Originally Posted by russiarulez

Erik, I was right about your age when I had my last concussion that did me in and your story really resonated with me, since I used to do some fairly extreme stuff in my late teens and 20s (paragliding, skydiving, dropping cliffs on skis and snowmobiles, downhill mountain biking, etc...)

In addition to all of that I was into martial arts/boxing/kickboxing since my late teens.

Just like you I never had a diagnosed concussion (before this last one) or a hard enough hit to black out, mostly just headaches for a few days after a hard fall/landing or a rough sparring session.

So I went on with my life without worrying too much about it. Looking back at it now I realize that some of the issues that I've had in the past were the result of these concussions that I just shrugged off and moved on (vision issues, sleep issues, etc).

Well, it all caught up to me eventually in a big way. I had a concussion (no loss of consciousness or memory loss) while at a boxing sparring, just a hard hit that "rang my bell". I didn't think much of it at first, but then things started to spiral out of control to a point where I couldn't get out of bed for two weeks.

Things eventually got better after about three months, and I thought that I'm all healed (after all, the doc told me to get back to normal life as did my friends/family) and I went for a fairly easy snowmobile ride with some friends.

Well it turned out not to be such a great idea... Things went to hell for me and it was worse than the initial 3 months...

Now 5 years later I'm still not back to normal and deal with the consequences of not taking it seriously back then.

The point of my story is that you need to take this last concussion as a warning and a learning experience. Trust me when I say that what you've experienced is not even close to how it can be if you keep hitting your head. Your body is telling you something, please listen.

By the way, 99% of doctors have no idea what they are talking about when it comes to concussions, just ask any of the long term users on this forum.

Originally Posted by Bud

Blue,

Hang in there, sleep will return.

You can learn to eventually ignore the headaches, my head hurts still after 4 years, I was whacked pretty hard but most of the time I'm not really aware of it until my wife asks how my head did today. I know that might not be the answer you want but I mean it when I say it really isn't that bad. For some reason we seem to handle a sore knee but a sore head spells doom to us.

Bud