Significance of my specific injury
 

Although risking the quality of the rest of my life for a few seasons of lacrosse is not to smart of a decision, I do think the severity of my injury comes into play. The ONLY pcs symptom i have dealt with is headaches, there have been points in time where I could not leave my bed because of how bad they were, and then there are times when I can barely even tell if I have one or not.

My mental capacity is as good as it was before, I have taken tests which determine your memory and thinking skills and I have performed very well. The suffering i have been through have been less pain oriented, but more so just from the lack of proving myself as an athlete. If it was not for the missing sports, I would not even bother avoiding TV, videogames, alcohol. The physical pain I am dealing with is managable, the emotional let down is what is most debilitating.

I guess what I am trying to say is that the PCS i am dealing with from a pain standpoint is not that serious, but what it is preventing me from doing is as bad as it gets.

The severity of your injury has no bearing on your risk of debilitating injury from further play. The intensity of your head aches is the only criteria that counts plus your history of years of full contact sports. When one injury causes such severe head aches or any other intense symptoms, that injury was a critical mass injury that needs to be taken very seriously.

Throughout sports, there are many situations where one critical mass injury has ended a career or other pursuit.

The big question is: Was this last injury your critical mass injury or will the next one be the one that you never recover from enough to live a full life.

If the mental task tests you have done so well on are the ImPACT Test or others like it, they are meaningless at determining your mental condition. They only test at a very surface level.

It is like getting a cast off a broken leg. Sure you can walk on the leg but the leg is not as strong as it was prior. Fortunately, a broken bone will eventually achieve full strength as the bone continues to strengthen as it is subjected to stress. The brain never even gets close to its prior condition.

Update on my condition.
 

So I am not sure if I will get a reply to this post, the thread has been dead for a few months now, but I am going to go for it anyway. It has been 13 months since the first concussion. I have been through several different treatments and medicines, some successful, some not.

I was on Depakote and Topamax, both of which I thoroughly despised and stopped. One thing that has been very effective is nerve blocks. I was a little scared at first getting a needle put into my head, but it made me feel normal, something I havent felt in awhile, for about a month. I was very encouraged by this and beginning to think i was totally healed. I was wrong, shortly after a vacation the headaches came back and hit me hard. I am still not sure if it was due to the travel or the stress my girlfriend had been putting me through at the time. I got another nerve block to deal with these headaches and once again it made a world of difference.

My fall ball lacrosse was beginning at college and I was anxious to prove to my teammates what I could do. The first scrimmage I participated in I played terribly, but made it through unharmed. I intelligently skipped the next scrimmage just to limit the chance of injury but played in the next one. In this scrimmage I once again played pretty poorly (after not playing for a year and a half, dont judge me.) and decided to take as many runs as possible to get back into it. I took a hit to the body and fell to the ground but felt fine. After the scrimmage though concussion symptoms set in, mainly a mental fog but I knew what was going on I have been through it before.

I have yet to meet with doctors about it yet but my trainer knows and I know that I probably had another concussion. I am suffering through HEAVY headaches. My future as an athlete is in serious doubt as well, I am about to lose something that I have built my entire life around. I cannot even internalize the emotional pain I am feeling about potentially losing sports because of the physical pain I am currently enduring.

It took me over a year to heal from the last concussion and I was not even 100%. I know that I now have a long and painful road to recovery from this latest concussion. I am at probably the lowest point of my young life in the sense that I am probably losing what I love most and it is going to be hard to adapt to life without it. I am very mentally tough though and I will find a way through it.

what I guess I am looking for through this post is some sort of hope or inspiration or anything. Or maybe I just needed to do this to vent, however any reply is greatly appreciated.

Dallas,

Welcome back. So, are you asking if there is a chance that you can return to sports? The simpler answer is Yes, you can. The complete answer is, You will continue this roller coaster with every little jar to your head. Eventually, you may end up like me. I can't even shake my head 'No' without concussion symptoms.

There is plenty of life without sports. While you are still young, you should look for other things to do. Maybe you need to find a spinal cord injury support group. You will find some very inspiring people there. There are plenty of people who have lost vast amounts of their previous life. The best find ways to go on.

It sounds like you are a competitor. Take that drive and move forward. If head aches are your worst problem, you are very fortunate. Losing memory and cognitive skills are far worse. My head aches are minor distractions. My inability to remember simple things is daily misery. But, I go on. I have a new grand daughter being born as we speak.

Seeing my kids grow up and have kids is worth far more than losing my opportunity to play soccer in high school. I switched to distance running and was determined to train for the 80 Moscow Olympics until I wrecked my knee cartilage and shoulder from the constant training.

Each time I have had to let go of something, I found something new to replace it. It can be done.

There are some good books about finding the job you will love. They discuss how to find a new passion in life. Read all those books you can find until you find your new passion. They say, Find a job you love and you will never work a day in your life. Then, go for a full life with this knowledge.

My best to you.

btw, I think Jim Cook of Samuel Adams Beer talks about finding a job you love.

