Anniversary: two years since Kaye's accident

Normally I don’t do personal on the blog but today was a significant anniversary – it's exactly two years since my lovely wife Kaye had a terrible road accident.

Knocked off her feet and thrown into the air when hit by a downhill riding cyclist while she was out walking during her lunch break, she sustained multiple skull fractures, brain injuries and two broken clavicles. Not until she emerged from intensive care after a week did I learn that one of those fractures is associated with a 75% fatality rate. When I later spoke to the policeman who arrived on the scene he told me there was much blood on the road that his first instinct was that she must be dead.

Coming out of hospital she was told by all her doctors that her recovery would be long, slow and painful – and so it proved to be. Yet as shown by the above picture taken on holiday in Christchurch recently, she is in remarkable spirits considering everything she has gone through and the permanent disabilities that are her accident’s legacy.

Kaye used to be the second highest executive at human rights campaigner Amnesty International Australia but now she can only do part-time work at a lower level of responsibility. She is totally deaf in her right ear, though while her left ear is poor due to congenital hearing loss that pre-existed the accident, she’s able to function reasonably well with a hearing aid.

However she has lost the ability to appreciate vast amounts of music. A strange side effect of her brain injury is that much music that to everyone else sounds rich in tone and harmony to her sounds discordant and screeching (her idea of hell is to have to listen to the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds).

Monoaural hearing doesn’t exactly help. She can never tell which direction sound is coming from, which can sometimes be unintentionally comical – when someone speaks to her she will sometimes turn and look in the opposite direction. (Yes, she can laugh at this.)

Her nerves are often jagged. She can often yell suddenly in fright at the smallest unexpected sound or movement, such as a car horn, and finds the sound of plates and cups being rattled during washing-up so unbearable she has to leave the room. She has sometimes been plagued by “worms” – imaginary music that plays maddeningly in her head.

Yet despite all this she loves life, and apart from minor short-term memory issues has lost none of her considerable intellectual capacity - she gets through books at about five times the speed that I can ever manage. An inspiring woman to live with. I’m blessed.

Finally we both owe a huge thanks to the staff at Sydney's Royal Prince Alfred Hospital and the tireless rehabilitation staff and doctors at the Royal Rehab centre in North Ryde.