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March 29, 2016 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:06:34
Edition 246 - Anthony Wright

Anthony Wright – who says he “re-wired” his brain after an amazing battle with acatastrophic tumour...

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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world, on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained Online.
Thank you very much indeed for all of your support and thank you very much if you tried to get through to the new radio show Sunday night on Talk Radio UK time.
They had a few phone problems.
They've got lots of new software.
Very, very impressive studios in central London and the phone system decided to play up on the night and I know that a lot of you were trying to get through.
Please try again when I'm on air because I'd love to hear your stories and talk with you.
The studios of course and the phone system controlled by the radio station, nothing to do with me but I know that they've made great efforts to make sure everything is going to be okay.
My fingers are crossed this week so I would love to speak with you.
In the meantime you've sent me some very very nice emails about it all.
Obviously we're going to develop that show.
But as you know it's crucial and vital for me to continue with the podcast where it all started 10 years ago here online.
You know this is my baby a completely independent production and I'm very very proud of it and I'm very proud of you for making it what it is.
Please keep the donations to this podcast coming.
You can go to the website theunexplained.tv if you'd like to donate and if you have recently, I thank you from the bottom of my heart for the support.
Theunexplained.tv being also the place to go and follow the link and send me a message or some guest suggestions, thoughts about any of the work that I'm doing.
Now, life is a little hectic at the moment, I have to say, because as I've said on here before and I don't want to become a radio bore, but you know, radio does not pay fabulously, so I have to continue to do my freelance shifts elsewhere, reading news and things to keep food on the table and keep going.
So, you know, it's all part of the mix.
But ultimately, I want to be doing more of this because this is the thing that I love.
And that's why I made the big departure to starting an independent show all of those years ago.
So having said all of that, really excited by the new radio show, and so are you by the sounds of your emails.
I'll just read some of them here that came into the website email address.
Dear Howard, about a year ago I discovered your podcast and was interested in a missing person case then discovered through you, David Paulidis.
And this evening I remembered your live show on radio from London, but wasn't sure of the time difference.
Then I worked it out.
Congratulations and good luck with both versions of your great show, says Mike Sanderford in Houston, Texas.
Mike, thank you for your support.
And please do try and come on the show, on the radio on anyway.
Love the new show on talk radio, says Andy in Staleybridge, Cheshire.
Thank you for that.
He says, good luck with the radio show.
I'll listen to your podcast while I take Lucy for a walk.
Lucy, of course, is now a very fit dog.
Hi, Howard.
My name is Austin.
I'm from Keston near Bromley, southeast London, Kent.
I really enjoy your show.
I listen to it while I'm painting in my studio.
Thanks for that, Austin.
Jeremy in South Korea, nice email.
Libby Langlands, thank you for the suggestion about John Teeter and the email address.
We're on it.
Brian with a Y, thank you for your email.
Mike B in Chiang Mai, Thailand, thank you for your email.
Larry Lamarca in Springfield, USA, thank you very much for yours.
Hi, Howard.
Good luck with the new venture.
Hope you make it a winner.
I know you will.
Keep well and all the very best to you, says Lee Killington.
Thank you, Lee.
Hi, Howard.
You're back on the wireless.
Fabulous.
Pretty dramatic listening to your piece about old air bases on the radio last Sunday while the wind howled here and the rain lashed on the window.
Scary but interesting.
It was, wasn't it?
It says, Chris.
Is that short for Christine?
Chris or Christina?
Not sure.
Paul Ridley in Alpington, Kent.
Nice to hear from you.
What else?
Hi, Howard.
Just wanted to say that on Sunday your new talk radio show was excellent.
I'm going to get a spirit box because that was what Chris Huff was talking about, Christopher Huff, using a spirit box at those haunted ex-military air bases.
Susan Vuston, thank you for your email, and Susan, thank you for your support, okay?
Just a note to say congratulations on the radio show.
I'm so delighted for you and you deserve it, says Lindsay, big supporter of the show in Glasgow, Scotland.
Lindsay, nice to hear from you.
Congratulations, Howard.
Karen from Bradenton, Florida.
Karen, regular emailer.
Thank you very much for getting in touch, Karen.
I know that you're glad, says Karen, to be back on the radio.
I am.
Sounds great at my end.
Thank you.
We're working on it.
Howard, let me congratulate you on returning to the airwaves on Sundays.
And I only discovered your podcast about a year ago after the passing of my dad.
And as you know, I've been through that too, and I know how that feels.
It's my only regret I didn't discover your show sooner.
Saying this, I'm working my way through your previous episodes.
And that actually is from Paul in Orpington, Kent.
I've got my pages mixed up.
It's been such a busy week.
I've been backwards and forwards to Berkshire on the motorway doing things, my usual work, and preparing for the radio show and doing the radio show and recording podcasts.
So it's been really busy.
Thank you for all of the support that you've given me and all of the support that my webmaster, Adam, has given me too.
Behind-the-scenes support and the times when I've really wondered whether I could do it all and tie it all together.
Adam has been there like a rock for me all of these years.
So thank you, Adam, very much.
And I wanted to say that publicly here.
The guest on this edition is somebody whose home I've just come back from in Berkshire.
A very special man who proves, I think, the power within the human mind and the human spirit to recover.
This man, well, by rights, should probably be dead.
Anybody who'd suffered the things that he'd suffered would have found it very difficult to recover, and many of them would have died.
Anthony Wright, near Reading in Berkshire, fought and fought hard and managed to rewire effectively his brain.
His story, which I've let him tell you here in full, is pretty remarkable.
And if ever your spirits were flagging and you wondered whether life was going to beat you, you've got to hear this man's story.
It's been an inspiration to me, let me tell you.
So Let's hear him.
So, this is exactly as recorded a few hours ago at his home at Emma Green, near Reading, Berkshire, not very far from one of the places that I work.
So, I think you will find it very, very interesting.
And as I used to say on this show, get yourself a glass of whatever you like to drink, sit back in your favorite chair or lie back in bed, whatever, and just soak this in because it is a truly remarkable and amazing story from a truly remarkable and amazing man, Anthony Wright, on this edition of The Unexplained.
