Hey,

Just thought I would share my story. (Sorry for the length).

My name is Nick and I am 22 years old and I have been dealing with my concussion/PCS for almost 10 months now. Seems like a very long time to me even though I know plenty of people here have been dealing with PCS for years. I was in the camp that thought Concussions only take a week to heal so the fact that its been 10 months has made it a very frustrating journey. Basic symptoms have always been the same: light headache (more of a pressure inside the head and feeling of compression), cloudy/foggy thinking, fatigue, stress/anxiety, irritability, and sensitivity to noise.

I got my concussion during the spring semester of my senior year of college in March of 2015 when I was out drunk with my friends and hit my head right on the side of my eye by the temple on an icy snowbank. I was drunk when it happened but I started to feel a headache pretty much right away and had a cut. The next morning I woke up feeling not so bad but definitely as if something wasn't right. First 24 hours weren't very restful.

I had an event the next weekend where I planned on drinking and legitimately thought I would be fine by then. I ended up not being fine obviously and from that point became week to week in my own mind. Ok I need one more week. Another week. I ended up flying home to stay with my parents and stayed there for a week. I actually felt better when I went back to school at the end of it but as soon as I got back to school I felt worse again. At that point it had been 3 weeks and I couldn't believe I wasn't better! How Naive I had been...

The fact that I wasn't getting better was extremely stressful. My peers didn't understand why i wasn't better and there were all these fun things going on that I desperately wanted to be better for. All these dates and deadlines that I was like ok I have two more weeks to get better. Long story short I ended missing out on everything, barely got my schoolwork done (handwrote a 15 page research paper because I couldn't use the computer), and graduated. Graduation night I had a beer or two because I was so sick of it and wanted to celebrate my four years of college with my friends.

What I was doing to help myself along was taking supplements (took a B vitamin, NAC, Magnesium, Omega 3s, and a new supplement called EHT by nerium). I saw a cranio sacral therapist who helped a lot actually. Every time I saw her after the session I would leave and it was like everything I was seeing was in HD. She told me that the swelling/inflammation in my head was having trouble draining and what she was doing was opening up the pathways in order to get the brain to drain. It helped a lot and I was convinced it was going to make me 100% better.

As soon as I graduated school I moved to NYC and once I was removed from that stressful school environment I started feeling so much better. At that point it had been three months. I attribute a lot of it to being removed from the stressful environment at school. At that point I thought I was 100%. I stupidly started doing all of things I had been wanting to do for so long. I went out with my friends to bars and got drunk, I played video games, went to the movies, had a beer after work or wine with dinner. Along with all of that I had just started a new job working in Finance. At a certain point after a few weeks the drinking and the stress of the new job became too much and my headaches came back. This was August and now I have not recovered since.

The best way for me to describe it is that I am 90% better but that last 10% feels like it is not getting better. Currently supplements I take are Brain Magnesium by Drs best, NAC by drs best, Curcurmin, omega 3s, and Neuro Optimizer by Jarrow. I try to see the cranial sacral therapist when I can but she's not local. I have become very knowledgable about concussions and try and help others and friends of mine as much as I can but its frustrating to see them get better in only a few weeks while I am still dealing with mine...

My greatest fear is that I will not make a full recovery and I will feel debilitated for the rest of my life. When I was 18 I had a herniated disc in my back and dealt with very stressful back pain. Today it is a lot better but it is not 100%. Im worried that is what is happening with my head. I fully recognize the role anxiety has in people's recoveries and how stressing about when you are going to get better is going to do the opposite. I just really hope it gets better soon and this nightmare that we all can't wake up from is going to end eventually...