Ms Fiona Bardon:

I forgot to say the last time that I am incredibly lucky that I have a family around me that is able to help me and to step in where I cannot do things. What about all the people who cannot read or write or research the resources that are available? What about the people who do not know how to complete forms or where to access services? These are the kind of things that are impossible without a support network. Coming home from hospital, a support co-ordinator is supposed to call to the home, but such people will not be able to get those kinds of services.

In terms of the blockages to employment, I am fighting so much to get better, and I feel every single time I get two steps forward there is a setback. You have to fight to get physiotherapy, speech and language therapy and occupational therapy. Then Covid came. It took me until February to get my speech and language and occupational therapy and then Covid came and there was nothing available. There was no Zoom back then. They were all scrambling to try to find everything and we were all on our own yet again. I thought, oh my God, I have been fighting for the past six months to try to get something and now it has all been taken away from me. It is frustration after frustration after frustration. It is unbelievable.

I have made an exceptional recovery. I have put hours of work into my speech, reading and crosswords, all the kind of things that help. When I talk to other stroke survivors, everyone wants to get better. It is not that everyone wants to get better to go off to Disneyland and pretend nothing has happened, everyone wants to get better because they want to get back to their normal life. We are not asking for massive things, we are asking to be back to the way we were, to be back to normality. Blockages are being put in place. It is kind of like, I put so much work and effort to get back to where I am now and you are now preventing me from moving forward. You are preventing me from getting back to what I have trained for. I went back to college at night time to become a teacher. I was working all day. I was doing college at night-time and at weekends. I did not become a teacher until I was 26 and then it took four to five years to become permanent. I worked for two or three years at my school and then I got sick. I was told I am not well enough to go back to work. I am at the point where I have something to give. As Senator McGreehan says, now that I have had this brain injury, I have way more understanding of the struggles of the children and I can relate to them.

I do not understand why you are telling me I am not good enough to be a teacher any more.

You are telling me that I am not good enough to try. If it is the case that I go in and after four weeks, it is too much for me and I cannot be a teacher anymore that is fine. However, at least that is a decision that I can make for myself. I can experience it and decide it is too much for me and then I can see what I can do instead. It may be that I can mentor teachers coming in or that I can for the National Council for Special Education, NCSE. I want to stay in education but it might be the case that I cannot still be a teacher. That is another massive change that I have to overcome emotionally. The lack of mental health services is just appalling. I said this earlier, but I am spending money that I had earmarked for my house, a house that I cannot afford because it is so expensive. My savings are going down and down because I have to pay for mental health services myself and I have to pay for my personal training and so on myself. There are little things. In a normal gym class the trainer might say to do 30 sit ups, press ups and push ups and run a lap around the room. If I do the 30 sit ups I might say what is next. Then I do the 30 press ups and say what is next. I am getting better all that but I am not fully recovered. You do get better over time and you are building up on those kinds of things but you just need the little bit of extra support. Anyone who has had a stroke, that I have spoken to at least, is not asking for, say, coffee machines that nobody else can afford. They are asking for handrails to be put into their house so that they can go to the toilet by themselves or for mental health resources so that we can overcome this massive thing. We have not done anything wrong, we just unfortunately had strokes and we want our lives to go back to as normal as they can be. Yes, life throws things at you. Everyone cannot get everything that they want at the end of the day and that is fine but then we are told that we cannot do things. Why can we not have services put in place so that we can instead?