Many of you have written to SameYou about your experience of brain injury and told us how you identified with Emilia's story. There was a common feeling of relief about hearing a familiar story from someone young, and speaking out to normalize the injury. People were comforted that Emilia had gone through something similar to them or to a family member or loved one.
The overwhelming emotion was of gratitude that Emilia was breaking her silence and that enabled and emboldened so many others to tell their brain injury story - some for the first time. It was as if people now have permission to speak out about their story.
I get days when I just want to give up. But after hearing your story it has made me realize, I'm not on my own!
You have told us that by sharing your stories, and reading other people's, offers hope, comfort and much needed peer-to-peer support that is often hard to find.
SameYou have created this support resource called Portraits to tell the untold story of brain injury. If you would like to share your story, you can submit your story via our Share your story page.
I was 27 years old when I was in a tragic car accident which nearly claimed my life. I am now 54. I remember seeing a p-plater in the rear window of a yellow station wagon. I had been t-boned in my right door jamb pillar. The p-plater had lost control from the other side of the road by colliding in a 360-degree spin.
I was an intensive care specialist and a cyclist. Now I am neither. I hit a lamppost at 65 kmh.
In August 2023 I had a bad case of the flu, which ended in a terrifying migraine that lasted six days. The auras were so intense that I couldn’t lie down at night because of the pain. I explained to my local doctor that it was like trying to give birth with my head at night and was told to come back in three days if the migraine medications didn’t help. I did get better over the next days, thinking this is what life with migraines is.
The afternoon of July 16, 2018, I went to the gym to run and lift weights. This was a workout routine I had done hundreds of times over the past few years, and nothing seemed particularly different that day...
On December 6, 2022, I had a sudden ischemic stroke (where the blood supply to brain tissue is blocked by a blood clot). This caused paralysis of the right side of my body, partial paralysis of my right arm, and severe speech and cognitive impediments, such as difficulties with word finding and sentence construction...
I was laughing and joking until I suddenly screamed and slowly collapsed to the floor. The stage manager came rushing in and got me to repeat my name and say where I was, but I became unresponsive.
I suffered a severe brain hemorrhage on the 4th of November 2022. I’m from London and at the time of the brain injury, I was working as a youth empowerment worker, bar supervisor and a poet and actress...
I originally acquired a brain injury as a teenager when I lived in England. The injury was not diagnosed for approximately 5 years. Eventually, I was diagnosed with hydrocephalus and had a shunt placed. This unfortunately failed twice causing me to go into comas...
21 years ago, I was five months pregnant when my optician saw a brain tumor in my eyes. He sent me to the optical clinic at St James’s University Hospital in Leeds and within a few hours, I was transferred to the neurology department at Leeds General Infirmary...
I was 28 when I had suffered from a stroke in my thalamus. The thalamus is a paired grey matter structure of the diencephalon located near the center of the brain, and is the body's information relay station. All information from the body's senses (except smell) must be processed through the thalamus before being sent to the brain's cerebral cortex for interpretation. The thalamus also plays a role in sleep, wakefulness, consciousness, learning and memory.