“Long story short, [I had] private rehabilitation to get me back to where I am now and I had very bad depression through the recovery.”
Sunshine-Tervit said the head injury changed him but not in the way he expected.
“I had to get quite in touch with my emotional side, which prior to the head injury was something that I never, never, ever, ever did.”
Luckily, Sunshine-Tervit’s parents were able to help him with the farming side of things while he was recovering, as they understood he wasn’t taking time off “for no good reason”.
Back home though it was a different story, as Sunshine-Tervit experienced mood changes which he had no control over.
“On my wife ... it was very hard,” he said.
“For example, if I was watching something on TV, and she came and changed the channel, I’d go completely irate and just get extremely angry - but I had no idea that I’d done it.”
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Scans eventually revealed that he’d damaged his frontal lobe.
“That’s the left front part of your brain. So that’s to do with memory, emotional control, regulating yourself - all that sort of stuff.
“So that went - for the most part - out the window ... I was very volatile through the early stages of recovery.”
There were also physical challenges, such as fatigue and “terrible” headaches, which led to Sunshine-Tervit’s depression.
However, a year after the accident, his wife took him to see a brain specialist who had come down from Dunedin.
“That’s when things started to turn around and [get] better.”
Before his accident, Sunshine Tervit was a man who enjoyed routine and having his day structured. Any change to this would throw him off balance.
After the accident, he learned “very quickly” to take things as they came.
“Deal with one problem at a time ... because in the recovery, I had no mental capacity to deal with multiple things on the go at once.”
As a busy farmer, he said this turned out to be a “blessing in disguise”.
“My dad used to be the same - he’d have 20 different things on the go at once - and you’d always get 75 to 80 per cent of those jobs done.”
With his new focus, Sunshine-Tervit now feels he can get 100 per cent of one task completed before tackling a second.
He’s also learned not to sweat the small stuff.
“If for some reason it doesn’t get done today - it’s not the be-all and end-all - there’s no point freaking out about it.”
Sunshine-Tervit also wrote down what needed to be done, to help him deal with all these “small things at once”.
“I think for me that’s been a very good tool and a helpful tool.
“If something’s written down - it’s not that you forget about it - it’s just that if it doesn’t have to occupy upstairs - don’t allow it to.”