The Unexplained has periodically over the years come out to different locations to meet interesting people.
We've been to South Africa, we've done shows in different parts of the world, and I've gone around the UK to meet people too.
It's not often we get out, and it's a real privilege to do this.
Now, the story that you don't know is for part of my week, I work at a place called Reading in Berkshire, a lovely part of the UK, about 40 miles away from London, where I live, and I travel early in the morning to go on the radio here.
Now, I've always believed, because I've known Berkshire for years, that it has such remarkable people in it.
There are the most talented, the most qualified, people who've achieved enormous great things, people who've been decorated and knighted and recognized in many, many fields, everything from the military to science, entertainment especially.
They all live here because it's handy for London and the living is good.
But every so often, the work that I do here throws up a character who you want to spend more time talking with.
And the man I'm about to introduce you to is here in his home in a beautiful place called Emma Green.
Now, he's got a lovely large home in Emma Green.
The sun is beating down in this conservatory that we're sitting in at the moment.
And this man's story, if ever a human story was made for the unexplained, I think this one is.
His name is Anthony Wright.
And I'm just going to summarize a little bit about what this man has been through in recent years.
Effectively, he had a brain tumor.
Now, that's a very simple way of putting it, but it was the kind of thing that most of us, it would have killed or certainly incapacitated us to the stage where we couldn't do very much.
This man, Anthony Wright, sitting with me, don't worry, Anthony, I'll speak with you in just a second, actually was able to rebuild his own brain.
After having had a near-death experience, after having died, as he told me when we spoke on the radio recently, given up certainly for dead five times, this man came back and rewired his own brain with the power of, well, we'll talk to him about what it is the power of.
But quite a remarkable story because Anthony now has 95% of function, which by rights and by medical practice shouldn't be so.
But he's done it, and he wants to tell the world his story.
And I felt that he deserved to get that story out to you on The Unexplained, wherever in the world you are.
Don't forget, you can contact me about this show or any show that you've heard via the website, theunexplained.tv.
Follow the link, and you can send me an email from there with any thoughts or suggestions, donation for the show, whatever.
And I'll put a link also to Anthony's work on the website, theunexplained.tv.
Anthony, Wright, thank you very much for sitting through my long introduction there.
Lovely home that you've got.
Lovely, peaceful place.
Oh, yes, this is life.
This is home.
And we've got the sunshine today.
Maybe golf, maybe later in the day.
Okay, now the story that I summarized there, and you can never summarise a story this big in just a couple of minutes.
I want to work through that story piece by piece.
Your life changed very suddenly and very dramatically.
Talk to me about that.
It was sudden and dramatic.
It was a normal life as far as I was concerned.
I was a traveling salesman.
I traveled over the UK and Europe.
And then one morning I was going in to see one of the large retail groups down in Eastleep.
I took a short break before the call to go across a playing field.
And there was this roaring noise in the distance.
It sounded like an approaching train.
I really thought it was a steam train.
And then a few minutes later, my world span and whatever this train was, it seemed to roll straight over me.
And I was down on the deck on the grass.
I think a lot of us wonder what it will be like to be struck down by something like that.
You know, people get heart attacks.
They have all kinds of things happen to them.
They, of course, happen as this did out of the blue.
What did that feel like?
What was going through your mind?
Sheer disbelief.
I was lying on the deck.
I heard a child's voice and it said, that's it then, Daddy.
And I thought, oh yes, it is.
And I was feeling my head and my chest.
I thought someone had shot me.
I was feeling for bits of jagged bone or blood sticking out or whatever.
And there was no injury whatsoever.
But here I was sitting on the deck.
There was no reason why I should be there.
Now, you sound to me as if you were bewildered, but did you panic?
No, it was just shock.
The panic came actually the following day.
Almost by luck, I happened to be in the hospital, the local hospital, the following day for a hearing check.
And the same thing happened again while I was waiting for them.
And then I realised it wasn't just some stress thing.
It wasn't just some minor thing in the distance.
Something serious was wrong with me that had been missed by the hospital.
Terrible situation to be in.
And because you're debilitated in that way, what can you do about that?
What did I do?
When it came to the hearing test, which they'd called me in to do, I was so angry that all this had happened, I deliberately faked the hearing test.
I deliberately made it up and I created a quite panicky response from them.
And as a result of, frankly, a lie, I made it all up.
They called an emergency MRI and I was back in the hospital the following day getting scanned by a machine.
But if you hadn't done that, if you hadn't, and this is the first instance where Anthony takes things into his own hands, if you hadn't taken that approach to it, then who knows what would have happened?
Who knows what?
You think those dropdowns bad enough if it happens in an open playing field, but if it happens at a motorway and you're travelling 70 miles an hour, that's a whole different ballgame.
And I was in this strange world where by effectively pushing our medical services along a little bit, suddenly they knew what the problem was because of course there was something on the MRI.
And what was the something?
Yes, the MRI revealed a brain tumour.
It was the size of a golf ball, four and a half centimetres across.
Roughly it had been there for 10 years, growing slowly, but of course by now it was now starting to push against key parts of the brain and that's why I was having the blackouts.
And before that cataclysmic event happened that started this process off, did you have any signs that this thing was inside your head?
Very little.
Sometimes people say you get mood issues.
Sometimes people say that you get strange sounds in your head.
Thinking back, possibly, but there was nothing clear-cut, not like the drop-down.
Right.
So there was no reason for your life not to continue in its usual frame until it was stopped for you?
Oh my goodness, and stopped big time.
The story went on actually because I was referred to another hospital, a specialist neurounit, and this took a week, then two, then three, and my health really started to fall away now.
And I started to get quite irritable with the hospital, I remember.
And a receptionist actually said something over the phone she shouldn't have done.
She gave away what the real condition was.
So what did she say?
She said that I'd been referred to another unit because I had hydrocephalus.
Not a word I'd ever heard before.
I had to get a dispel that one, I'll tell you.
Just, you know, I have to say that I don't know.
I have an idea.
Is that fluid on the brain?
It's exactly right.
What it is, it's fluid on the brain, but in my particular case, it would be excessive pressure from the fluid.
