Eleanor Simcox was in the middle of her sleep when she heard a loud bang during midnight. When she checked where the noise came from, she was devastated to see that her husband, Mark Simcox, was lying in pain all the way down the stairs at their home in Dawlish, Devon, The Sun reports.
Eleanor, 26 years old, told The Sun, “We had been lying in bed talking one night. It was quite late and we had been out with friends, so when we got to bed we had started chatting about what had happened that night. He had been away on a fireman training course for a week, and we had lots to catch up on.
“He got up to go to the toilet and I didn’t think anything of it, until I heard a massive bang and a thud. I raced out of the bedroom and saw him lying at the bottom of the stairs. For some reason, he had been into the bathroom and then because it was dark he had become disorientated and had fallen down the stairs.”
Eleanor called for an ambulance for Mark as soon as she saw that he had begun bleeding out of his ear. When Mark was immediately taken to the hospital, a CT scan showed that he suffered three fractures in his skull and his brain started bleeding.
Mark had to undergo a craniotomy to relieve the pressure that was hurting his brain by removing a piece of his skull. He was on comatose for 11 days and was needed to be transferred to the Royal Devon Hospital.
Eleanor said, “The operation was luckily a success. When Mark came out his coma he was transferred to a ward for people with dementia because he was suffering from memory problems. He never forgot who we were, but it was like Groundhog Day.
“His memory span was only about three minutes, so he would forget everything that had happened a few minutes before, and he would ask the same thing over and over again. I kept telling him that he’d had an accident, but he kept forgetting. He didn’t remember what had happened, so he didn’t know why he was in hospital.”
Because he couldn’t remember what had happened to him, Mark insisted on escaping the ward and go home. Mark fortunately remembers that he has two kids. But Eleanor decided to keep them from seeing their dad for she feared that his condition may scare the boys.
Eleanor said, “At first I couldn’t leave him alone in the house as he would forget and leave the gas on or not switch the oven off. But now his memory is better, although I do have to leave him notes to turn the gas off. I’ll tell him something and he’ll ask me again about it ten minutes later, but it isn’t to the same extent as it was.
“We got married in August and it was a wonderful day. He remembered his vows, although he couldn’t remember some of the guests coming and I had to keep prompting him. And I had to remind him about our first dance together, too.”
