Stories & Achievements: Nathaniel’s Story
Nathaniel’s story: bulls eye!
I can’t remember the specifics about my brain injury, but I was hit when I thought I’d take a short cut across train tracks one day in 2013. I think the whole length of my hospital visit was like around a year or so. At the brain injury unit at Westmead I was in the transitional living unit which helped me get some independence back. I had plenty of rehab involving physios, speech pathologists and so on.
My biggest challenge is stability: walking in a straight line, and balance. The left side of my body doesn’t work well My right side vision is completely gone, left side is ok at the moment.
I started doing archery regularly about a year ago. I had tried it a couple of times when I was much younger. It’s something that I really enjoy and like getting out the house to do it. My archery coach Lyn is so helpful and understanding.
“One of my support workers, Elise, gets me there and back and helps me out - she’s become like a good mate to me. ”
Besides archery we’d go shopping, for a coffee or lunch. I like McDonalds. Sometimes we go to the beach at Salamander. That’s when we could go out that is, but we can’t right now with COVID, although we can still get Drive Thru Maccas!
I’ve been with Headstart six or so years, and they’re very helpful in all ways but mainly to get out of the house. I’ve enjoyed the socials and parties and that gets me out of the house too.
I do still have some friends from before my injury, I know where they all are. I see them birthdays and sometimes Christmases. They pop up depending on how busy they are. But my day to day friendships are my house workers and support workers. I live in a group home. One of the houseworkers has a husband and he’s turned into a friend over the years.
“One of my main goals is simply getting out of the house. Staying inside is a little bit too much sometimes. My other goal is to do more archery.”
From Nathaniel’s support worker Elise:
Yeah I love him, he’s great. We get on really well! I make an effort to keep Nathaniel motivated. That’s the main challenge that I keep working on.
The archery has been great for him, as I’ve tried a lot of other things to engage him with. There are limits because of his vision. A lot of the things he would have liked before he can’t do now as he can’t enjoy it the same way, because he can’t see. For example we go ten pin bowling, which he likes but can’t enjoy it as much as he used to because he’s struggles to see how many pins he’s knocked down. There’s really very few things he likes to do, which is challenging as he has to spread it out over the five days of the week.
I recently got a remote control car and I want to take him out to a skate park when there’s nobody there. We’ll race the car away and see if he enjoys that, although I’m not sure how much he’ll enjoy it visually. Vision is a boundary we’ve got to get over and I hope will get his interest and eventually want to get into it a bit more because you can go and race people and make friends. I’d also like to get Nathaniel into the idea of putting the remote control cars together and knowing how the engines work on them and stuff like that, because he’s interested in cars and engines, so I’m trying to find ways we can do it that might not involve a full sized car.
Archery is real highlight for Nathaniel. He can kind of see where the target is but his perception is still out. So we’ve kind of worked out roughly where the deficit is and how to help him compensate.
“Now it’s just getting consistency and having him understand how to improve if he’s off by a few inches.”
I’d like to help get him some kind of monocular scope, even if it’s not attached to the bow, so that he can look and see what’s going on down at the target. That could help in motivation as it’s hard for him to be excited about, as he can get a bullseye and he might not know until we walk up there.
Because he needs a left-handed bow, he’s a little bit weaker there so we’re trying to build up his strength. So he has lots of exercises to do at home. The physio has approved some and I’ve just given him basic things like using those hand strengthening grips. Also resistant bands and weights as well but it’s a matter of getting him to actually do it. So I prompt him a lot and remind him that while exercises might seem boring, the more work he puts in at home the better he’s going to be when he’s at archery.” - Elise (CSW)
