Gogglebox’s Shaun Malone was given “less than a 10 per cent chance” of surviving when he suffered a brain infection during his teens
Image Source/ Twitter
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The 24-year-old star – who appears on the programme with his dad Tom Snr, mum Julie, and brother Tom Jnr – suffered from sinusitis when he was 15 years old, which left him in a coma and he “essentially had a stroke”.
He said:
‘In 2010 I got sinusitis and in some way, the infection found its way back to my brain.
‘My brain started swelling and my skull started crushing it so my mum took me to A&E saying, ‘look he’s poorly,’ and they said it was sinusitis.
‘And then I collapsed one day at home and I ended up going into a coma and they said to my mum and dad that I had a less than 10 per cent chance of living.
‘I was in a coma for a few weeks – and they said to my mum and dad, “Shaun’s got brain damage, we don’t know what the brain damage is or how it’ll affect him or if it’s going to be really bad.”
‘When I woke up my brain damage affected me in some ways, like my memory, but mostly the way it affected me was with my left side.
‘I essentially had a stroke, I couldn’t move my left arm, my left leg, even the left side of my face. My sister has got pictures of me trying to eat’.
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Shaun – who has since landed a job with the Manchester United Foundation, where he works as a football coach – admitted the injury had a massive impact on his mental health.
Speaking on the ‘Coaching From The Sofa’ podcast, he added:
‘It had a huge impact on my mental health, I had gone from a very outgoing, young kid to then having all my independence taken away from me’.
Shaun’s mum Julie previously admitted she didn’t know if her son would ever be able to walk or talk again at one stage.
Speaking to the Manchester United Foundation’s website, she said:
‘We didn’t know if we’d ever get our son back.
‘He’d gone from being fully able bodied, to having a left-sided weakness, to having epilepsy – at one point we didn’t know if he’d ever walk or even talk again.
‘Manchester United Foundation has been Shaun’s lifeline’.
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