canvas when I lost my job due to the effects of my injury. My rehabilitation coordinator came to all my work meetings to support me. Headway Surrey have truly been a lifeline to me, and my life would look very different if it hadn't been for them. Jo, my rehabilitation coordinator is responsible for most of the progress that I've made and accommodation strategies that I now have in place.

I was privileged to become a project partner in a collaboration with 'A Creative Transformation' and Headway Surrey to produce a film about the impact of nature and creativity as part of the journey to recovery. The feedback was that it was both powerful and emotive. It was an honour to be a part of this project.

But this isn't about me. Brain injuries affect so many people. The stats say that someone suffers a brain injury every 90 seconds. There are approximately 977 people per year who get brain injuries. That's huge. And sadly that number is on the rise. A lot of people will not live following an acquired brain injury. I was one of the lucky ones.

Brain injuries are life changing, and they affect the person who has the injury but also really impacts on the people around them. Family, friends, carers, employers etc. The research tells us this, but I also know this from personal experience. Headway Surrey ensures that when a person’s life (and their family's) is turned upside down by brain injury, they get the help and support they need and deserve.

Brain injuries may be from a road traffic incident, stroke, meningitis, encephalitis, tumour, aneurysms, sporting accident, work injury, assault, combat, domestic violence, hypoxia, falling debris, trip, fall or slip etc. Whatever the cause, it is their aim to help people live well with their brain injury and achieve their potential, whatever is meaningful and relevant to them and your family.

Headway Surrey support 18 adults in Surrey with acquired and traumatic brain injuries, road traffic accidents or strokes, and they also support their families. They have been providing a range of specialised services since 1985, from our base in Guildford (and online, via telephone and text, or at hospitals and other venues).

They support people with practice and repetition of key skills for the months or years to reach optimal recovery, and to learn compensatory techniques and strategies to reduce memory problems, socialisation and communication practice.

Headway Surrey are a tiny charity but they are so caring and passionate about helping people with brain injuries, and they offer such an amazing service and give so much cognitive, practical and emotional support. There isn't another service in the whole of Surrey that provide the practical and emotional support that Headway Surrey so wonderfully offer. But as such a small charity, they have been hit massively by the cost of living crisis and the effects on charity funding. Grants provided tend to be tied to a specific purpose and can't be used to help the overall running costs. It costs £70,000 per year to run the service, and due to the funding situation they are on the brink of closure.

For a small charity, EVERY PENNY makes such a massive difference in the work that they can do. Any support that you can offer me as I take on this challenge would be so wonderful and would mean the world to Headway Surrey, and would be such a lift to me when the training is hard, running through the rain, cold and dark nights that winter brings, and on the day itself.

Thank you for visiting my page. I want to raise as much money as I can for Headway Surrey for gratitude for everything that they’ve done for me, especially Jo who has helped me so much and I cannot be more grateful. It would make such a difference to Headway Surrey as every penny raised helps them to provide the help and the support to those who need it across all of Surrey.

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Our aim is to enable adults in Surrey to live well with their acquired brain injury, to be independent and to support their families. To do this we offer a range of services to help with memory, information processing, decision making, managing fatigue, understanding the brain and cognition, emotional and behavioural changes. We provide peer support opportunities and social groups to enable independence and motivation to achieve their best. We support as many people as we can back into employment or volunteering. "You are my lifeline!"

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I want to start this with a disclaimer of sorts, as this is a lot of my personal story. I’m sorry this is long.

I have significant mental health difficulties I was becoming very unwell when I ran the London Marathon for the first time in 2018. I reached crisis point and ended up in a psychiatric hospital a week later. After several months I was on home leave prior to being discharged. 36 hours later I had to go back in to the hospital to collect some more medication and attend a mindfulness session. Somewhere along the line I developed epilepsy, I have no idea when or how but while my dad was signing us in to the hospital I had my first seizure and when I landed I hit my head on the slate floor. I sustained a skull fracture on the right side, and the force of my landing caused my brain to hit the left side of my skull known as a contra coup injury. I ended up with a skull fracture and a subarachnoid haemorrhage on the left.

