Hello world, does anybody read blog posts anymore? It seems like there are so many blogs out there that it's hard to imagine anybody will care about what I have to say. Except, I feel like it needs to be said. About five or six years ago (it's hard to keep track of time when you're busy trying to keep your head above water), I sat at the opposite end of a soccer field and watched my kid's head hit the ground.
I knew it was a concussion even though nobody else believed it. Just like I knew the gender of my kid while still pregnant, even though everybody else swore up and down that it would be the opposite. It doesn't matter. It doesn't make any difference at all what I knew, and when I knew it. It doesn't change what happened and it doesn't change the fact that I couldn't do anything to stop it or to make it better.
Long before I ever got pregnant I swore my kid would never play soccer because of the risk of getting a concussion. But, she wanted to and I made her promise that she wouldn't use her head. So she didn't. It happened anyway. Instead of headbutting an airborne ball, she fell backward while in net and hit the ground. All I could do was watch.
That was the first one. But it wasn't the last one.
The next time, I wasn't there. It was at school. She collided with a friend. Both ended up with a concussion and the other girl got a broken arm as mine accidentally stepped on her trying to get out of the way. It was years ago. They're still friends and the bone is healed.
That was the second one. It took a little longer to recover but she seemed to be better.
Then, a few months later she was in gym class. They were playing basketball so there were a lot of balls flying around. When it was time to clean up, she got hit in the head by a flying basketball. Before she had a chance to recover, six more balls made contact. It was the end of the class so it flew under the radar. As she was making her way to her locker, a kid threw a Nerf football from the other end of the hall and it hit her square between the eyes. When I picked her up from school she was green and couldn't stand up.
It was a Friday and there was only one week to go before Christmas holidays. I had heard that the old logic of keeping movement to a minimum was now replaced by recommendations to get moving as soon as you can to speed recovery. So I suggested that she take it easy but go to school. At some point between classes she found herself standing beside a cinder-block wall, chatting with a friend, when somebody asked if she knew where Eva was. Completely forgetting the wall she turned her head in the direction of her classroom with the full force of an individual that is oblivious to the cement obstacle in her path.
That was it. After that she couldn't get up for three months. That was four years ago. She's still struggling.
We all are. A concussion isn't just a traumatic head injury to one individual. It's a life altering event for them and their entire circle of family, friends, acquaintances, and every degree of separation hence forth.
The funny thing is that despite all the lip service, when it lands in your sandbox, you quickly realize there are no real supports, only a never ending spiral of misinformation, neglect and confusion. The more help somebody needs, the less likely that they will receive it... especially if they live outside of the right catchment area.
Hospitals, it turns out, have two things in common: each tries to distinguish themselves with a unique area of expertise that they can showcase, and each limits access to their services to a very close cropped geographic area... this despite happily accepting Provincial tax dollars. So, I pay for services I have no ability to access. Sounds fair, doesn't it?
Of course we tried going to doctors. All sorts of doctors. You wait months to get in and you drive for hours only to be told that you should really get the anxiety addressed. It seems the experts of the day all feel that the only thing to be done to help with concussion recovery is antidepressant medication.
How's this for dark humour? Patient: Doctor, I have a traumatic brain injury. Doctor: There's not much we can do, it's all in your head. Is it? Is it now?
No, it isn't. To begin with we're a little lucky I suppose that she needed glasses anyway because otherwise we may not have learned that hitting your head can result in a narrowed field of vision and convergence and divergence issues. In other words, you start to see the world through a fishbowl with blinders. So, we got vision therapy.
They started her off with syntonic phototherapy. It's supposed to help with retraining the brain to help with balance by desensitizing it to certain wavelengths. I'll tell you, every time I picked her up I was wondering if it was doing more harm than good. But, we had to do something and in the end, supposedly it got a little better. While that was going on, they also did conventional vision therapy, to get her eyes to figure out how to work right. So, eventually the double vision eased up.
About two thirds of the way through the government shut down the doctor's offices for a few months because of COVID19. By the time they were allowed everybody was hurting. So it was only a matter of time before they started feeling like they were paying us for the privilege of helping my girl. So they just decided that she was done. I don't know. Maybe they were being honest. But really I don't think that they were. They just made a business decision. Just like all the other doctors and other healthcare professionals who make business decisions about not taking overly burdensome concussion cases or not getting certified to care for kids under 18 years old.
It's shocking how few providers there are who are willing to help kids with concussions.
When we did finally stumble on to health through hearsay and gossip links that eventually, maybe, put us on some sort of path to recovery, we realized just how little we had done until now. Even so, we are just scratching the surface of related issues that must be addressed if the minds infamous neuroplasticity super-power is ever to kick in.
Oh, and we haven't even started talking about the immense controversy in the fields of mental and medical health: can you treat traumatic brain injury without treating the mind and the other way around. Most providers seem to believe that they can do one or the other but it's not their problem that they've picked one or the other and they aren't going to worry about treating the human body as one complex and interdependent system. That's on the kid to figure out... or not.
Oh,
and we also haven't mentioned the link between hormone dysregulation
and concussions. Consider yourself lucky if the provider you are talking
to is aware of the link but damned if they're going to touch that one
with a ten foot pole or a 2.5 year waiting list.
