Jake Newbury

A date that’s now imprinted in my own, my family and my close friends’ minds is Monday 24th February 2020.

It was (or what should have been) a normal Monday morning we’re all familiar with, going to work. I love to ride to work and start the day with energy. However, I don’t remember what happened on this Monday morning, a short bike ride through central London. My parents received a phone call around 10/11 am from the Metropolitan Police informing them I was involved in a road traffic accident and to travel to London immediately. Before this, the London Air Ambulance was first on the scene, less than 10 minutes (during rush hour morning traffic) from the first 999 call! Performing life-saving treatment until my heart was beating to a near 4 BPM. I woke up three weeks later from a deep induced coma in a hospital bed in ICU, with my parents by my bedside. My brothers and friends visited daily. I couldn’t talk, couldn’t remember why I was there, couldn’t walk and went through a delirium stage, which according to my parents, was horrendous. Around ten days after this point, I was only starting to be able to communicate in some fashion, a nod of the head, even trying to write.

I had suffered a Traumatic brain injury (TBI) and a Major head injury. I also incurred many fractures to the base of the skull and fractures to all of my facial bones. I was rushed out of the hospital earlier than anticipated due to covid becoming rife. During its first peak, I left the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel on 3rd April 2020, to rehabilitate at my parent's home in Burnley instead of sending me to Preston Royal. Both parents then supervised me at home with the help of many zoom calls with Physiotherapy and Speech and Language therapy. It was a critical stage of my recovery we (my mum, dad and myself) all followed their lesson plans on a daily basis. We all managed to work together successfully during covid.

Years later, I'm still slowly recovering from the trauma, with mental fatigue and pain in the head when overworked or doing tasks that I would have usually done before without pain or tiredness, without issue. This can be difficult when you know you can do something and you used to do it in a certain way before, but now I'm learning to adapt and accept I can't do it anymore (at least yet).

I was given a full report when I could and was fit to understand what I’d been through by Alice (The Neurotrauma Clinical Nurse Specialist at the Royal London Hospital) and Frank (From the London Air Ambulance)