How I acquired my injury

I acquired a brain injury due to a reasonless, random, violent attack upon me in public during 2003. After leaving an evening concert in central London a married couple of friends of mine invited me to stay the night at their home, a flat on Commercial Road in London. I accepted their offer and travelled there safely by mini-cab. After the mini-cab had safely delivered me to their front door I had to wait for a short period of time for my friends to arrive at their home on foot from the local night bus stop. Whilst waiting, a random psychopath secretly approached me from behind and violently attacked me over the head with a blunt object. Shortly after this attack, I was spotted by two off-duty police officers as I lay dying, on the pavement. The officers called for an ambulance, which took me to Hospital, where my life was saved.

How my injury affected my life

After a decent A-Level education and Imperial College education I ended up working in the I.T. industry, specifically software for the DTV sector. This form of work was natural to me, I enjoyed it and I had started to acquire a reasonable level of experience. I was in the process of searching for a new job just prior to acquiring my brain injury. My injury obviously put a sudden halt in my career and has made the concept of working my way back into work in the software industry one that has taken time to develop. Because I am such a determined person, I have started to make solid plans on my way back into software now but if I had never acquired a brain injury then it is most likely that I would be rather well developed in my career by now, without any problem.

The positive I was insistent on developing during my recovery

Whilst recovering from a brain injury I was strongly driven to make the use of my life worthwhile. Using my skills in counterpoint and music composition theory learnt during my teens and a deep inspiration from the music of J.S. Bach, I devoted the year 2007 to the creation of a trilogy of string-accompanied flute sonatas, which sound surprisingly baroque, based upon my musical tastes. The arrangement of the debut performance of these works being directed towards a charity affair was, for me naturally, dedicated to helping the charity ‘Falklands Conservation’ because of their help of penguins, who are a species that I have a great love for.

Andrew Wenham-Prosser