Different strokes
Different strokes - full story
02 September, 2012
Reporter: Rahni Sadler
Producer: Alex Garipoli
Chris Birch was just your average young heterosexual man until a freak accident changed his life forever. The Welsh 19-year old, engaged to be married to his girlfriend, was skylarking with mates after rugby practice one day when a bad fall down a hill momentarily cut off the blood supply to his brain. He suffered a stroke, and when he woke up he found something inside him had shifted.
Birch began to realise that he was gay. He now works as a hairdresser, and his female fiancé has been replaced by a boyfriend named Jack. He’s slimmed down from his previous 120kg frame and undergone a complete personality transformation, with different tastes in everything from music to food to – of course – romance.
Some doubt Birch’s story – even his partner Jack has his suspicions about whether it was the stroke that caused this shift in sexuality – but as his neuropsychiatrist explained to Sunday Night, the trauma of a stroke can unearth otherwise hidden parts of the brain. Birch may have been gay all along, but it took a shift in his brain to bring those feelings to the surface.
We also visited Alan, who lives 100km from Chris and had been a tradie since the age of 14. A window glazier by trade, he had no interest in art and had never even set foot inside an art gallery – until his stroke.
When he awoke, he was a gifted artist, a talent only discovered when an art therapist insisted he put pencil to paper as part of his rehabilitation process. He now has a fine arts degree and is a gifted artist with his own gallery in fashionable north London, where his paintings sell for hundreds of pounds each.
CONTACT SUNDAY NIGHT
