20/08/2025
Meet Roz, one of our incredible Individual Advocates who lives with a brain injury. 🧠
In light of Brain Injury Awareness Week this week, we sat down to hear more about her journey living with a brain injury and her passion for advocacy. 🌟
"Prior to my injury I was an apprentice hairdresser. This was, at the time, my dream. I wanted to be a creative design Hairdresser for models in magazines, actors and actresses in movies and theatre. I had just completed my first year.
In April 1989, when I was 18, I crashed my car. I injured my brain, I was in a coma for 6 weeks, on waking I had lost the ability to walk and talk. I lived in rehabilitation hospital for 9 months and went to the day hospital for another year. Then I went to the State Head Injury Unit to help organize my life again.
After acquiring my disability, I was fortunate to be able to relate to people with a disability and to assist those who did not have a disability understand or at least assist them to understand about people with a disability. Disability in life can be described as a ripple effect. It affects all layers of a family’s community both informal and formal. But we all have to work together to assist each other.
I still have a lot of supporters, as life can still have negative impacts, but I also have a great support team especially my mother and brother. We laugh a lot, be it with me or at me, or at them or with them. My mother and brother helped me a lot to rediscover my new life. A lot of this was done through humour.
I love advocacy work due to understanding life as a person without a disability, to living a life as a person with a disability. I use my experience as a positive as not everyone has this knowledge!"
[ID: Image of Roz sitting at her desk and smiling at the camera, she is wearing a black jacket and pants and a blue dress with patterns on it.]
