14 DAY TRIAL // Sharon Campbell-Rayment, from Ontario, Canada experienced a rather bizarre syndrome after being knocked unconscious from a horse fall and waking up with a Scottish accent. The 50-year-old woman had never been to Scotland before the accident and was baffled when words such as “wee,” “grand,” “awright” and other similar ones were suddenly in her vocabulary.
Back in 2008, Sharon was thrown off her horse Malachi on her family farm in Ontario, suffering a severe head injury that left her unable to speak for several days. The doctors blame her speech impairment on the concussion she got as a result of her head injury.
When her voice finally came back, after weeks of speech therapy, she noticed that her Canadian accent was replaced by a Caledonian one. Her vocabulary was filled with specific Scottish words and expressions and her accent was as native as it got.
Doctors were amazed and ended up diagnosing her with foreign accent syndrome, a rare condition associated with head trauma and concussions. There are only 60 more people in the whole world that accused this type of problems. “Doctors have said I might have the Scottish accent for the rest of my life, or it might just disappear overnight but I don't think it's going anywhere fast,” the 50-year-old mother of two says, according to The Scotsman.
The bizarre effect of the head injury made Sharon believe it was a mystical sign redirecting her towards her undiscovered Scottish family roots. In order to see if the condition was a blessing or not, she took her husband Doug and traveled to Scotland in 2010. They started tracing her ancestors and discovered they have migrated from Scotland to Canada more than 100 years ago.
From all of the accents in the world, she woke up with a Scottish one, so it had to be with a purpose as things don't happen randomly. The woman admits that the accident changed her life completely and has taken the happening as a message from a higher being.
Besides the accent, Sharon also has to deal with brain trauma that makes it really difficult for her to concentrate, make decisions and solve problems. She also has a strong sensitivity to light, severe headaches and feelings of anxiousness when surrounded by crowds of people.
Even if her life got visibly more complicated since the accident, she overcame her fear and started riding horses again. She turned her horse-riding retreat into a therapy center for people who suffered brain injuries and are trying to recover.
The woman is also close to finishing a book about her experience and the way the accident changed her life, in order to help other people going through similar experiences cope with the aftermath of a brain injury.