And I went online that night to check this hydrocephalus thing, thinking, well, I'd better find out what I'm dealing with.
And as I was looking at the screen, the computer screen completely collapsed.
It started flickering like mad.
I couldn't read it, etc.
It really got very nauseous.
And I was getting very, very annoyed.
I was yelling about Microsoft and Windows and Bill Gates and all this.
So you thought that you were seeing things that were created by the computer?
I thought they were.
I turned my face away from the screen to stop the juddering and the whole wall was juddering.
It was my eyesight that had gone.
Boy, you know, you're a feisty guy.
You know, now you're a feisty guy.
Then you were a feisty guy.
You were in sales, so you knew how to put a case together and you knew how to fight your corner.
I can't imagine, faced with reality being distorted for you in that way, what that must have felt like.
Do you know, maybe services people will tell you this.
The shock was so great, you didn't actually feel anything.
It's like being in a house when all the power has been switched off.
There's absolute stillness, completely dead.
There's no clocks ticking, no nothing, and suddenly you're aware.
And I realised because the juddering stopped and I could now read the text.
And there it was.
Always treated as emergency.
Permanent blindness may result.
And I realised then reading through the text, I was about four weeks away from being permanently blinded.
So what happened?
Well, strange conversation with the doctor the following day.
I remember I phoned him up.
He knew the background and said, how are you doing?
And I said, well, I don't know.
According to the internet, I will be blind soon.
And his voice dropped and he said, have you got vision disturbances?
And I went, yep.
And he said, how long?
And I said, well, I've only just realised what they are.
I thought it was stress.
I'd been noticing flickering vision for a couple of weeks.
And he said, right, I'll see you today.
And he called me in that day.
And sure enough, odds of God knows what, I had an advanced case of something called papilledemia.
And my optic nerves were badly swollen on both sides.
And yes, I was in trouble.
You're talking about it very calmly now.
If it was me and I was going through something like that, Anthony, I would be freaking out.
Well, I was in a strange place because roughly four people a year in all of Europe get this condition through the pathway that I got it.
And I have just diagnosed it online with no medical qualifications.
And it's like the odds are 25, 50 million to one against.
And I've done it.
And it's like, what happens next?
Doesn't sound to me like maybe we can let them off the hook a bit because what you had was rare.
But you weren't getting an awful lot of support from the medical people.
Oh, they moved very quickly now.
My goodness, they moved quickly.
I was in hospital 24 hours later and they operated two days later and a shunt was fitted and they saved my eyesight.
So once they realised what they were dealing with, they dealt with it very well.
The biggest issue in the early days was diagnosis.
They just hadn't realised what they were dealing with.
So by the time they'd done that first operation and they'd saved your sight, what position were you in then?
Right.
Generally with these tumours, they will try and leave them alone.
And it was just possible that the tumour would stay still and I could carry on living as was.
But I realised it would need to be tackled.
And so I set out on a quest to try and find the best way of dealing with it.
I got a copy of my scans, an electronic copy of my scans, and started contacting hospitals in England, in America, in Europe to try and get a solution to the problem.
Now, this is a very proactive way of doing things.
I've got to tell you that, how can you put a figure on this, but I would think that at least 65% of people hearing this now would probably sit back and say, well, you know, maybe My prognosis is not so good, I'm going to let the medical profession deal with this.
You did what I would do, you'd want to get a handle on it, find out about it, and see what the hell could be done.
Yes, that's right.
I mean, obviously, the immediate experience I had with the tumor was that if you wait too long on this thing, it could wipe you out, and it came pretty close to doing that.
And I needed to understand how to deal with it.
And also, with something like this, it's a clear and present danger.
It stands a real chance of absolutely smashing you.
You must get the best opportunity to try and fix it.
But you know, the impressive thing about you is even from this stage, your view of the thing is, how do I deal with this?
Not, oh my God, look what's happened.
What would have happened if I'd have done that?
I don't know.
I think I'd have been destroyed, but it was strange.
I mean, I visited four or five hospitals in the UK.
I got to the Institute in Hanover, the Hanover Institute, Neurological Institute.
I had emails come in from various people in the States, etc.
And generally, the prognosis was not good.
I have to say, most people said this is going to be tough simply because of where it was and all the issues that were sitting around it.
So there you are in that situation, you're trying to get answers.
By the sounds of it, you didn't like the shape and sound of some of the answers you were getting.
No, indeed.
And we formulated that what we'd try and do is reduce the tumour in size, and then once reduced, what was left could then be irradiated, and maybe you could leave it there, but it would be dead to the world.
So that's another operation, a big one.
Absolutely.
And they would leave a bit of it behind, potentially, leaving you with a further risk for the future.
You've got it exactly right, though.
The radiotherapy, once the tumour is of a given size, the success is quite good.
But of course, it was too big for radiotherapy at that time.
Far too big.
Half again too big.
Okay, okay.
Two parts to this.
What are you thinking?
How are you feeling?
But you have a family, don't you?
So what was the deal with the people nearest and dearest to you?
They were very supportive.
We did think we'd get away with it, but you don't know.
I think, to some degree, I don't think everyone really understood what the risks were.
I remember I had played golfer actually before the key operation, and I remember speaking to my friends then and saying, look, this could go many, many ways, but if I'm left on a hospital bed as a cabbage, if I'm left just wild, keeping me alive or whatever, at that point, I don't want to be resuscitated.
I don't want to come back to that because I'd realise potentially what could happen.
So you made a rational decision that you didn't want them doing too much, but you wanted them to do as much as they possibly could.
And if it was starting to look iffy, if it was starting to look as if your chances were really, I don't know if you put percentages on it, but if they were not looking that bright, then your thought, and very much it would be my view of it too, I want to give it my best shot and then I want to go.
Yes, you've got it exactly right.
And I had no understanding of what was going to happen or how tough it was going to get.
Strictly speaking, with an op like that now, 90, 95% of people pretty much walk away from them, actually.
What do you mean they don't have them, they say, I don't want to bother, I'll just let it take its course.
You've got it exactly right.
In normal circumstances, unless there are complications, yes, I'd say about 95% go okay.