Scared
 

Ive been reading things on this site about concussions. And im extremely anxious to get back in to my favorite hobby-weight lifting. Im in high school right now, got a concussion 2 months ago playing football. I feel completely fine. Im talking about heading back to the weightroom after my neurology appointment. I already have a couple friends who will want to come with me after school to the weightroom. But the things im reading here have scared me. Im going to go quite slow at getting back into full blown lifting. Its killing me just sitting around and watching other people workout, and I just want to go back to doing it as hard as I can. But im going to stay slow. Take it easy. Watch myself, and have others watch me. And take time with my recovery.

jmt

Welcome to NeuroTalk. I suggest you take it very slow. Focus on reps rather than max weights. Max lifting causes much more muscle breakdown. The toxins from muscle breakdown will be very bad for your recovering brain. Once you can do a good rep circuit over and over without ANY symptoms, you can start adding max lifts slowly.

Avoid body building supplements until you have returned to a symptom free with max exertion condition. Go easy on energy drinks too, especially if they have caffeine or stimulants.

You will be surprised at how easy it is to get back to your worst condition. Just one day of overdoing it and you can be back to square one.

Think of cardio conditioning before anything else.

Lifting and my current status
 

So I also was in your spot and just wanted to get back to normalcy and start exorcising again. Running and lifting actually made my symptoms feel better for whatever reason (bloodflow, optimism, who knows). My advice to you is avoid lifts that require heavy breathing such as squatting and even benching. You can eventually work up to that when you are feeling comfortable, I was able to with no problems.

Back to my situation, I recently visited with a neurologist who told me no sports for now but that the eventual decision to stop completely will be on me. I HATE that, I personally have to be responsible to say I quit. No one quite understands what I have gone through and it will appear to them as if I just gave up, when in reality I have been fighting through severe headaches for 13 months and counting just to give myself a chance to come back. I honestly wish the doctor would just tell me I cannot play.

On a sidenote, she prescribed me with depakote. It has me scared. I tried to take it awhile ago and I did not like it. I feel as if it messes with my emotions. I am a very reserved and tough person mentally. But with my short term expieriance with depakote I feel way more emotional then I usually do and even anxious. Does anybody know about this drug that can tell me more?

Even though Its a bad situation with taking heavy drugs, Id rather take them then feel how I have been feeling. Thank you for any responses

thanks for response
 

Im gonna take it very slow. ill be accompanied by my girlfriend who is getting back from a knee surgery. guess ill just do what she can. stay with that till i feel as good as new and symptoms stop. still get headaches all the time just from sitting around. but theyre starting to go away. and ive heard from friends and family that emotionally im ok again. and my memory is A LOT better than it was. so yeah....im not even going to put weight on the bar until i feel no more symptoms. Thanks for the advice. saved me from what i thought i was goin to do.

Depakote
 

I take it for mood swings. It helps with my anger issues but leaves me open to feeling emphatic sometimes. What I mean is if I am watching a sad movie I feel sad. If it is exciting... If it is happy... I grew up being encouraged to hide my feelings so this can at times make me feel vunerable.

On a different note if I miss a dose it really whacks me out. I get very angry, frighteningly so. Be careful about dosing as this drug is hard on the liver. If you start suffering from pain in the abdomen go to your Dr or ER.

Avoiding re-injury
 

As a general comment on repeat head injuries, it seems to me very hard (impossible?) to foretell how much harm can come from repeating TBIs/PCS.

The first one or main one in your life (if you're here reading this) was probably much worse then you could have expected.

Now you're partly wiser, (if you're reading these postings and you'll have had loads of other experiences to put you in the picture to some extent), but I reckon these things are certainly true --

-- Contact sports (and some others) have a high risk of TBI/PCS
-- If you've already had a significant TBI/PCS, your brain is more sensitive to and more easily more harmed by physical trauma
-- Repeat injuries are often much worse, and/or happen more easily (=with smaller impacts).

It seems EXTREMELY hard at first to sacrifice sports or activities you love and are accustomed to, in order to keep safe, to avoid a mere chance in the future, but the hardships of re-injury are awful.

I had my injury from a head-first fall off a rearing horse (unhelmeted) onto farmyard concrete. A complete life-changer, to put it ridiculously mildly. That was 21 years ago. Slowly, slowly, I've got a new positive life focus, but the relevant things to pass on are --

-- I had just one probably small impact seven years ago, which immediately sent me into coma, (and with pre-traumatic amnesia, which just means your mind can't access exactly what happened leading up to the impact) ... that was VERY cautionary and set me back

-- over the years, I've known several TBI people with re-impacts, two in particular are always in my mind, because I know the specifics of their re-injuries more closely -- each one, from just a "modest" re-impact, lost very much quality of life, permanently

-- lastly, being "in the know", knowing that your brain is vulnerable, has got to be an inhibition when you're playing a contact sport with an injury risk. It will hold you back a bit, unless you choose denial or a sense of oblivion.

Keeping out of contact sports after having had a TBI is necessary, and gets a whole easier when you've taken a new direction. I hope that anybody reading this for whom it's relevant, can really find their own mechanisms to be safe. Re-injury just gets worse and worse. Maybe it's a bit like the Richter Scale for earthquakes, going up just one point is ten times worse -- but the one extra point with re-injuries comes even with less impact force.

Mind your head -- it holds your mind, and all that.
Have lots of luck, but arguably nearly all luck is pre-arranged (particularly "bad luck"?) ... ultimately it's up to ourselves.