Sylvia Mukwewa

33-year-old Sylvia Mukwewa knows all about battling back from brain injury. However, not only is Sylvia facing an emotionally and physically challenging road to recovery, she is doing so without the direct love and support of her husband and eight-year-old daughter who are in their native Zimbabwe awaiting her return.

Although born in Manchester, Sylvia's home is in Zimbabwe. She moved there when she was two-years-old and was raised and schooled in the country where she enjoyed tremendous success, being honoured with an award for being the top student at Zimbabwe University on her way to qualifying as pharmacist.

By 2001, she had a good job, a loving husband, a beautiful two-year-old daughter and was pregnant with their second child. But then, out of the blue, everything changed.

Sylvia suffered an abdominal rupture five months into the pregnancy. Due to the remoteness of where the family lived and the lack of specialist hospitals in Zimbabwe, she was air-lifted to hospital in Harare - many hundreds of miles away. She was unconscious at this point and remained so for the next 49 days. She lost the baby and the haemorrhage resulted in her losing huge amounts of blood, which caused part of her brain to shut down.

Sylvia remained in hospital for two months before being moved to a rehab unit, where she stayed for a month. Her brain injury had left her with cortical damage, meaning that although her eyes worked properly, her brain cannot recognise some of the images they send. She was also left with epilepsy, poor short-term memory and restricted mobility.

When she left the rehab unit, she had to visit a new specialist rehab centre two days a week as an outpatient to continue her treatment. This meant leaving her husband at home and living with her mother-in-law, who lived in the city and helped Sylvia to take care of her daughter while she focussed on recovering.

It soon became clear that the help Sylvia needed couldn't be provided in Zimbabwe. She returned to the UK in 2003 without her husband and daughter and was soon introduced to Headway South Bedfordshire where she's been a service user for the past five years. At first she was very depressed and thought she was useless. She had gone from being a successful wife, mother and businesswoman to someone who could no longer do anything constructive. Or so she thought.

Sylvia said: "Headway has given me so much. Being around others in similar and often worse situations stopped me from feeling sorry for myself and taught me how to socially interact with others again. It gave me a sense of independence and opened my eyes to the things I could do, such a improving my computer literacy, rather than focussing on what I could no longer do.

"Most of all, Headway has given me a determination to get my life back. I have finally come to terms with what has happened and that has released me to find new things that I can do that will make my husband and daughter proud of me when I finally return home to them."