WELCOME:

Welcome to our website and thank you for visiting.

As some of you may know the Vernon family are very close and we have found ourselves thrown in to a situation of having to raise funds for my fathers care and equipment due to the acquired brain injury that he sustained in January 2015 after collapsing at home during a normal evening.

It is true when people say that until you have walked in other people’s shoes you should not judge and during this journey it has become something that we have learnt more and more.

The family have had to deal with so much seeing the person they dearly love change from one day to the next and then beginning the very slow journey to try and learn and improve.  No day with a brain injury is ever the same and we have learnt lot of new skills ourselves.

We have experienced heart breaking decisions, bureaucratic decision makers who feel that family are not important, moments of complete joy and elation when you see Brian succeed in something, sometimes only to followed by complete sadness if he has failed or is having yet another awful seizure.  Every day we wake up hoping that is an awful dream and it had never occurred.

But the truth is that it has and we have to deal with that and do everything we can in power to help the person who was the head of our little family.  Brian has given so much to the community and others.  He was a true gent with grit and determination and tries so hard every day through the awful pain that he now has.

So what have we learnt:

• we know a lot about brain injury
• we have been surprised at how little support there is out there
• we now know that Sussex has hardly any provision for helping people/families with brain injury
• most of all we have learnt to be resilient, to be strong and to believe in what you feel in your gut when something feels wrong
• we have learnt to never forget a happy moment, to laugh and to cry together, to respect each other, to hug each other when you are down …
• we have learnt that many people care, in Peacehaven  where we live, our friends, our work colleagues and our extended family across the world who just want to help – but just don’t know what to do from afar.

As time goes on with this website we are sure it will change, we will want to share the things with you all about Brian but also our journey.  We hope that you may be able to help us and if not then just to read and share our story that shows that we will never ever give up on Brian.

I want to thank you for taking the time to read our introduction and if you can help the great if not we thank you for visiting us.