Brain Injury Association

Headway is a UK-wide charity that works to improve life after brain injury by providing vital support and information services, it played a substantial part in the post-hospital discharge first year period of my recovery, whereby it:

  • Gave me the opportunity to get out and meet new folk
  • Provided facilities to take part in activities such as playing pool or table tennis
  • Enabled folk to gain reassurance of their cognitive function in activities such as pub quizzes
  • Provided a dining room where we had meals (and therefore conversations) together

More than anything else though, Headway provided a wonderful community environment. I saw it as a place where folk with brain injuries could engage with people who were experiencing similar limitations to my own. At Headway I was able to feel part of something whereby my limitations didn’t make me feel “different.”

Simplified Password Management

During covid-19 lockdown periods, an occupational therapist who’d supported me back in 2016, viewed an IT buddy password management video which I’d published on YouTube. She invited me to present a session about password management on a weekly Zoom call with Headway South Manchester in February 2021, which was used to keep the Headway participants in touch with each other. I was inspired to simplify and improve my way of explaining password management, the output of which can be seen below.

Bank Card PINs

I was asked during one of the Headway Zoom calls if the magic number could be leveraged for use with credit card and ATM card PINS. The constraints to be observed would be that each card must have a different PIN – and the PIN mustn’t be written down anywhere. The short answer to the question was “no”, but I came up with the following idea which I’m certain is a satisfactory solution.

Use the first block of four numbers on your bank card as your PIN. An example of using this approach is shown below:

  • Credit Card Number: 6548 3364 7821 3258 – use 6548 as the PIN
  • Current Account Number: 36579241 – use 3657 as the PIN

The method suggested here is by no means proposed as a perfect solution for PINs. However, for anyone with severe memory difficulties which makes PIN recall practically impossible, this would be an entirely satisfactory approach.

Raj Gataora

In 2022 I viewed a video presented by a Nottingham Headway participant and was utterly absorbed by his story / message. There’s also a further article which refers to Raj’s resilience in his recovery.

I became so inspired that I had to meet up with Raj, whereby I presented him with the T-shirt he can be seen wearing in the following photograph 😀