KNOWING when to give up can be an extremely difficult decision to have to make.

If you are in a running race and you’re two miles behind with only three miles to go, you could in theory win but to do so would probably kill you.

It would be much more sensible to accept coming second. But that is very difficult for some people, me included.

Seven years ago when I was left semi-paralysed by brain injury, my first thoughts were: I will walk again in a week or two; I will be back at work within a month; I’ll be playing football and cricket with my two boys soon.

That is my nature, stubborn, determined and refusing to give in – but some would say belligerent and pig-headed.

This determination not to give in and fight ‘til the end has helped me achieve a lot in life so I thought let’s use it to my advantage here now that I’m disabled and fighting to regain my fitness.

I set about the fight by exercising my paralysed arm day and night and trying to push the end off the bed with my semi-paralysed leg.

After learning to hobble along I was released from hospital and continued my stubborn resistance at home.

It wasn’t long before I began a horrific legal battle against my former employers through the employment tribunal for not allowing me back to work.

I was like the runner in the first paragraph trying to do the impossible and causing my blood pressure to rise to dangerous levels and my life was very much put at risk .

Certain friends and relatives would encourage me never to give up and to always cling on to every last bit of hope that I would fully recover.

But this fight was leaving me exhausted and needing to sleep a lot.

I was difficult to live with and not much fun to be around.

Another group of people including doctors, therapists friends and family encouraged me to accept my disability and not give up but to embrace my new situation being a person with one fully-functional arm and leg as well as only half my visual field.

Accepting it felt to me like defeat.

I was absolutely torn between the two theories; fight and never give up or accept and embrace my new disabled life.

In the end after a couple of years of complete turmoil, I began to accept the situation that I might never work again or play football and cricket with my children or go scuba-diving, among many other things.

As I let go of those things I learned to cook again with one hand and learned to type on the computer using speech recognition.

Seven years later, here I am writing this article on my computer using speech recognition. I think in the last seven years I have made the best out of the new me and I’m still working on that in a stubborn way.

I am disabled and may never recover but I can still do some things pretty well.

This is my last column but to anyone who has just become disabled, I would suggest to them that accepting is a very important part of recovery and channelling your energies into the right areas will bring dividends. Good luck.