Symptom Relapse
 

About 4 months ago I had the second concussion of my life, the first was playing rugby at age 14, which was about 10 years ago and from which I completely recovered in a few days. This time I was riding my bicycle in the dark and ended up smashing my head on the muddy ground of a park in a fall but did not lose consciousness.

The next day I had difficulty following conversation due to impaired concentration but showed no other symptoms.

The day after I woke up with a headache that could best be described as the feeling of electric jolts in my brain, and I would have a constant daily headache for almost 3 months. In the following weeks I continued to have concentration and memory impairments, and difficulty reading (which I think is due to impaired saccadic eye movements).

I took nothing except vitamins and fish oil until about 11 weeks into the incident when university exams approached and I started taking paracetamol to relieve the headaches as I needed to study.

Bizarrely not only did 4-6 tablets of daily paracetamol provide relief but after
a week when I stopped the paracetamol the daily headaches that I had for 3 months completely disappeared.

I was headache-free for a month and my concentration/memory issues significantly improved as well. I still had impaired saccadic eye movements (I skip words when reading, something I never used to do before the concussion) and I feel like my ability to encode new memories still isn’t as good as it used to be before the concussion, but it felt like I was finally making a recovery.

About 3 days ago I played soccer, the first time I engaged in vigorous exercise since the concussion. We played for 2 hours so as you can imagine I engaged in very intense exercise.

That night the PCS headache returned and it has been 2 days now that I’ve had the same headaches which I thought I was finally free of. I should also mention that I never had migraine, tension, cluster or any sort of headaches before the concussion, in fact I can't even remember the last time I had a headache before my recent concussion.

Has anyone else experienced something similar? Did you continue to improve after symptom relapses?

Hi Stoic

Welcome to NeuroTalk :).

The TBI/PCS forum is very active so I am sure that you will get helpful comments from other members (I don't know enough about TBI/PCS to say anything useful).

Best wishes.

Sounds like you over did the soccer activity and your body did not like that..
Baby steps work best when returning to normal activities, but any very active/risky things might be best changed to something less rough.
Especially when still in recovery mode..
Maybe many months after no symptoms , then lightly test those activities again for short times at first.. build up slowly as tolerated..

I completely understand your struggles there. In June I got a bad enough concussion from a motocross accident. I thought I finally was healed early that september and hit my head playing basketball. Instant relapse but the symptoms were all worse. And to add to that I fell down the stairs because if the dizziness and got the third that year. I've had up and down weeks/months. Yesterday I was feeling extremely well so I decided to do a calf raise. A singular calf raise. I did this calf raise exercise a little bit to quick and jolted my head a bit. It feels like I've gone back to the beginning after a small event like that. It's not a fun feeling.

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