So why were you in the 5%?
Why did you want to have this?
I offended the gods at some point in my life.
I don't know.
No.
What happened was, as far as I can tell, somewhere in the large tumour that I had, there was some kind of blood vessel that hadn't been spotted.
And as a consequence, after they operated on me, the compression of the brain vastly improved very quickly to the point where it's life-threatening.
You really are possibly going to die from it.
But I was trying to get to the point of why you decided that, whereas another person may have thrown in the towel and said, I'm going to let nature take its course, why you decided to opt for the surgical intervention?
In some ways, I had no choice.
Sorry, the health had again started to deteriorate, by which time now, because of the tumour growth, things were starting to happen.
I had car alarms going off in my head at night.
I remember was very strange, being woken up to a car alarm, rushing out to the front, and there's no car there.
It's very strange.
It's strange in that some people do, and I get this too, I hear my front doorbell ring.
It will wake me up from sleep, but no doorbell's rung.
The mind, the brain is a remarkable thing, isn't it?
And you were discovering, you know, not just the upsides of it and how it can make us amazing people, but the downsides of it, how it can play terrible tricks on you.
Oh, yes.
And the balance system was falling apart.
I was struggling to walk through doorways.
It was almost like by now I had half a bottle of wine inside of me most days, just even when I didn't.
So they wanted to do another operation.
You were cool with that.
And that operation would be followed by chemo.
Talk to me about that.
It all should have theoretically gone quite well.
looking back i should have known better i think it was st valentine's day was the um 2006, that was.
Valentine's Day, 2.6, I think.
And it did turn into a sort of St. Valentine's Day massacre, basically.
The main op went ahead.
Now, these are big ops.
This is a 12, 14 hour operation.
It did seem to go okay, and I was alive and well, and talking to the nurses afterwards.
Everything was fine.
And then about eight, ten hours after the operation, I started to slip into unconsciousness.
And that was a sign that the brain compression was starting to build.
And by the way, I'm not so well.
Unconsciousness, were you aware of anything?
I just slipped away.
The nurses had this system where they would call out every hour on the hour, who are you, where are you from, why are you here, who's the Prime Minister, all this sort of stuff.
And we'd all have lots of jokes about it.
And then at hour seven or eight, I stopped answering.
Well, were you tired of it by then?
Didn't like the questions, no.
Okay, there's a near-death experience, isn't there?
Your story has within it a near-death experience.
And this is where it starts to divert from the normal.
What happened?
Yes, well, this is pretty much the second operation.
They went in and they know we're in trouble and they tried to clean the wound up and all the areas up and just check one more time what's going on, why is it wrong, etc., etc.
And I'm now starting to fade quite badly.
And in fact, at some point during or the back end of that operation, I actually faded away.
The interesting thing was, I'd experienced all of the descriptions of this near-death afterlife, all the rest of it.
And I'd put it down to the drugs because, of course, you're on quite phenomenal medication in a situation like this.
And it was only a year or so later that I found out that I had actually died during one of these interventions in my head, you know.
So you got a chance that most people don't get, though, they certainly don't recall it, to know what happens in that twilight zone.
As you say, a very real twilight zone.
There were some things that happened that were strange, but very obviously fiction.
You're talking sort of, you know, 50-year-old Star Trek effects, and you know darn well it's the brain playing tricks.
And there's other bits that were as clear as day.
I remember my own subconscious having this strange conversation with me.
And it asked me, just exactly how long do you think this can go on for?
Who was asking that?
It's just internal conversation with my brain.
And it was made very clear to me, look, you know, this is coming to the end now.
Are you sure about this?
So it wasn't as if some figure in a white cloak came up to you.
This was just stuff that you knew.
Oh, yes.
So you were going through a thought process in some kind of state, in some kind of reality, while you were lying in a hospital bed?
Absolutely.
I recall at one point I was thinking we'd been involved in this awful car smash.
I don't know why.
In this subconscious state, I was going to be introduced to my wife and child for the last time to say goodbye.
And I was really struggling with why are we saying goodbye?
I thought this was massive pile-up or something, and I could not understand why.
was still your own subconscious guiding you through this so it wasn't as if something this Exactly.
Exactly.
The strange thing was, this interaction, weird that it was, it wasn't anyone I knew.
I never recognised them.
I'd never seen them before in my life.
So you saw people.
Tell me about them.
they were complete strangers and i was thinking well what's going on here and then it would I'm sorry to interrupt.
Were they different from how you and I look?
Oh, no, they were just people, just people I'd never met before, recognized.
It wasn't something from my own memory even, not that I can recall.
And what were they saying?
They didn't know me, I didn't know them.
But what were they saying to you?
They were introduced to me to say goodbye and I was left with this, well, hang on, this isn't, you know, the family.
Who are these people?
And it was very clear to me that I was in this strange, it's like a waiting room, really, and that I was going somewhere else and we were just waiting.
And it was this unworldly place because it wasn't threatening.
There was no sense of pressure.
There was no sense of terror or dread.
It really was just a very relaxing existence, but equally almost like, I say, ghostly, almost like you were just a veil of air, really, rather than any sort of substance, you know?
And how much of that do you think was hallucination caused by the powerful drugs?
And how much of that do you think is something else beyond you?
Because to be able to interact with people that you've never seen before and have conversations with them and understand what you're going through, that is either a remarkable capacity of the human mind or it's something else.
I was going to say, you bear in mind I had probably a street value of around £500,000 worth of drugs in my body at that particular time.
So the notion of lucid thought at a conscious level, I was no kind of conscious.
And you think it probably took me a month to wake up completely from all these operations.
And so the actual thinking process in that time would be so scrambled.
I can't believe you could have intelligent or structured conversations.
You describe it as a near-death experience.
That is a term or that is a series of words that many people read different things into.
You know, they talk about connecting with the life beyond this one.
Part of what you said sounds like that.
And part of that sounds like you're connecting to something within yourself.
You're going to places that most of us don't go.
Which do you think it is?
I've certainly got the impression that there was somewhere else.
And strangely enough, many people, I believe, fear death and all that goes with it.
