On the 5th December 1995 (Eighteen and a half years ago from 2014), I had a lifechanging experience. In December 1995 I had a very severe brain injury falling off a boogie-board in shallow water in the surf at Peregian Beach on the Sunshine Coast off Queensland, Australia.
I was:
At the moment these are my continuing problems:
The result of this for me, is that my wife Harriet now to manages all the finances on a day to day basis. Prior to my accident, we ran a small landscape design and construction business and I did most of that.
The Context Of My Brain-injury:
For twenty years, I ran a small Landscape Design and Construction Company undertaking very creative, individual designer gardens for wealthy residential clients around Brisbane. I was an artistic person, a lateral thinker ..... more artist than businessman. I thought of a landscape as a three-dimensional piece of space that people walked through. This space changed with time as it grew and changed with the time of day. Shadows vs. sun patterns, boulders, colour, plants, trees, earth-forms, solid structures and water. These were the ingredients I used. Unknowingly, I was a landscape sculptor. Rather an intangible product to sell and run a business with!! I built a structure for my life: my marriage, family and business from this base.
Harriet and I are into simplicity and recycling. We live in this amazing house built out of rejected materials for $32,000 in 1981 (33 years ago in 2014). We spent another $20,000.00 on it that the builder hadn't allowed for. See the house and garden on my personal experiences website at http://www.kenaitken.net/ (If you have problems in openingup the website, it is suggested you place your cursor on the very end of the website and it should open up. This was originally a PDF file). Look for the page OUR HOUSE and see the posts: Our House and The Actual Garden.
The business situation all changed overnight when I had a simple accident which resulted in severe consequences. I went through a real transformation of life. Before my accident, another significant incident occurred. Through my business connections, I had held an insurance Income Protection Policy for several years. One night in July 1995, (four months before my accident I didn’t know I was going to have), a man phoned me out of the Yellow Pages and said he wanted to talk to me about an Income and Protection Policy he was promoting.
I said, ‘I’ve already got one of those. I don’t need to talk to you’. We talked about rates and benefits for a while. They were far better than the policy I had. As a result, I went ahead with a different but small company at the time. If it had been my wife, she would have said ‘No’ as she would never talk to someone like that on the phone but fortunately it was me. This policy was for life and was CPI indexed. Four months later, I had my accident.
In many ways this accident and its consequences, has been the best thing that has happened to myself and the family and even though it has been a difficult experience. I have now been provided with an income much better than a Government Pension. I think there is irony and humour in this. I had worked hard all my life for very little, whereas now I don’t have to work at all. I am now on a permanent holiday for life and yet I still get paid for it. It is quite adequate for our needs and Harriet could work as well which she has done for the last 18.50 years till she retired late last year. We own our house well, so we do not have mortgage payments to make every month.
By Ken Aitken ... ... When he was in hospital in February 1996