My experience is that everyone has heard for so many years that concussions aren't that bad. It is hard to get people, even doctors and nurses, to understand that what you are going through is serious. If you think about times in your life when you were around someone who was sick, maybe an aging relative or someone whose parent or child has died, it is easy for us to be consoling at first, but we soon forget their pain or condition and become annoyed with them. It is so easy when we are well to forget the ill, and when we are ill to forget how hard it is to relate to an ill person when we are well.
I don't know if that makes sense.
Basically, it is easy to judge, but hard to truly understand. As a person who is well, it is frustrating when someone becomes seemingly obsessed with their illness and keeps e-mailing tons of links and articles explaining details we cannot relate to. It might be interesting the first couple times, but after that it is just annoying. We can't help it, even with the ones we love most. As human beings we forget so easily. I was 19 when I got my first concussion falling off of a horse. I had 10 hours of amnesia during which time I forgot that my uncle had died in a tragic accident 2 years previously and other such important details. My parents, who love me more than life itself, did not do very much research, they did not push me to go see doctors, the most they did was to not get very upset at the 2 letter grade drop and they did not make me work that summer. It was not because they loved me less or anything like that, it was because they had no idea, no matter how many times I explained, they had no idea how I was feeling.

People care, they just don't know how we are feeling, and it is difficult to keep other's pain at the forefront of our minds. It is also hard to relate and to know what to say or do, and it is hard to be truly interested in the nuances of something we cannot even comprehend.

If you think of your reactions and treatment of other people who have been in some kind of pain, I will bet a lot that you have treated them much the same way. This is not because we are awful, it is because we are human.
May the peace of this Christmas season fill your life!
Merry Christmas!
Margarite