Cooper Maher had just buried a friend who died by suicide when he jumped behind the wheel of a car after having a few drinks.

The next thing he remembers is waking up in a hospital bed.

“They told me I’d been in a pretty serious accident. I didn’t believe them,” he said.

He was travelling around 120kp/h on Strontian Road at Boree Creek, New South Wales, about 80 kilometres west of Wagga Wagga.

The car flipped and Mr Maher was thrown out of the front windscreen.

“I was on life support for a couple of days and then in a coma. I’m definitely lucky to be alive,” he said.

The 24-year-old sustained a traumatic brain injury and split his knee open.

The crash occurred in November 2022 and, almost a year on, he said it was not the physical injuries that still impacted him, but the invisible one no-one noticed.

Brain injury impacts

One in 45 people in Australia live with a brain injury.

“It is reasonably common,” occupational therapist Jenny Goodfellow said.

“It is a significant thing that happens really suddenly. A person is having a normal life just going about their day-to-day activities and, all of a sudden, there’s a trauma and life changes,” she said.

Brain injuries can occur from any number of things such as a car accident, being hit by a car, assaults, falls, sports injuries, strokes or haemorrhages.

The injury does not affect a person’s intelligence and the impacts are often unseen.

“People with a brain injury are often walking and talking and to the general public look like they’re just normally functioning,” Ms Goodfellow said.

“It’s really what’s going on inside the person’s brain that you can’t see, that makes life so challenging to get back to.”

Ms Goodfellow is the coordinator of a transitional home, Tarkarri, based in Albury on the New South Wales-Victorian border.

She said no two people were the same when it came to a brain injury.

“People experience changes to many skills in life,” she said.

“Things like thinking skills, memory, planning, concentration, difficulties with communication, difficulties with physical skills, changes to behaviour, mood, [or] emotions,” Ms Goodfellow said.

Invisible injury

Adam Scott, 38, said the psychological side of his brain injury had been the biggest challenge.

He was working as a contractor in Parkes, putting optic fibres in the ground when he was assaulted by someone unknown to him in February.

He was flown to Westmead Hospital in Sydney and spent two months in the intensive care unit before starting rehabilitation at Tarkarri.

“I’ve learned how to live with the injury, which I will live with for [the rest of] my life,” he said.

“Just learning the basic fundamentals of day-to-day living again that were taken away from me with the injury [has been the hardest].”

Mr Scott did not remember much of the assault but said it had been a difficult experience.

“For me, lying in a hospital bed with no broken bones, no sign of an injury. I didn’t have an understanding that I had gone through a traumatic brain injury,” he said.

“It’s dealing with the trauma, and also the great unknown around the injury and having no experience [that] has been very difficult.”

Learning everyday tasks

Recovery can take anywhere from several months to several years and sometimes people do not ever fully recover.

At the transitional home, a multidisciplinary team worked directly with clients, who lived on-site, supporting them and their families to get back to life as it was before the injury.

“We take things for granted like making a cup of tea or planning an evening meal, we just do it,” Ms Goodfellow said.

“After a brain injury, the person actually has to stop and really think about, OK, how do I go about this task.”

Clients learn to break down tasks and regain skills to accomplish those everyday jobs again.

“Whether it’s getting their breakfast, getting lunch, getting a cup of coffee, cooking an evening meal, go shopping for the groceries, being able to walk safely in the community, returning to physical activities, whether it’s sport, the gym … building up their stamina and their strength to return to work,” Ms Goodfellow said.

Community awareness

Both Mr Maher and Mr Scott said it was easy for people to forget what had happened because their injuries were not visible.

Mr Maher said it was easier to talk about the injury to his knee than his brain.

“I tell them what’s happened with my brain but until everyone actually starts getting a bit more educated on brain injuries, no-one is really going to [understand],” he said.

Ms Goodfellow said more community awareness and education on the disability was vital.

“Most physical recovery will happen in the first 12 months. And then we see the thinking recovery, more over a two-year period, but it can keep going on for many years,” she said.

“It’s really about having compassion and empathy … because even though you can’t necessarily see the changes that have happened with a brain injury, they have a big impact on a person’s ability to get back to life.”