I didn't get the impression it was a particularly bad place.
And I got the impression in some ways it was one of the most natural things to be.
And I wasn't troubled by it in any way.
Did you get a sense of a place?
My mother, my late mother, nearly died when she was a child and came back from her crisis.
It was Pneumonia, which of course affected you know, those decades ago was a very, very serious thing that children died from.
They didn't have the antibiotics and stuff and super drunks they do now.
So she talked when she came out of it, she turned the corner about a beautiful place with sunshine and gardens and peace and quiet and everything being very happy there.
She was looking forward to going there.
I'll go with the peace.
I'll go with the sensation of complete restfulness and all that goes with that.
I wouldn't say it was an earthly existence in the sense like trees or seas or beaches or anything like that.
It was almost like drifting in space.
Did you have any control over what was happening to you?
Because it sounds like these people who sound almost like ambassadors leading you to whatever is to come next, it sounds to me as if you were drifting along with it.
Did you have a say?
As you say, drifting along.
I wasn't really very much in control or very much at all at that time, to be honest.
Okay.
So how did that end for you?
How did you come out of that?
You said it took a month to be clear of the effects of the drugs.
How did you leave those people, that place either within yourself or outside yourself?
We're not sure.
We don't know.
We can only have our thoughts about that.
What happened?
Actually, the coming out of the coma and obviously the after effects of the drugs was a really rough ride.
I'd be the first to admit that.
One of the side effects that people don't go into very much with the major drugs that they use is paranoid delusions.
It's not unlike heroin in that respect.
And by the time I woke up properly, which I'll say was about a month after all these operations, because I'd had another one, making number three, by the time I woke up, about a month later, I was convinced that the hospital staff were trying to kill me.
And that was really not a very nice place to be.
Boy.
So that makes it a very frightening thing for you and makes it a very difficult situation for them.
And a very difficult patient, I would imagine, as well.
But no, I was convinced they were trying to kill me.
I remember like nightmares of sheer terror that sometimes seemed to go for an hour after an hour and unrelenting.
And there was no way to get through that.
That really was just withdrawal symptoms from the drugs.
I've known people who've had operations and, you know, not operations of the extent of your operation, but even routine operations and they've come out of it and they've been a bit paranoid for hours and hours afterwards.
So to go through it to the extent that you did, I can't even imagine what that's like.
Now, look, when we had our radio conversation, and when you have a conversation on radio, you remember it's just a few days ago, I'm up against travel news and all of those things that you have to do and I'm playing records and trailers and all sorts of things.
So my mind is in 15 different places and I had to get you to edit the story.
But I do remember you saying, and I remember feeling really guilty that I didn't have time to explore it the way that I wanted to on a straightforward orthodox radio show, not a show that's like this one.
But you talked about having some say in whether you slipped away or came back.
Am I right about that?
In other words, the question was put to you as it is put, they say, to some people, do you want to go or do you want to stay?
Oh, yes, this business with how long do you think this can go on for definitely was the cue, come on now, you know, this is just going to slip away if you let it.
Do you want to come back?
What did you want?
I think in my part, it was a conscious decision to make a stand and try and get back.
And I suspect that if you go back to the surgical team, they were very sceptical when it came to that third operation.
They thought, most of them it seems, thought that I wouldn't survive it and they definitely wouldn't agree to a fourth.
It's one of the reasons why they had to do all that they did on the third was they knew they were just so weak by then.
There's no way there can be a fourth operation.
And it was like, okay, come on now, you've got to get up and get on with it, basically.
So Operation 4, we've said there are five.
So the penultimate operation, what state are you in?
We know what Operation 2 was like, horrendous, and left you in a situation that took a month to even begin to recover from.
And you had those conversations connecting you with people you'd never seen before.
What was happening in Make or Break, as the team thought it was, Operation 4?
Oh yeah, so the prep to this last one in the sequence was they knew that they would have to make some big changes to my body and quite literally remove anything they didn't like the look of.
So my wife had to sign all the papers to the effect that I might lose my speech, I might lose my hearing, I might lose my balance, I might lose my face, potentially I might end up a vegetable.
She's got to sign all these bits of paper.
And that's before you take into account the fact that you might not live through it.
And possibly you might not live or not live very long.
So she was left with this really quite terrible dilemma and had to sign away all the forms before they even entertain doing this operation.
And the postscript is actually that, again, nobody thought it was going to go so well.
Everyone, my friends, my wife, all my friends, turned up to the hospital for the last op and it was very clear it was just the beginning and my friends said look let's just go to the local pub let's go and get some food we're going to be here it's going to be a long night come on let's get out of here nothing's going to happen for 12 hours and he disappeared my wife and the friends and they all went into the bar and two hours into the meal the phone rang from the hospital and the hospital made it clear
they wouldn't call unless it was something very important and so wife and friends the female ones promptly jumped to conclusions and started bawling their eyes out in this pub and my friends there with these screaming women and everyone in the pub looking at him thinking what on earth has you done and what on earth has you said and there was nothing serious it was just oh by the way the operation's going fine but wasn't that good of them to give them an update.
But of course, if the phone goes, the first thing, if you're one of the nearest and dearest, you're going to assume the worst.
You just couldn't make it up, could you?
And talk about if it could go wrong, it did.
But no, they got back to the hospital.
And in fact, the message was, actually, it went very well.
And what should have been a 12, 14 hour op was all over in five or six.
And by the way, I seem to be doing quite well at this stage.
So fingers crossed.
And what's going on with you?
Land of nod there.
I mean, the first I was aware how bad things were, I was conscious and I wanted to go home.
And I couldn't understand why I was still in the hospital because I was connected up to any number of wires and cables and I was constantly trying to disconnect them so I could go home.
You were a difficult patient, weren't you?
I was very nearly sectioned at this point, I think.
But no, my balance as well, no one explained to me, not that I could have understood, but no one had explained how bad the balance was.
And I actually fell out of the hospital bed because I just hadn't taken account of how the balance was.
And how was your communication?
Very poor.
For the first month in hospital, they used, apparently, I don't recall this, but they used to have these plaques with signs and pictures on so I could press or show if I wanted a drink.
