Life Changing

It was a summer evening in 2014, when four men barged into Paul Kohler’s family home and began a savage assault on him. They believed erroneously that he had a large amount of money hidden there. The speed of the police response meant that Paul was saved from almost certain death, and the four men were later arrested, charged and imprisoned. Although he felt vindicated by the sentencing, Paul’s worldview was changed forever when he...

In 1975, Richard Dailey was the victim of a freak wave that swept him overboard from the vessel he was working on in the North Sea. His daughter Angie was just five years old - and the news of his death was one of her first memories. Although they were compensated financially, the impact of that loss was difficult to understand and over the years it caused tension between Angie and her mother. Angie inherited a treasured box of old...

Like so many who serve, Falklands veteran Geoff Stear took trauma away with him - in his case a very particular reaction to the smell of meat. It was so powerful and debilitating that it made his life almost impossible, leading him to injure himself and endanger others as he tried to get away from the perceived danger. On several occasions it left him hospitalised – once with a broken neck - with no recollection of how he had got t...

In her early twenties Carol Cairns, the daughter of a priest in Ireland, had a passionate affair with a young bohemian poet called Benedict Ryan. In the Dublin of the 1960s, their improbable partnership burned bright but briefly. Somehow the gap in their backgrounds was too great. Not long after, life took her in a completely different direction. Shortly after her 70th birthday, while thinking of names for a grandson to be, she rem...

Phillip Browne was born into a large and loving Windrush generation family in Birmingham. Church and singing were an important part of his upbringing, and when he struggled at school it was singing that gave him an escape and a status. But just as he was beginning to show signs of real potential, a devastating ear infection robbed him of his hearing completely in one ear - and Phillip was told by a doctor that a singing career was ...

Robin Elsey Webb is a young and already very successful yachtsman with a dream of tackling the famous Vendee Globe, the single-handed round the world yacht race. But his plans were shattered during a trip to Antigua, when he was violently attacked and suffered severe head injuries. With his life hanging in the balance, it fell to his partner Liz to make swift and bold decisions about his treatment. Robin's job was to try and stay a...

As a bright adventurous 16 year-old, Angela Tilley was thrilled to get a job in a busy London office. But after a year's unwanted attention from one of her co-workers, attention that today we would call stalking, she started having panic attacks on the way to work. The attacks became a debilitating daily occurrence, leaving her mentally and physically exhausted. Her courage in pushing back against her fears, forging a career and ha...

Husband and father, Larry O’Brien, loved the freedom his job as a long-distance lorry driver gave him. But on March 6th 1987, that freedom was almost lost in the horror of the Zeebrugge ferry disaster, in which almost 200 people lost their lives. Larry – who could not swim – risked his own life to pull 30 people to safety. Almost 40 years later, Larry tells Dr Sian Williams why he never felt like a hero, how he came to terms with...

When 18-year-old Stacey Goodwin got a job at a bookies, she put a pound coin into a slot machine and won enough money for a night out with her pals. It was the trigger for a destructive gambling addiction that led to a life of shame, brutal isolation and deceit. The money she lost over an eight-year period was eye-watering – on one occasion, frittering away a £50,000 online win in a matter of days. Sometimes suicidal, and always lo...

In 1977, Ed Stewart was a happy-go-lucky teenager with his whole life ahead of him. With a new engineering job, a girlfriend and a motorbike, life was good. But when he dropped in on a friend’s party, a violent row with another teenager - who was carrying a shotgun - turned Ed’s whole life on its head.

Ed had to learn to navigate the world in an entirely different way, but he made a success of it - becoming a piano tuner to the sta...

For Lisa Hover and her husband Andy, life on the Hampshire Dorset border with their family of four children seemed idyllic. Even when a routine sight test on their young daughter Annabelle picked up an abnormality, it all seemed manageable. But the abnormality turned out to be early sight loss, which itself masked a more severe and life shortening genetic condition. With no cure available, Annabelle was determined the most from her...

As a young man, Mohammed, AKA MFA Zaman, arrived in Britain from Bangladesh with a working visa, a patron and a job lined up as a chef. On arrival though, the promises of a bright future turned to ashes when he became a victim of modern slavery. But at this lowest of low ebbs in his life, Mohammed decided that he needed to do something - and that something was to volunteer at an old people's community club in Lewisham, near where h...

After a whirlwind romance, Paul Mason and his wife Isabel were in no doubt that they wanted to start a family. It was not easy, but eventually that ordinary miracle happened. And yet it was a little more than ordinary - because they discovered they were to be parents to triplets.

Paul tells Dr Sian Williams about the joyful and harrowing life-changing events of his children’s birth, and explains how the family have since discovered...

Mother-of-two young children, Tanja Bage, had always been a keen singer and performer, so she was increasingly aware of her shortness of breath. The diagnosis was cancer, which required almost immediate surgery to remove the tumour, and with it her vocal chords. She would be losing her voice, and she had just a week to prepare herself and her family.

Tanja tells Dr Sian Williams about navigating the challenges of motherhood whilst h...

After moving to Los Angeles, 12-year-old Dan Edozie and his mother were left homeless and begging for food. Life was not easy: they slept where they could, sometimes on public transport, sometimes in the refuges of the city’s infamous Skid Row. But a chance separation from his mother was about to change his fortunes forever.

Dan tells Dr Sian Williams how this life-changing moment allowed him to take control of his own destiny and s...

Sarah Fairbairns spent much of her life feeling she was a bit different. Growing up in the 1960s and 70s, she gained the reputation of a wild child – from travelling to India, to dancing on stage with the cast of iconic counter-culture musical Hair. And yet all the while, she faced bouts of sadness and depression, and a confusion as to why that should be. Later in life, Sarah made a discovery about a medical childhood trauma that c...

Strapped to explosives, threatened with execution and packed into a vehicle with a suicide bomber, civil engineer Nick feared for his life. It was 2013, and he had found himself at the heart of a violent attack on the Algerian gas facility he was working at, carried out by a group later revealed to be affiliated to Al-Qaeda. It was a deadly hostage situation, in which 39 workers lost their lives – several of them Nick’s close colle...

When twins Georgia and Melissa Laurie set off a once-in-lifetime adventure to Mexico in 2021, they thought it would be an opportunity for some sisterly bonding. Whilst on their travels, they went for an ill-fated swim in a lagoon – and found themselves in a terrifying fight for survival.

They tell their incredible story to Dr Sian Williams, and explain how in that moment, and over the years that followed, their love for each other ...