The man with the missing brain A medical recovery that is baffling science - and giving hope to head injury patients

"Are you ready for our drive then?” Simon Lewis, 56, comes hobbling into his parents’ living room in Sherman Oaks, north of Los Angeles. An Englishman by birth, his public-school accent remains. “Brave man!” he chuckles. “Brave” is one way of putting it. “Foolish”, another. After all, Lewis has partial blindness in his left eye – he needs special glasses to see the road. He also suffers from “flat time” which means he can’t put his memories in the right order. This means if you replay him a piece of film backwards, he might

not notice. “So the trouble is,” he explains, “if I see a pedestrian on the side of the street, I can’t tell if he’s going to cross or just stand there.” But most of all, Lewis just hasn’t had much luck with cars. The reason for these difficulties is a traffic accident 20 years ago which killed his wife and left him with devestating injuries. They’d been married just five months. Simon Lewis was a well known film producer at the time, driving home amongst the wealthy and usually safe suburbs of Los Angeles. Then out of nowhere, a white van hit them side on at 75mph. Marcy was killed instantly and Lewis was so injured that the paramedic on the scene took him for dead. Twenty years on, Lewis’s life is still defined by the crash. Only this time, it’s a happier story, one that Lewis has told in a book called ‘Rise and Shine’ and before large audiences. It’s the story of his astonishing recovery, and it not only gives hope to sufferers of traumatic brain injury (TBI), but provides proof of the brain’s incredible ability to repair itself. The broken skull, jaw, pelvis, two collar bones and nine ribs have all more or l ess healed. It was the destruction of a third of his right hemisphere of his brain that took much, much longer to come back from. The bleeding in Lewis’s head at the time of the accident left him so bloated his brother David had to identify him, whilst he lay on the operating table, recalling, “He was this enormous Michelin man lying there with raccoon eyes”. Lewis went into a scale 15 coma that night – the most severe coma on the Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS). It’s as close as one can get to death without actually dying. Lewis remained in that state for 31 days. When he came to, Lewis was a shell. He couldn’t read or write, and he had severe amnesia – he wasn’t aware that he’d been in a crash at all. Doctors predicted he would need 24-hour medical and social care for the rest of his life. But then his recovery began. It has been a long road, littered with surgeries, and even now it isn’t over – but, today, Lewis has not only regained most of his cognitive function, he actually has an IQ as high as the one he had before the crash. A large team of surgeons, brain consultants and therapists have worked to rebuild his mind. But it has hinged on Lewis’s determination. “That’s why we chose Simon,” says Dr Suzy Walton, “Plenty of people with brain injuries survive, but he also has ambition, drive, confidence and, on top of that, he puts himself out there as a public speaker, which means he’s able to cope with nerves and anxiety.” The work, which was started with injured soldiers from World War Two, looks to re -train other parts of the brain to take on the jobs the damaged bits can no longer do – activities include physio, games and other problem solving exercises. Lewis was assessed at each stage with activities planned just for him rather than him follow a set programme. They made sure it was a gradual step-by-step programme that did not exhaust him. They also made sure his family and friends were working on the same issues at the same time, so he was in effect learning at home. Simon Lewis continues to receive treatment two decades after his accident and still has significant disabilities. But he feels lucky, ““I never lose sight of the fact that I get a chance that my wife will never have. It’s a responsibility of survivors to never complain, and to make the most of what remains.”