My memory of this is very hazy. I remember being on the floor in the hospital and hearing the words ‘seizure’ and ‘ambulance’ but I was drifting in and out of consciousness. I remember being in a bed in A&E, a nurse washing some of the blood out of my hair, and a nurse and doctor having an altercation about whether the wound should be glued and stitched. I remember hearing ‘transfer to St Georges’ and actually making the doctor pinky promise that he wouldn’t put staples in my head.

I vaguely remember being in a room, expecting my dad and sister to visit. When they arrived, they’d been to Costa in the hospital reception. I don’t remember my dad being there, and after the visit I remember my sister being there but wearing a Woolworths uniform. She stopped working there in the early 2000’s. My brain was superimposing older memories to piece together what I wasn’t able to remember. I find it very difficult to trust my memories as I can’t always tell what is a true memory or when my brain has filled in the gaps. I can come across as really scatty at times when I can’t remember whole conversations the following day, or I forget things like appointments or where I need to be.

After about a week I remember suddenly becoming lucid. I was still having seizures, and when they happen I have no memory of them. I don’t notice any warning signs, and I’m not sure if there are any. Afterwards I can generally respond to instructions and support to move, but it takes me some time to become lucid again and I don’t know that I’ve had a seizure unless somebody tells me.

An Occupational Therapist came to see me on the ward armed with a clipboard and some worksheets. I remember thinking to myself ‘I know why you’re here, we both know that I’m fine so let’s do your little worksheet love and then we can both go about our day’. She gave me a worksheet to do that I remember having used with the children in a language unit in a mainstream infant school. It was a load of words and I had to put them into categories (food, transport, animals etc). I couldn’t do it. That was when I realised that I had a problem. I was given the phone number of a member of staff at Headway Surrey on a scrap of paper.

I had attention problems, word finding issues, memory difficulties. I found processing what was happening a real challenge. When I was speaking I couldn’t really put coherent sentences together. I was mixing up words and replacing them with something vaguely related or similar sounding. My memory was probably the thing that frustrated me the most. I was ok during the day, but the following day I couldn’t really remember what had happened the day before. I started writing everything obsessively because little things like what I’d had for dinner a few days ago was of no consequence but it worried me so much that I couldn’t remember. I’d always said at work that my memory was my super power but I was relying on it far too much, and one day it would fail me. I had reached that point.

I found some photos of my head wound before it was put back together. I asked my dad why they were on my phone and whether taking photos was the priority at that time. Apparently I told him to take those pictures. I have no memory of this.

I started attending Headway Surrey a while later initially on a 1:1 basis and then going to the day centre sessions. The staff and volunteers there helped me with the cognitive difficulties that I had, and external strategies to compensate for the things during everyday life that were challenging.

In all honesty I’m still waiting for that magic moment where something clicks and everything goes back into place. I’m having a hard time accepting how that magic moment isn’t going to happen, and this is something that I often talk about in my sessions. They say in life that time heals everything. I’m still waiting.

I’m still going to Headway Surrey for 1:1 sessions, and Jo has been fantastic in helping me understand my brain injury and the effects, as I don’t really have the insight and understanding myself. Jo helps me to put the situations where I’ve had problems into context of how my brain injury affects me. Headway Surrey supported me in getting back to work in my old job after 2 ½ years, and my rehabilitation came to work meetings with me over a period of time to help me understand when I lost my job due to some of the effects of my brain injury that had a real impact on my ability to do the work required.

I couldn’t be more thankful for the help and support that Headway Surrey have given me. That has been a crucial part of my journey in helping me with my recovery and giving me the tools to be able to get back to work, live independently and being able to go back to my own home. There’s no way that I would have been able to do those things without the support that they’ve given me, and they’ve helped me more than they can ever know.

In April 2026 I’m going to be running the London Marathon to raise money for Headway Surrey, as a debt of gratitude, and the money raised will mean so much to them. They are a very small local charity, but they give such specialist and life changing services for adults with acquired brain injuries across the whole of the county. I want to help raise awareness of brain injuries and the impact that they can have, and the fact that help is out there. Headway Surrey have been crucial in changing my life after my traumatic brain injury and they’ve helped me more than they can ever know.