So it's like training a baby, isn't it?
Oh my goodness, yes.
By the time the full diagnosis came through, I was not back to 16, but that diagnosis was three, four years after I'd come out of hospital, so I might have been significantly behind that at this point.
Okay, so operation for what year is this?
This was the same week.
Okay, this, right, okay, okay, I'm sorry I lost the time scale there.
So this was really fast moving.
Your body was taking a pounding.
Oh yes, conceptually, not that I recommend anyone try this.
If you had four operations of that type in four days and all they did was gave you the anesthetic and trimmed your hair slightly and then tried to wake you up, by the time you get to four, you're in danger simply because of the amount of anesthetic you've taken.
Never mind any changes they make in your head or your body as a consequence of the operation.
So after number four you're in a bad way?
Oh yes.
I had about a month in intensive care, then about two weeks in higher dependency, and then another month on the main ward, and then finally I was moved to a place called Rehab, as a rehab unit, by which time I'm looking to try and learn to walk basically.
Did you feel like the same person inside?
Because all of those changes in your brain and them messing around with it, doing these operations, draining fluid, did your personality change?
Everything changes.
I mean, they weighed me at this time and those eight weeks I'd lost five stone of body weight.
About a third of my body weight had gone sitting on a hospital bed for five, eight weeks.
Okay, now here's another mile marker on this very difficult and very pitted road that you're traveling because you're a very positive person.
We understand that all the way through.
And you made a decision to come back from this and to fight it.
But you must have been so weak at this time.
The awful lot of us would have said, well, you know, look, I might have said way before this, I've had enough of this.
I want out.
People do, I think, make a decision about these things.
But you were determined, despite the state that you were in, to hang on in.
Oh, yes.
I mean, I was taken into that rehab unit and I'm still in a wheelchair and I'm, you know, so slim my clothes don't fit.
And I can't hear one side and I'm confused and dazed.
They took me around the place and there's a gym.
There's a gym there.
And I thought, right, okay, now we've got to get on with it.
So I said, right, gym, let's make a start.
And they said, oh, no, no, sorry, there's no one available.
And I said, well, I can operate a gym, you know, I'll start.
And they said, no, you can't do it on your own.
So pushing in the wheelchair, and I was still in the chair, the following day, I broke into their gym.
you broke into the gym.
Broke into the gym on my own.
What went on?
Broke into the gym and started using the equipment.
I remember it was, for me, a profound experience because I went in and they had all these parallel bars on the side of the wall.
This is to help people walk who are damaged.
And I remember I flashed back in my mind to pictures of Douglas Bader and the black and white movie where he lost his legs.
For our listeners in North America, around the world, Douglas Bader was one of the great war heroes.
He was a fighter pilot who lost his legs, was captured by the Germans, but kept trying to escape with his prosthetic legs.
And in the end, to try and stop him escaping from captivity, the Germans confiscated his legs.
He was a very brave man.
Well, that's right.
And I saw the parallel bars and I was thinking, oh my God, what am I doing here?
What has happened?
And I looked down at my legs.
I still had two legs.
They didn't look strong, I've got to say, but they were still there.
And I just thought, well, if this guy can do it, I must be able to do something.
What we're hearing here is an example of, an astonishing example, which is why we're talking, of the power of the human spirit.
People make a decision, I think, whether they want to stand up or sit down.
Yes, and I had to, obviously this was a signal to the hospital to get on with it, but I had to also tell my own body, okay, you sat down for three months.
Now, come on, it's time to get to work.
And, you know, it wasn't easy and it wasn't fun, but you've got to make a start somewhere.
And, of course, I thought I was really clever doing this and been so sneaky.
And, of course, I hadn't seen the security cameras, so they were fully aware of what had been going on.
So do they send a team to come and stop you?
The joke was they had an on-site psychological backup unit.
And we were having a chat about it a couple of days later.
And I said, well, of course, you know, one does need to make the point that you need to get on in the world if you want to get well.
And they said, and we'd like to make the point that we would question the sanity of someone that would try.
But you're no ordinary patient.
Difficult perhaps for some of them, but spirit, courage, I think is the word.
Okay, how did you view your, How did the road ahead to you look?
What was the task that you felt you were facing?
I had no perception of just the extent of the damage and probably just as well I didn't because had I realised what it had taken, I think it would have sent me back.
The hospital itself, if indeed hospital is the right word, it's more like a small holiday inn, except that you've got more staff and they're qualified.
And the malarkey, for want of another word, started big time.
We used to have shower fights with the nurses in the morning and then in the afternoon we used to play indoor golf.
So it wasn't all earnest and serious.
There was fun to be had.
Well, they thought they had the measure it actually and then one day, one evening, now just recount here, this is a security unit with electronic doors and all the rest of it, 24-hour medical care.
And an off-duty nurse found me in a pub a mile outside the hospital.
So you were, you know, in a way you were like those wartime escapees from prisoner of war camps.
You know, you were very, very determined and you were going to have it your way.
And this again is another example of the human spirit.
Did they give you any thoughts, their thoughts, on how far you could recover?
Because it seems to me from what you've already told me, their estimate of how far you could get was way short of yours.
Very much so.
In fact, I went back to the unit a few years later, just so we understand.
It was all done in the best possible fun and taste and whatever.
And I used to get Christmas cards from them.
I used to get invitations to the staff party, etc.
But I went back two years later, as much as anything to say sorry as thank you.
And I met the director of the unit and I said, oh, you know, I hope there weren't any hard feelings here because, of course, I really tried to push the system as far as I could.
And she said, it's funny you should say that.
I had to talk to my staff two or three times about you.
And I thought, here it comes, you know.
And she said, just remember, she said, firstly, it's mavericks that change the world.
And the second thing she said was, do you know the average time to get out of a place like this for a person in your condition is 84 days?
And she said, and you were out in 34.
That's almost a third of the time.
Almost a third of the time.
And I was going to say to her, well, actually, I was out at 17 days, but you didn't find out.
But I thought, no, I won't say that.
So you're using something that people might, in a trivial way, because they'd be searching like I search for a phrase for it.
You were using mind over matter.
