This short book can be described in a few words: inspiring, insightful and unexpected.

This is the touching journey of a young Sri Lankan medical student in London afflicted with brain injury after a routine tonsillectomy went wrong. “I had come back from the dead but was no more than a zombie.”

Antoinette is refreshingly raw and candid in her detail of living life as a young, vibrant, attractive woman with a penchant for drunken partying who is now dealing with memory loss and its affect not only on her life but on the lives of her family and friends. Rose, Antoinette’s sister and also a doctor, even admits, “I heard a colleague once comment on a family friend with dementia who she felt was probably faking some of her erratic behaviour…I regret to say that in my mind I sometimes accused Antoinette of the same thing.”

Antoinette describes her ambition to continue with her education despite being told by medical professionals that studying in this state would be an almost impossibility.

“She needs to realise she is a pretty girl.

If she can’t do medicine, so what? She could easily get married or work as a checkout girl. It doesn’t matter-life goes on.”

The pattern of being hired and then fired from endless jobs due to the effects of memory loss, a dwindling social life and only a handful of boyfriends interspersed with matrimonials in the Sri Lankan newspaper somehow does not lend a pitiful tone to the book, but one of continuous struggles that she strives to overcome no matter what.

Juxtaposed by the daily social challenges, Antoinette relays how taxing her change in circumstances was for her family who became her primary carers and how her parent’s optimism was reduced to resignation. “Since the accident I have had fits of rage or fury. I don’t know what precipitates them. This is one of the hardest changes that my family have had to deal with.”

With a sister whose life was partially held back because of Antoinette, to parents who were on the path to divorce, Antoinette goes on to share the more trivial down turns to her injury. “After 17 days of coma I awoke to find my hair butchered with a cut that left me looking like Doc Brown from ‘Back To The Future.’”

Her trajectory towards recovery includes the gruelling process of rehabilitation which is given a very personable and real angle by Antoinette. “I visited the rehabilitation unit at the hospital…I remember a man walking up to me. He was dressed in a gown; he smiled at me and then pulled his gown open to show off his ‘birthday suit’ in all its unfettered glory.

"My mother walked over after the man was moved on, and told me not to get upset. I responded, ‘Why should I be upset? He is brain injured, just like me.’”

Along with the struggle towards recovery Antoinette reveals the moments of despair, the suicide attempts and the overwhelming inclination to blame God. “I didn’t deserve the health problems I had; I was angry because I had trusted that He had healed me, and yet I was not living the life I thought He wanted for me. I was angry because the church made no sense. The Bible made no sense; however hard I read it, I forgot it so fast.”

Antoinette’s words are honest, inspirational and witty. Her aim was to write a book about brain injury that was not didactic in context and short enough for anyone who does not know of someone suffering from brain injury to be interested in reading.

The book is intelligent, entertaining and honest. She has succeeded.

The book is available from Amazon in paperback or Kindle.