Don't write me off

after a catastrophic car accident, but has since written herself back to life.

Gillian Firth fizzles with energy when she talks about her work. Her words may occasionally be slurred and her train of thought might sometimes come off the rails, but her enthusiasm is relentless.

A devastating car accident in Bahrain ten years ago left her in a coma for six weeks. When she finally came round, doctors diagnosed brain damage and told her to prepare for life in a wheelchair.

But Gillian, a self-proclaimed "stroppy cow", was having none of it. Brain damage or not, she was going to walk, talk and get her life back on track.

"The first few years were just a blur of hospitals and falling over," she explains with her trademark good humour. "It was a frustrating and lonely time. And not just for me; it was devastating for my parents too. They started off being super-happy that I was alive, but then the reality of day-to-day life set in."

This energy-sapping reality was the subject of Gillian's first book, Gillian Mk 2, which chronicled her slow, painful recovery.

She began writing when she returned home. After a lengthy period of rehabilitation in Leeds, she settled into a new flat in Selby and got herself a second-hand computer as part of her divorce settlement.

Gillian had been married for a year and was teaching English at a Bahrain secondary school when the accident happened. She doesn't remember anything about the accident, but she does remember that her marriage was happy.

Unfortunately, things started to go wrong almost immediately after the crash. Her husband's hospital visits became less and less frequent. When she was transferred back to the UK, she was lucky to see him once or twice a year. Then he revealed he had found someone else.

"No one knows how they will react in these circumstances," she says. "I was surprised that he did not stick around, but he wasn't the only one. My address book went from being jam-packed to being virtually empty after the accident."

Gillian spent a year writing her first book - a quirky, funny and often painfully honest diary of her recovery - and self-published it with the help of Yorkshire Art Circus. It is now in its 12th reprint and has sold more than 2,000 copies.

"Writing the book was very cathartic," she explains. "By writing things down, I ironed out the creases in my life. It also got me off my bum and out of the bloody flat."

She joined a writing class in Selby and began to make a whole new group of friends. It was a struggle to get to classes and social gatherings, even though she had got herself out of her wheelchair by this point and was gradually weaning herself off her walking sticks, but she persevered.

Sometimes, however, her rediscovered enthusiasm for life was given a nasty knock by inconsiderate strangers.

"The first day I walked out the door without any sticks I felt so proud of myself, then someone pointed and shouted 'oh my God, look at her, she's a right spacker'," says Gillian. "I felt completely crushed."

The brain stem injury she suffered in Bahrain damaged the part of her brain that controls balance, co-ordination and speech. This means that while the good side of her brain remembers she used to be able to run, jump and stand on her head, the bad side can't remember how to do it.

"I still have to think about every step I take," she explained. "I have to remind myself to lift my foot up, put it down, swing my arms, everything - nothing comes naturally. It's very frustrating. I still can't do two things at once. If I try to walk and talk at the same time, everything goes wobbly and wrong. The only things I can do successfully at the same time are write and smoke. Oh, and I can drink coffee too, although I sometimes spill a bit on my way from the kitchen to the computer."

Gillian is now working on her second book, a supernatural novel she says will be "weird, creepy, thought-provoking and intense", and is trying to launch a second career as a public speaker, talking to groups such as the WI about her recovery.

"I've never had a problem talking about it," she says. "My problem is not knowing when to shut up. I've had a lot of letters from people with experience of brain injury who bought my first book and got a lot out of it, but I didn't write it with the intention of helping people. I wrote it to kill time because I was sad and lonely."

She's not lonely anymore though. She has an ever-widening circle of new friends and a relationship that she is obviously extremely happy with. It has been a long, hard struggle but, ten years down the line, her life really does seem to be back on track.

"Many people have said how brave I am, but I'm not," says Gillian. "I've just got on with it. You have to work with what you've got, don't you?"

To order a copy of Gillian Mk 2, write to Gillian Firth, PO Box 81, Selby Post Office, Selby YO8 8YJ, enclosing a cheque for £11.99 (including p&p).

Updated: 09:43 Saturday, July 03, 2004