Yes, if you want to call it the placebo effect, the answer is true.
And what you're trying to do is put the brain in a place where it doesn't see itself as beaten or whatever, but as working towards trying to get well.
If you recall in the book we were talking about earlier, you could consider yourself 5% disabled, but you could also consider yourself 95% able, and that is a whole different way of looking at it.
Yep, and that was clearly your way of looking at it.
What you were doing is effectively to recover and to get function.
You were rewiring your own brain.
Yes, I had to start obviously with the balance because I was so badly shot.
I mean, to give you an example, at the point where they'd let me go home, I could walk about 600 yards, no more than that.
And it occurred to me then that that's no kind of life.
You can't even go to the shops.
And it's like I didn't envisage a world in which I would be, frankly, useless.
And for the rest of, it's not what I wanted to be.
And so we really had to set out and improve that balanced system.
And the balance is something that I take for granted and most people do.
We don't think of a gyroscope in your head constantly checking the surroundings and making sure that you're balanced and you're upright.
But for you, it's a very mechanical thing.
You've had to rework the whole system.
You're absolutely right.
From a listener's point of view, if you're trying to walk normally and you are half cut, maybe you've had a bottle of wine, maybe a bit less than that.
And I'm like that without the wine, I'd have to say, at 8 o'clock in the morning through to 12 o'clock at night and every day of the week for every year.
And the challenge with that, of course, is that that really does limit what you can do.
And you really have to exercise that to get it to a level where basically you can get by.
These medical people who began to understand the kind of person that you are and that you would not take those limitations lying down literally, did they ever indicate to you that, look, Anthony, you're doing wonderful work here.
You've achieved an awful lot.
But you've got to be realistic about this.
There is only this far you can get?
They tended to get their heads chewed if they played games like that.
So they tended to back off.
One of the challenges is I've tried to stay on side With our medical people for a long while, and bear in mind, there were a number of subsequent operations to the ones we've described.
But to some degree, along the way, I've had to modify a little bit rather than fall out with people.
The real indicator to me how far we'd come was that I was being checked a year or two ago.
I'm checked every year like an annual MOT.
I was being checked by a specialist and they were checking your walking speed, normal walking, and timing it.
And they timed me 10 yards one way, timed me 10 yards.
We were on the way back from the checking and I looked at the specialist nurse and I said, you do realise I've only got one balanced nerve.
And she was utterly disbelieving because I was walking better than she was.
And she has two balanced nerves.
And this is what we're saying, the remarkable spirit and fight that you have within you.
You had to learn.
And you demonstrated this before we started walking, how you have to almost, recording rather, how you almost have to take bearings off the two walls in this conservatory that we're in and then reference that back to your brain and your feet.
And that's how you stay upright.
Yes, that's right.
I mean, it's pretty much subconscious now, of course.
And the answer is, I don't know, a thousand, two thousand hours of physical exercise to get it to that sort of state.
You bear in mind it was two years before I could walk properly and probably another two years after that before I could run.
And even running is not easy now.
So what were you in that time, what were you doing, do you think?
You were rewiring your brain, but how were you doing it?
Oh, well, the exercise bit was golf.
It was running, it was walking, it was lifting weights and effectively increasing the workloads.
I remember I used to go out, when I first started on the golf course, I could really only do four or five holes, just a short walk out.
And I went from that to being able to do seven, eight, nine, and then all the way around.
And then eventually within a year, I was going around the course three or four times.
And I got it up to about two, maybe 300 shots played on a golf course before I could really get my call myself fixed.
How was your speech?
Speech then wasn't so good.
Obviously my face, as a result of the operations, my face collapsed one side completely and I've been through a series of facial reanimations and I had to learn to speak properly simply because of the physical change in the way my mouth now moves.
And of course, I had the minor brain damage, which gave you an element of dyslexia in the speech.
But if you were to walk into a shop now, these years on, there would be nothing much to differentiate you from anybody else, which is a remarkable thing to have achieved.
It's strange.
I probably don't see it that way, actually.
I'm probably more conscious of it than other people are.
Well, you would be, of course, because of what you've been through.
That's right.
But the objective for me, all the way back to 2006, really, was, I want my life back.
I want to get as much of my function back.
I want to be as normal as is possible, I suppose.
Anybody hearing you now, look, speech is what I do for a living.
I've known it all my life.
I understand microphones, sound and everything.
If I was to have talked to you, as we say in radio down the line, and heard you speak, there is no indication in the sound of you that anything traumatic went on with you, which is a tremendous testament to you.
Oh, yes.
And it's the time application as well, the structure of the brain and the speech and getting it back, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
This is part of a five-year plan.
That's the order of what it's taken.
And we were talking earlier about me standing up in front of a group of people in May, 50, 60, maybe 100 people.
One of the reasons why I did the public speaking process was I knew that it would stretch me in an area where I wasn't strong and I would get better at it because that's what this whole game has been about.
Whatever the weakness is, you find it and then exercise profoundly to get the weakness out of the system.
That's why I wanted to do this conversation with you and put it out to the world on my podcast, because I think people need to hear this.
There are people who email me who are going through terrible circumstances.
People, I mean, there are people with cancer who email me, people in all sorts of terrible circumstances who, all of them, they listen for hope in the middle of it all, because without hope, we are nothing, it seems to me.
And I think that you will give those people a great deal of hope, Anthony.
It's a great story.
But now you've written a book about it.
As you say, you're doing lectures about this.
We've got 10 minutes or so left.
Talk to me about the work then involving other people.
You've been doing the work on yourself.
You're well advanced along that road.
So what are you wanting to do for other people?
There's two entirely different things that I do.
The first bit is the recovery message.
At the moment, mainly a book and the e-book version, which is also I want to do public speaking and I want to do training courses on that.
I've written a course, Get Your Life Back Really.
It's Mind and Body, all the things you can do to get this placebo effect going.
So in fact, it's working with you rather than working against you.
So that's the sort of link to charities and health.
And then there's another bit which is more the commercial line, which is neuroplasticity to do with working the brain and getting your memory going and helping your brain work more effectively.
And that links more to sort of personnel development, HR training and the business community.
