Hi all - first post from me:
I had an ischaemic stroke on 1st July of this year. It affected mainly my left eye though to a lesser extent my right, the result being a loss of sight in the centre of my vision, which amongst other things has made reading difficult (the first half of each word is missing!). It has also had some impact on my cognitive abilities, what I believe are called ‘executive functions’, which I think of as the ability to organise my thinking. It has also affected my balance to some extent, left me with the most awful headaches, and a couple of other things that I still find cropping up even now, a couple of months afterwards.
According to my doctors, my stroke was relatively minor, though as I said to them, it is the most serious one I have ever known! I am recovering well though and realise from my time in hospital and meeting other people, that I have in many ways got off lightly.
My usual work is writing for magazines and newspapers, and I also illustrate a lot of my own articles with my photography. Obviously I can’t work at the moment, and when it first happened I was devastated - I write a lot about the environment, which tends to require a lot of research (scientific papers and law, regulations etc.) and I couldn’t dream of doing that yet. When it first happened, for the first couple of weeks I struggled to create a file on my computer. It was really awful, but my recovery is progressing well.
This brings me to the reason I’m posting here. I am finding - and particularly in those early days - that my photography has become increasingly important to me. I’ve been doing a lot of walking and making landscape pictures. I am finding enormous comfort in these images, the act of making them, of thinking in pictures, it actually feels somehow ‘healing’.
And it isn’t just my own photographs, but looking at art in general. I am lucky to live close to Manchester and have been visiting the galleries a lot. The Whitworth Gallery has an exhibition of Turner’s works at the moment. In the first few weeks, I remember standing in front of one of his wonderful landscape paintings, with the skies and a storm swirling as two figures battle through it, and becoming completely lost in the image, while the descriptive panel at the side at that stage was just a jumble of words I struggled to read at all.
I am wondering if anybody else who has suffered a similar brain injury, or someone they care for, has found themselves similarly comforted by art, or engaging in - or experiencing - other creative work, I guess? I’d really like to hear your experiences if you have - I am trying to find out how unusual or otherwise my own experiences have been.
I’ve heard of ‘art therapy’, but I must admit I’d never taken it very seriously before. My own experience though has taught me otherwise, I can honestly say that for me, taking these photographs and immersing myself in art in general has kept me sane. Can anybody relate?
Thanks for reading! 
Andrew
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