An open day at a Liverpool centre will help us understand how people overcome brain injuries and neurological conditions to live full and rewarding lives. David Charters reports

ON A morning when the sky promises sleet, three women meet under comforting lights in the cafe of a building off the main street for a nice cuppa and a chat about all the usual things.

You know, Christmas shopping, silly celebrities on TV, the weather; yes, the eternal weather – and how one of them began suffering from serious epileptic seizures after her beautiful baby sister died and how the second was almost killed by a hit-and-run driver, who left her bleeding on the Tarmac.

The third just listens, occasionally squeezing the arm of one of the others, the way that women do when they are offering encouragement to a friend telling a story.

And “friend” is the right word here on Norton Street, just off Liverpool’s London Road, where the traffic of the day is passing in grey anonymity. This is the headquarters of Neurosupport, a charity established to provide non-clinical help to people with neurological conditions including the diseases known as Alzheimer’s, Huntingdon’s and Parkinson’s, strokes, migraine, epilepsy, brain tumours and brain injury, as well as anything affecting the nervous system.

There is still a taboo in some circles about mentioning that something has happened to the “brain”, as though its existence is unconnected to the rest of the person; so we use expressions like “a problem upstairs”, while nodding sagely, instead of addressing the facts.

But, on Tuesday, Neurosupport is holding an open day to enable the public to find out more about its work. Exhibits will include a short film, photographs, paintings and poems, all done by people associated with the centre, many of whom have neurological conditions.

And there, sitting in the comfortable lounge with their cups of tea, are Dorothy (Dot) McCarthy, 51, a clerical officer with a housing trust, who is married to Peter, a JCB driver, with whom she has a daughter, Louise, 29; Natalie Shaw, 26, a part-time assistant at Debenham’s store; and Maureen Kelly, 55, the centre’s manager and a mother of two.

The mood is convivial, but Dot is about to tell a harrowing story. Her language is vivid, but it needs to be if you are to understand just a little of what she has experienced and how, as a result of that, spells of day-dreaming grew into full epileptic fits (grand mal).

At the time, Dot was nine and living in council flats in Leasowe, Wirral. One day she was returning home from the local school. She squeezed through railings to take a short-cut home and saw blood on the concrete beneath the window of their flat. Dot’s little sister, Suzanne, two, had fallen from the window.

Her body had been taken back to the flat. “But my mum was coming down the stairs with what looked like a bundle of rags when I arrived. It was my sister,” recalls Dot.

Within seconds, a happy and loving family had been cast into the deepest grieving – the parents, Billy Lines, a building worker, and his wife, Betty, as well as Dot’s five other brothers and sisters. “I used to have little day-dreams, but they never put that down to anything at the time, until I had the full seizure when I was nine,” says Dot. “My behaviour changed, but in those days they didn’t associate behavioural patterns with epilepsy. I was just a naughty child.”