Speak to me about neuroplasticity.
Okay, conceptually, most people think their brain is a fixed entity, you've got it, and good luck sort of thing.
Whereas in fact, increasingly, as I've discovered and other people are now starting to write about, the brain is something that changes according to the uses you give it.
So if you want your brain to operate in a different way, you can actually do exercise that will help the brain.
good example would be taxi drivers of yesteryear.
They used to do something called the knowledge.
They would go all over London and they would learn where all the streets were, where all the special places were, making notes as they go.
Now a taxi driver's brain does not change the day he buys a taxi and steps in it.
The taxi driver's brain changes as a result of three years exercise driving around the capital, making notes and having tests and checks on what they've learned.
And the most interesting thing is not that their brain changes, but that after they retire, it slips back to its former self.
Again, it might take several years, but that is the brain-changing.
So for most people, the most mental effort they make is to learn stuff to pass exams and further themselves.
But you're saying that you can actually change your life.
Now, we don't want, and it's very important, even though this is a podcast on a radio show, we would have to make it very crystal clear, and I'm sure you would agree with this, that we don't want people taking entirely their health into their own hands.
You've got to go to the doctor.
You've got to work with the medical people because part of your recovery is the operations and is the support that you've got.
But there's another element is what you're saying and you're going to be lecturing about and you've written about, that you can make a difference in tandem with those other people who would be helping you anyway.
Oh, yes, I agree entirely.
I mean, what I say to people is that you work with the medical service, not against them, and you don't do the opposite of what they say or ignore it.
You've got the best drugs, you've got the best doctors, you've got the best nurses in the world.
And by the way, you do as they say.
The quarry to that is this, look, there are 365 days in the year.
If you see these people for four days, the other 361 are important as well.
And you have to take a clear mind for your health, a clear responsibility for your health doing those other 361 days, because quite frankly, these other people will not be able to fix 361 days of bad decisions in just four days.
It can't be done.
And how do you feel about the capacities within the human mind, the human brain, now that you've been through all of this?
Quietly surprised.
I mean, I wouldn't want to have to go through it again, I've got to say.
And in a strange way, you didn't make the point.
I haven't stopped recovering.
This is still an ongoing process.
You told me on the radio you were 95% along the way?
I believe so now.
The memory, even the short-term memory is now vastly improved, and my memory recall is much, much better, speed of speech is much, much better, etc., etc, etc.
I still feel I have places to go and be interesting to see how well we do over the next few years.
Where are those places?
What things would you like to achieve?
Oh, I think I would really like to win a TED title.
I think it would be nice to win a TED title away from home, probably in America.
Okay, well, we've got American listeners, lots of them.
Explain to people in other parts of the world what that is.
Effectively, it's a short speaking competition.
It's usually videoed, it's usually put out, it runs for between five and ten minutes, and it's an acknowledgement of good content, good presentation, etc., etc.
And of course, from my point of view, someone with spoken dyslexia and an impaired face winning a tag title and a gain away from home is ludicrously outrageous.
But hey, you do have to set the bar pretty high sometimes.
When you were going through it all and when you were at the worst of it, Operation 234, did anybody ever suggest to you or did you find out for yourself what the percentage chances of you being able to recover to the extent that you have were?
Oh, when we were on the danger list in that last operation, about 70% of the people just die.
That's it.
About 25% of the people, they live for about a year on a hospital bed with tubes and things coming out of them, and they never leave the bed.
They die in hospital.
That leaves about 5% that get up and make some sort of normal life.
And I'm in that category with my own company, my own website, a book, and speaking at a conference in Wembley, whenever it is.
You're in a category all of your own.
Something very influential to me that I heard on American radio when I was in my 20s.
And, you know, in this silly career that I've chosen, you have your ups and downs.
And the man said it was some kind of inspirational talk.
Failing is not going down.
Failing is staying down.
It seems to me that you embody that spirit.
Yes, I think I understand what he means.
I was doing some research before we were talking today, and I think I probably, at a psychological level, was knocked down significantly seven times through this whole process.
And it's only really in the last couple of weeks that I sort of thought, well, actually, yes, we did get up each time.
Difficult question, but it's the clincher, really, I think, of all the questions.
What were you doing it for?
Why did you want to come back?
Oh, I think I wanted my life back.
I mean, I've got, you know, wife.
I've got family.
I didn't want to leave all that behind.
And beyond that, I just was not prepared to accept being an incomplete person.
I really want to fulfill what I'm capable of fulfilling.
I would not accept a life watching daytime TV or something like that.
It's just not me.
So before we started recording, you said that the world of work, and it's hard enough for anyone to get and keep a job in this country or any country these days, the world of work is not exactly closed to you, but it's going to be difficult.
You now see this as your mission?
Certainly, yes.
I'm going to have to change The world a little bit to suit who I am and where I am.
There's no changing of the fact that I'm partially deaf.
There's no changing of the fact that I had five years off work and there are no references.
No one remembers who I am or whatever I used to do.
So I really am going to have to find my own way in the world and public speaking, training, writing books, etc., seems to be the way forward.
My money's on you to win.
You have a website.
Please tell us what it is.
Oh, it's anthonywrightrecovery.com.
AnthonyWrightRecovery.com.
I'll put a link to Anthony's site on my website, theunexplained.tv.
Thank you very much for being part of this experience.
Anthony's been very gracious to allow me into his home today.
I felt that you deserved to hear this story properly without breaks and interruptions.
And that's exactly what we've done.
And the next time we do a show, I'll be back in the studio.
But Anthony Wright, you are a remarkable man.
Take a big pat on the back, and thank you very much for making time for me.
Well, and thank you for coming in today.
What a marvellous interview.
Anthony Wright and his story, please let me know your feedback about him and what he's had to say.
And you'll find a link to his website on my website, theunexplained.tv.
Gotta go.
Loads to do.
Thank you very much for your support.
Please, if you can, call the radio show.
Show them that you're there and show them that you care.
I didn't mean that to rhyme.
It just did.
So until next we meet here on The Unexplained.
My name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained.
I am in London and please stay safe.
Please stay calm.
Please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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