Amazing fightback of budding author who lost her memory

Published on Saturday 15 March 2003 00:00

AS A teenager Lynsey Calderwood’s entire memory was wiped out when she fell off a chair and banged her head, but that has not stopped the young writer publishing her autobiography and writing a novel tutored by such well-known authors as Liz Lochead, Janice Galloway and James Kelman.

Calderwood’s severe brain damage went undiagnosed for ten months as her parents fought to prove their daughter’s fall had changed her personality. She was dismissed by the medical profession as a problem child with behavioural problems, bullied at school and eventually became anorexic.

"We lost our daughter, she went to the Girl Guides and never came back. A stranger returned and was a totally different wee girl than the one I gave birth to. We had to get to know her again. She looked like Lynsey but she didn’t have the same qualities," said her mother, Margaret.

She added: "We were fighting a losing battle trying to get help. There were no marks on her head but when she came home, she couldn’t read or write. Her school work went from 99 per cent to 1 per cent, but the doctors kept telling me she was attention-seeking and lazy."

Now 24, Calderwood features in the Lives Less Ordinary series on BBC1 on Monday night.

She talks about her life which changed during a Girl Guides meeting in 1992 when she banged her head on a stone floor. She was taken to the Royal Alexandria hospital in Paisley and was X-rayed. After a CT scan, she was sent home with the all-clear.

However, for Calderwood it was all new. "It was like occupying someone else’s body or being an alien who had just landed from another planet. I knew nothing about the person I was supposed to be. Although my body was 14, my brain was like a baby’s. I didn’t recognise my room, family and I felt completely alone - isolated inside my confused world," she said.

The accident had damaged areas of the brain responsible for many essential life tools - long and short-term memory, concentration, motor skills, balance, physical co-ordination, spatial and visual awareness, colour recognition and co-ordination, and the senses. The simplest of tasks were forgotten.

"I’d lost all my memories of people, places and events. I didn’t even know what food I liked, I couldn’t read or write. I could speak but I wasn’t communicating with anyone. It was like I had my hard-drive wiped out," said Ms Calderwood.

It is estimated that 16,500 children in Scotland suffer a head injury each year and although most make a full recovery, the more traumatic cases find the medical provision inadequate in terms of proper diagnosis and treatment.

Her head injury and memory loss went undiagnosed for more than ten months, leaving her family to cope with the consequences of her severe brain injury with no explanation for her erratic and distressing behaviour marred by anger and temper tantrums.

She was previously a placid, good-natured teenager, and the personality change was dramatic. In April 1993, Calderwood began psychiatric sessions at a behavioural unit at Paisley’s family centre, but no-one could find an explanation. Her mother revealed that after one assessment, a psychiatrist said that "she had never in her life met such an obnoxious teenager and couldn’t believe that someone could go to such lengths to attention-seek ... do you think she could be abusing substances?"

Eventually, Calderwood was referred to Dr Robert McCabe, a specialist in adolescent mental health problems, who within 20 minutes diagnosed memory loss. Calderwood was unable to cope with home life and being bullied at school, so Dr McCabe recommended she enter the adolescent psychiatric unit at Gartnaval Hospital in Glasgow. An intended six-week assessment stretched to four months, and she became clinically depressed and stopped eating. Eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia followed.

She said: "I was always lost all the time. I was never sure if it was me going the wrong way or if I was forgetting where people had told me to go, or if it was because people were sending me in the wrong direction."

Today, Calderwood’s brain still does not process information correctly, but over the years she has found ways to improve her attention span and function "normally" in the real world. She is now undertaking an MPhil in creative writing at Glasgow University and is working hard to finish her second book, after taking advice from Lochead, her tutor, to rewrite the first chapter.

Writing, she says, is her sanctuary and she had written poetry during her stay in Gartnaval Hospital. She cannot write with pen and paper so instead uses a computer.

"The creative writing classes at Cardonald College were the start for me. I didn’t do brilliantly in English but I loved writing poetry and short stories. My tutor encouraged me to put them together into a book. I was thinking I’m not Posh and Becks and no-one will want to read it, but I sent it off to two publishers and one phoned my house and said they’d like to offer me a contract," said Ms Calderwood.

Her autobiography Cracked was published in December 2002. On the basis of her book deal and a reference from tutor Dave Manderson, she was accepted on the postgraduate course at Glasgow University, a great achievement as she did not have a degree.

"I couldn’t do a degree because I’d fall asleep in the lectures. I have difficulty concentrating if people are just talking to me. I’m fine in discussions but I have very little visual memory."

She now tutors a creative writing class for people with mental health problems at Reid Kerr College.