Hey, Zach! My daughter (16 years old) received her head injury 8 1/2 months ago. She had lots of the same symptoms as you. Lots of headaches, nauseated for 4 straight months, couldn't read for 3 months, couldn't exercise, noise/light sensitivity, concentration and memory issues, etc. She is a sophomore and missed volleyball, basketball, and track this year.

Around the 6 month mark we saw a great improvement in her cognitive abilities (memory, processing and retaining new information). Around 7 months we noticed that the fatigue lifted A LOT.

I'm happy to say that right now she is down to very occassional, short "zapper" headaches, very occassional nausea. She still gets overwhelemed by too much stimulus much faster than she would have pre-injury. She is prone to anxiety attacks which she never had before that I know of.

As for treatment, she was on Elavil for about 5 months and recently tapered off of that. She did a very slow return to exercise (started at 2 minutes on the eliptical machine). She is now able to run outside for 20 minutes or more at a time. None of her doctors felt her symptoms were bad enough to warrant any type of vision therapy, LENS, etc. We pay a lot of attention to diet (high protein, low sugar, low caffeine, high fruit/vegetable). She takes 1,000 fish oil but is fairly resistant to any other vitamins. We are working on it

She told me recently that she "tests" her brain all the time and has done so since the beginning. For example, our eye doc has one of those screen savers that shows a set of 8 pictures and then repeats. She would watch it and then look away and memorize what order the pictures were in (i.e. purple flower, monkey, barn, etc.). I didn't realize she had been doing this. Not sure if it helped or not, but it made her feel better when she started remembering things easier.

As for school, we requested some informal accomodations. Her teachers dropped any vocabulary tests. She listened to books on tape or I read to her. FYI most libraries have books you can download straight to your I-Pod...very cool. Her grades before were mostly A's with maybe a couple of B's - all honors classes. They went down to mostly D's, but are slowly coming back up to B's and C's. Her psychologist is going to write a formal letter that will go with her transcripts describing why she struggled this year. I can't tell you how much better she felt physically once she realized that nobody cared what her grades are this year.

She has struggled getting some of her old friends to understand why she can't do sports and why she has to rest all the time. That's a major frustration at your age. Some people take the time to understand, others won't. Try not to stress too much about that. We encouraged her to do some things she wouldn't have had time to do before, such as learning to bake, working with our dog, some crafty stuff, etc. It all seemed pretty lame before, but she is learning some fun new stuff and forming an identity outside of sports.

If I knew what I know now at the one-month mark I would do a few things differently. Mainly I would force her to rest more and I would put greater restrictions on "screen time" (texting, TV, computer). I might have even pulled her out of school for that first semester completely. It's hard to say how much difference any of things we did or didn't do had on her recovery to this point. I would have focused on removing stress a lot more aggressively.

As for the future, I have a list of tests/treatments to go over with her neuro in June depending on how she feels at that point. We have focused on chasing down one symptom at a time to rule out any underlying complications (hormones, eyes, TMJ, etc).

The people on this forum offer great advice. Keep a log of your symptoms and talk with your docs about any of these tests or treatments that make sense to you. Other than that, try to rest and don't stress too much.

All the best-