You are listening to a podcast from the HealthTech Research Centre in Brain and Spinal Injury. We've been chatting to some innovators and some doctors and some therapists and we are talking to some people with lived experience of brain injury too. So I'm delighted to be joined today by Greg Dean.

Hi Greg, it's nice to see you.

I thought I've not had either of those and that's the last thing I remember for about a week. I turned out I had a subarachnoid haemorrhage, a non-aneurysmal as it turns out which is probably one of the better ones to have and I spent about three and a half weeks in Addenbrookes courtesy of that. Slightly complicated because some of the surgery that was performed to remove the blood that had pooled around my brain required a drain putting in and that drain unfortunately introduced an infection around my brain which was probably just about as damaging I think as the initial bleed.

So it took a little bit while to sort that out. When it came to about three and a half weeks out we were all quite positive that I was going to be discharged and everything was going to give or take, with a bit of time get back to normal.

I have a tendency as an ex-scientist of going into detail a little too much so there are two types of subarachnoid haemorrhages some which are called aneurysmal and they are typically there from birth and they're deformations of the of the arteries in the lining of the brain and those often require repair and often will come in clusters and again you'll be scanned and looked for them. Mine is termed as non-aneurysmal bleed and tends to be thought of as spontaneous and often induced by high blood pressure doing as I was at the time and so yes I was scanned in several different ways to see if they could find a bleed and there was nothing there and the chances were, I was told, that the bleed actually had stopped itself by the time I even got anywhere near a hospital. So the damage is done by blood pooling and what it tends to do is create pressure that affects the frontal lobes of your brain and gives damage around those specific areas of the brain.

So for instance for six months I had my driving licence suspended I wasn't allowed to drive because in essence I had brain surgery. Inside my head I felt I could drive as per normal I didn't have any issues that I could get in the car I could drive for three hours on the road and not have a problem. When I got my licence back however though I can drive and can concentrate on it I can only do that when I'm not tired and I have a much more limited range in which I can time I can do that for.

So it's very much the time that it was a real slow discovery of where my issues lie because we weren't expecting to see any and it wasn't until I tried certain things that I suddenly realised that I was having problems in doing that and you think well with time given another few more months things will come back to you but at the six-month mark we realised that things weren't really as they should be and I was not cognitively functioning by that anyone would tell.

I think that's one of the hard things for folks to see because they see a glimpse of you being able to do those things I see you James and you seem like you're just living a normal life and you know you didn't have to do those planning and I think it's good that we can do that and we can we can live that way but it doesn't always go to plan and when it doesn't go to plan it's very hard then to kind of explain to folks why that is.

I guess trying to give something back to the community.

So it was something that I found the most rewarding things I've done since stepping back from work.

It's very different research but it's an environment that doesn't feel that unfamiliar to me so I guess that's one of the other things that kind of drew me to the opportunity.

As for gaps I mean some of the work that I've done through NIHR as a patient, things like fatigue tracking apps. It was a brilliant idea I'm not sure that's come to fruition or not but I think when you're first faced with something like understanding that you suffer from fatigue it's a very nebulous concept and actually something that actually helps you see and understand how you're impacted by that and how certain things interplay with each other. That was an absolutely brilliant idea so hopefully something is happening with that work.

I think you still need to have the experience to really understand what's going on but that kind of thing for me would be invaluable. I think for other folks I mean there's anything where just making some of that load on planning and organising that kind of where you can create stress moments that if it's not there it will be so much more valuable. So making that interface for technology for folks that are less cognitively or more cognitively impaired will be a big challenge to make things better for those folks, more accessible for folks.

Greg's there with me too right and he's been through it and he's finding ways to cope and to manage things and suggesting those kinds of technologies as well to support is a really valuable thing to do. Well listen we have been chatting for quite a while now and I'm conscious that sitting in front of a screen like this makes us both very tired so I'm going to wrap up there. Thanks ever so much for your time Greg, really appreciate your input on the call today.