Missing Memories and My New Set of Wheels

“They say what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Personally, I think whoever coined that phrase never had to navigate a shag-pile carpet in a wheelchair while trying to remember whether they actually liked olives, or if that was just a pre-aneurysm personality trait.”

If my life were a car, it would be a vintage Land Rover dropped from a Hercules transport plane and then declared “probably stress” by the mechanic.

Welcome to my world: a whirlwind of military-grade PTSD, Fibromyalgia, Functional Neurological Disorder (FND), and the aftermath of a ruptured brain aneurysm that decided to delete fourteen years of my life like a bored teenager clearing browser history.

The Great Identity Heist

Living with a Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) is like waking up halfway through a film. You are the lead actor, but you have forgotten all your lines and the script is written in Cantonese. Fourteen years are gone. Vanished. Weddings, birthdays, friendships, arguments, entire chapters of life that everyone else remembers except me.

This memory wipe did not just take the data. It fractured my identity. I looked in the mirror and saw a man I did not recognise. That feeling was made worse by a left eye that decided to retire early, leaving me half-blind and permanently vulnerable to anything approaching from the port side.

As a veteran, my identity was built around being the tough guy. I was the protector, the provider, the bloke who could carry a heavy pack for miles without complaint. Suddenly, I was a man in a wheelchair who could not remember his own thirties. It is a significant blow to the ego when you transition from soldier to asking for help reaching the digestives on the top shelf.

The Husband, The Father, and The Power Chair

Coming to terms with my role as a husband and father has been the steepest climb of all. In my head, a father is meant to be solid and dependable. Instead, I felt fragile, frustrated, and permanently aware of my own limitations.

The hardest part has been dependency. My wife went from being my partner-in-crime to becoming my primary carer. There is nothing quite like the romance of your spouse helping manoeuvre your wheelchair through a bathroom door that is three inches too narrow.

Then there is David, my Personal Assistant funded through Adult Social Services. He is brilliant, but accepting that I need support just to navigate a trip to the shops was a massive hit to my masculinity. For a long time, I did what most men do. I tried to out-stubborn it. That worked about as well as expected.

I wanted to be the hero of the story. Instead, I felt like the bloke whose nervous system could short-circuit because somebody dropped a spoon.

The “It’s All Linked” Club

Then we have the triple threat: PTSD, Fibromyalgia, and FND. Doctors love telling me these conditions are “all linked”, which often feels like medical shorthand for saying your brain has become so overloaded that it has started pulling random fire alarms throughout the body.

Fibromyalgia feels like being hit by a bus, except the bus is invisible and somehow follows you into every room.

FND adds the element of unpredictability. Since the aneurysm cemented my need for a wheelchair, FND has found other ways to make itself known, including triggering seizures from stress, overload, or sometimes apparently nothing at all.

The worst part is not always the severity. It is the unpredictability. You stop trusting your own body. Every dropped object, loud noise, spike in stress, or sudden movement becomes a potential trigger. Your nervous system stops feeling like part of you and starts feeling like a hostile third party.

It is exhausting living in a body that behaves like it has its own agenda.

The Keyboard is Mightier than the Brain Bleed

So how do you rebuild a life when the foundations feel like Swiss cheese held together with trauma and pain?

For me, the answer became writing.

When I started this blog, I was lost. Writing gave me a way to examine the chaos instead of drowning in it. It allowed me to process the anger of the stolen years, the humiliation of dependency, and the reality of becoming disabled in a society that still quietly equates masculinity with physical capability.

Putting words on a page gave me distance from it all. It gave shape to things that previously existed only as noise in my head.

Over time, I realised something important. Being a man is not about how much weight you can carry, how physically intimidating you are, or whether you can still do everything you once did.

It is about how you conduct yourself when life strips those things away.

Through writing, I found a purpose that was not tied to physical strength or memory retention. I found a way to contribute again.

The Final Word

Recovery, for me, is not about walking again or magically reclaiming lost memories. It is about building a new identity from what remains rather than mourning what has gone.

That foundation has to be built on honesty, adaptation, and dark humour. Without the humour, the weight of it all would crush you.

Besides, being in a wheelchair does at least guarantee me a seat at the pub.

More importantly, though, I am still very much in the fight.

#Dustywentworth

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