Dusty Wentworth

There are moments in life when everything fractures – your identity, your memories, your body. When you're not just changed, you're remade. For me, that moment was the rupture of a brain aneurysm – a subarachnoid haemorrhage that erased 14 years of my life and reshaped everything I thought I knew about myself. I woke up in a hospital bed unable to walk, unable to remember much of my adult life, and unable to recognise the man I had once been. And so began the slow, gruelling journey of becoming someone new. A Life Interrupted Before the aneurysm, I had been many things – infantry soldier, bodyguard, husband, father, protector. I'd survived war zones, lived with PTSD, managed chronic pain, and kept moving forwards. But none of that prepared me for this. The aneurysm didn't just threaten my life, it rewrote it. Functional Neurological Disorder, fibromyalgia, partial blindness, tremors, and cognitive damage became my daily reality. My body no longer obeyed me. ...

Surviving the rupture changed everything — now I live in a body I barely recognise, searching for meaning in the wreckage. The doctors didn’t expect me to survive my subarachnoid haemorrhage. Some days, I wish I hadn’t. At 36, I was a fit, strong infantry soldier. At 50, I woke blind in one eye, unable to walk, with more than 14 years of my life erased. Survival didn’t mean carrying on with life as it was. It meant waking into a stranger’s body, holding memories that don’t feel like mine, and living with pain that never lets up. The Hole in My Timeline I don’t remember getting married. I don’t remember my children being born. These are the moments most fathers carry as treasures — and for me, they are emptiness. I look at wedding photos and see a stranger in my place. I hear stories of my children’s milestones and can’t recall a second of them. For me, those memories don’t exist. People pressured me: “Do you remember this? Do you remember that?” as if badgering me could som...

What does a man do when his body turns traitor—when his voice vanishes, his muscles shake, and the only strength left is the will to endure? This is my life with Functional Neurological Disorder (FND)—a battle fought not on foreign soil, but within my own skin. Yesterday should have been a day of celebration. My new bespoke wheelchair—a bright orange Quickie Nitrum—had just arrived, coinciding with the first anniversary of my discharge from a neurological rehabilitation centre. But as so often happens now, my body responded to the surge of emotion in a cruel and unpredictable way. By the afternoon, the toll had arrived. Excruciating pain gripped me. My speech was gone entirely. Tremors and muscle spasms rocked my body without mercy. Despite the considerable amount of pain medication I take, the pain always finds a way through. By 01:30, the spasms had become so violent they resembled a seizure. In moments like that, medication is useless. You have to retreat into your mind,...