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Am I Still Me?
Five years ago broadcaster Sheena McDonald was hit by a police van and suffered massive head injuries. After a long painful journey to rebuild her shattered life and personality, she asks herself if she can ever be the same person she used to be.
I am not a neuro-scientist but you could say I have coal-face expertise, because I am a survivor of head-injury. I suffered such a severe head-injury that the medical profession thought that surviving at all was as much as could be expected. Just over a year after the injury, a doctor described me as "a walking miracle"—and I was still in primary recovery.
Five years on, I'm very much better. And given that the professionals are surprised—to the best of my knowledge, "miracle" is not a clinical term—I now have a layman's obsession to understand as much as I can about how the brain works—and how mine defied convention.
I was so determined to recover fully that I found it impossible to believe that I am not myself.
Of course, given the nature of my condition, my claimed expertise and authority on having been through serious trauma is tempered by the practical reality of being traumatised. In other words, I remember nothing about what happened to me. So I rely on others' memories and experience. I have been a journalist for more than 20 years. This is a classic journalistic exercise: to hunt for truth after the event.
This is why documentary-maker Roger Graef persuaded BBC Four and BBC Scotland to commission a documentary about what happened to me. I mean "me" literally. What did happen to me? What makes me me? And am I the same me I was five years ago? The documentary is called Who Am I Now?—and neurologically, that question makes perfect sense, as I discovered in the making of the programme.
I was hit by a police van while I was crossing the road on 26 February 1999. It was late at night and raining. The van was travelling on the wrong side of the road.
I was taken by ambulance to the nearest hospital's Accident and Emergency Unit. Intubation was carried out to allow assisted ventilation because I couldn't breathe for myself.
Big blue pumpkin
My brother came to see me the next day, so I asked him what he saw. I'd never wanted to go back to these lost days and weeks before, but now I was interested. He said I was in a coma and my head "looked like a big, blue pumpkin with a hole in it," while my eye was "not where it was supposed to be—halfway down your face".
In the evening, my partner, BBC journalist Allan Little arrived back from Moscow where he lived and worked. He recorded what he found:
"Sheena lay in the Intensive Care Unit covered with a single sheet. When I saw her I was sure it wasn't her and there had been mistake. She was unrecognisable. Her face was enormous, swollen and discoloured—red and blue in patches—and her eyelids were a violent discoloured crimson. Her chest rose and fell to the pace of the ventilator. There were tubes in her mouth supplying her with oxygen. Wires were taped to her face, her hands, her arms and across her chest. Behind her, black and green screens measured her heartbeat, her blood pressure, her breathing. The intensive care nurse explained that Sheena was heavily sedated and completely unaware. It was the first time that I had really confronted the frightening prospect that she might emerge from this brain-damaged."
So Allan thought I didn't look like myself, and was already worried that I would never be me again. And for a long time I wasn't. I suffered five or six weeks of what's called post-traumatic amnesia.
Too long?
Conventional neurological wisdom insists that such a period of amnesia inevitably changes the sufferer. My consultant neurologist at the time spelled this out to me all too clearly in the making of the documentary. I was shocked. I was so determined to recover fully that I found it impossible to believe that I am not myself. But that was only the start. It has taken me years to recover to the degree I have. Doctors used to think recovery stopped after a few months, but I'm living proof that this is not so. My mother says she always knew I would recover, and would mutter "Get a grip, Sheena!" to my hospital bed—so I joke that I didn't dare not recover for fear of disobeying her.
Those bold enough to hire me to do what I used to do seem satisfied that this person called Sheena McDonald is as good as ever
Making this film has taught me a great deal. I think it is not typically Scottish to talk or ask questions about oneself, so doing it for this documentary revealed how I was and am perceived by friends, relatives and strangers—and I was often surprised.
I am convinced that I am myself, and those bold enough to hire me to do what I used to do—work as a broadcast journalist—seem satisfied that this person called Sheena McDonald is as good as ever. But am I a cunning simulation of the person I was? Or will I achieve lasting fame as a neurological footnote for freakishness? Or even change what neuroscientists expect of the severely head-injured?
Reprinted with permission. Copyright 1999 BBC.