Former Narrandera resident and high school student Cooper Maher, 24, is still living with a brain injury almost a year after his horror crash.

Cooper had just buried a friend who died by suicide when he jumped behind the wheel of a car after having a few drinks. The next thing he recalls is waking up in a hospital bed.

He was travelling around 120kp/h on Strontian Road at Boree Creek, near Narrandera.

The car flipped and Cooper was thrown out of the front windscreen in November 2022.

He was on life support for a couple of days and then in a coma and lucky to be alive. The 24-year-old sustained a traumatic brain injury and split his knee open.

Almost a year on, he says it was not the physical injuries that still impacted him, but the invisible one no-one noticed.

There is often no physical evidence but it can affect how a person thinks and feels, posing huge impacts on day-to-day life.

One in 45 people in Australia live with a brain injury.

“It is reasonably common,” his Albury occupational therapist Jenny Goodfellow said.

“It is a significant thing that happens really suddenly. A person is having a normal life just going about their day-to-day activities and, all of a sudden, there’s a trauma and life changes,” she said.

Brain injuries can occur from any number of things such as a car accident, being hit by a car, assaults, falls, sports injuries, strokes or haemorrhages.

Ms Goodfellow says more education is needed around traumatic brain injuries.

“The injury does not affect a person’s intelligence and the impacts are often unseen. People with a brain injury are often walking and talking and to the general public look like they’re just normally functioning,” she said.

“It’s really what’s going on inside the person’s brain that you can’t see, that makes life so challenging to get back to.”

Ms Goodfellow is the coordinator of a transitional home, Tarkarri, based in Albury on the NSW/Victorian border.

She said no two people were the same when it came to a brain injury.

“People experience changes to many skills in life. Things like thinking skills, memory, planning, concentration, difficulties with communication, difficulties with physical skills, changes to behaviour, mood, [or] emotions,” Ms Goodfellow said.

Recovery can take anywhere from several months to several years and sometimes people do not ever fully recover.

At the transitional home, a multidisciplinary team works directly with clients, who live on-site, supporting them and their families to get back to life as it was before the injury.

Clients learn to break down tasks and regain skills to accomplish those everyday jobs again.

Cooper said it was easy for people to forget what had happened because their injuries were not visible. It was easier to talk about the injury to his knee than his brain.

“I tell them what’s happened with my brain but until everyone actually starts getting a bit more educated on brain injuries, no-one is really going to [understand],” he said.

Ms Goodfellow said more community awareness and education on the disability was vital.

“Most physical recovery will happen in the first 12 months. And then we see the thinking recovery, more over a two-year period, but it can keep going on for many years,” she said.

“It’s really about having compassion and empathy … because even though you can’t necessarily see the changes that have happened with a brain injury, they have a big impact on a person’s ability to get back to life.” 

This article appeared in the Narrandera Argus, 31 August 2023.