Building a Safer Headspace
Transcriber: Vy Tran
Reviewer: Rhonda Jacobs
I looked around
and there were 500 puzzle pieces
all scattered around
the waiting room floor.
Wow, we had made a mess.
My cousin and I were jamming together
the pieces of the puzzle to pass the time
until my dad’s name was called,
forcing us to abandon our unfinished work.
My cousin pulled me
into the waiting room to see my dad.
I embraced him, careful
to not disturb the forest of wires
or the bandages that were wrapped
around his head.
I was naive,
being more preoccupied with the mess
I had left behind in the waiting room
rather than my dad having experienced
his ninth major concussion
as a professional athlete.
At 10 years old, I was confused
by the uncertainty in the doctor’s voice
when he was relaying updates about my dad,
as I had seen these physicians
as all-knowing and all-curing superheroes.
What was so wrong with my dad’s head
that even the doctor couldn’t understand?
In today’s society, we tend to overlook
the ramifications of head injuries
simply because there’s usually not as much
gruesome, visible exterior damage.
There’s even an allure to watching
professional football players
clash their heads together,
or watching a boxer sock someone
in the face and knock them out.
Now, I don’t have anything
against televised athletics.
My dad is a professional cyclist.
He’s been one of the top cyclists
in the nation for his career
that’s lasted 18 years.
He races about 50 times a year.
So that’s a total of
over 1000 races in his lifetime.
He’s placed on the podium
at the state and national levels
and even competed
at the world championships
five years in a row.
Unfortunately, as a cyclist,
crashing is part of the sport,
and my dad is no exception.
Thankfully, my dad has seemingly recovered
from every one of his major
crashes or injuries
even the ones where he hit his head.
However, in the past few years,
things began to change.
He started getting mood swings.
He can’t control his emotions at times.
He has frequent seizures and collapses,
sometimes he slurs his speech
and forgets where he is,
similarly to how a dementia patient would.
How does a perfectly healthy
professional athlete
start experiencing these symptoms
at the tender age of 49?
My dad isn’t the only athlete
who’s experienced these types
of problems later on in life
due to a history
of traumatic brain injury.
The first post-mortem
pathological brain study
that showed correlation
between concussions and lifelong impact
was that of Mike Webster,
a former NFL player
for the Pittsburgh Steelers.
Mike Webster was extremely accomplished.
He was in the Pro Football Hall of Fame
and competed in four
Super Bowl championships in his lifetime.
However, in the last few years
of Webster’s life,
his personality and behavior
began to change dramatically.
He abandoned his wife and kids
and started living out of his van.
He couldn’t sleep at night so he would
use a taser to shock himself to sleep
until he could.
He even started pulling out his own teeth,
until he eventually
died of a heart attack in 2002.
Now, this man, he had a wife, a family,
friends.
By the end of his life,
he was completely unrecognizable.
After Webster’s death, Dr. Bennet Omalu
the forensic neuropathologist
that performed his autopsy,
saw all kinds of damage in his brain.
In fact, studies today show
that the cumulative damage
to Webster’s brain
was equivalent to that
of over 250,000 automobile crashes.
Webster wasn’t an isolated incident.
Several years after his death,
fellow NFL players Justin Strzelczyk,
Andre Waters and Terry Long all followed.
Dr. Omalu found the same type of damage
in all of their brains.
After finding convincing evidence
of the link between concussions
and experiencing dementia-like
symptoms later on in life,
Dr. Omalu gave his discovery a name:
chronic traumatic encephalopathy,
or CTE for short.
Now, the brain is a soft and squishy organ
that just floats freely
in fluid within our skull.
When an impact is sustained to the head,
the brain hits the skull and gets damaged.
This is called a concussion.
CTE is caused by these concussions
or even multiple, seemingly benign
sub-concussive traumas.
CTE also causes rapid brain degeneration
over a span of five to 10 years,
usually starting in one’s 40s or 50s.
While it’s unknown what exactly triggers
the start of this deterioration,
it could be years or even decades
after the initial injury.
The tragedy and difficulty
is that there is no cure for this
progressively degenerative condition.
There is no ability to undo
the constantly worsening
damage to the brain.
What starts off
as forgetting your keys
can eventually spiral
into forgetting your own brother’s name.
Additionally, there is no way
to effectively detect or even diagnose CTE
until a postmortem autopsy.
As of right now,
doctors can only do it
by a case-by-case basis
using the patient’s head trauma history,
combined with a process of elimination
to rule out any other
neurodegenerative diseases,
such as Alzheimer’s or dementia.
For a disease that is so deadly
and so prevalent among athletes,
there is little awareness surrounding it.
To understand the prevalence of CTE,
the NFL conducted a study.
Scientists took 111 brains of [deceased
former] professional football players
and tested them for CTE.
110 came back positive.
However, CTE is not isolated
to just football.
What happens if you hit your head once
when you fall off your bike
or head a soccer ball too hard
and get a minor concussion?
Regardless of the severity of the incident
our brains were not designed
to undergo this type of trauma.
The issue with sports
is the repetitive nature
of this kind of trauma
and how it eventually leads to
the rapid brain degeneration that is CTE.
The more damage to the brain one receives,
the more likely CTE is to develop
later on in life.
CTE occurs in four stages,
with the symptoms
getting progressively worse every stage.
At stage one, patients may be asymptomatic
or only experience minor symptoms
that can go largely unnoticed,
such as headaches or forgetfulness.
Stage two comes with noticeable
impairment to memory,
mood swings and extreme behaviors.
Stage three comes with
significant memory loss
and a general lack of emotional,
cognitive and behavioral control.
Imagine that your memory always fails you,
you’re feeling confused,
you lose your train of thought,
can’t find the words for your sentences.
Feelings of depression and anxiety
build up within CTE patients.
Stage four is the most
progressed stage of CTE,
as many of the neurons in the brain
have actually been killed.
All previous symptoms
progress dramatically.
Language and motor
difficulties come into play,
and patients have trouble remembering
even the most basic things.
Over time, these symptoms
cause a sense of insanity in CTE patients
and can cause such severe
psychological issues
that the leading cause
of death in CTE patients
is actually suicide in stage three.
Although we may not currently have a cure
to help people like my dad
who suffer from CTE,
I try to stay optimistic
about the new developments in technology,
preventative and medicinal.
Even with scientists
actively researching cures,
we can do our part to reduce the risk
and prevalence of CTE going forward.
The issue isn’t playing sports
or the NFL or being active.
It’s just a general lack of awareness
surrounding the issue of CTE
and what happens to our heads
if we continue to treat them this way.
Now, I’m not saying we need to walk around
wearing marshmallow hats all the time,
but implementing safer
head awareness measures,
even starting in school athletics,
can help.
By protecting our heads now,
by enforcing the use of helmets
in contact sports
and instilling protocols
to prevent severe collisions
from even happening in the first place,
there will be less concussive
and sub-concussive trauma in us,
as well as future generations,
eventually leading to lower rates
of CTE in the future.
This, combined with increased regularity
of cognitive exercises in our lives
as well as the elevated
funding for research,
we could possibly even eradicate CTE,
as well as other
neurodegenerative diseases
within the next century.
While the advancements in medicine
and neuroscience are exciting,
our participation on a local scale
is just as important.
If you know someone with CTE,
Alzheimer’s, dementia
or any other neurodegenerative disease,
you can help them instrumentally
without a fancy neuroscience degree.
For me, I’m going to start off
by going on a run with my dad,
because exercise helps improve
the overall well-being
and general condition
of neurodegenerative disease patients.
Then we’ll go on a hike, walk my dog,
play some board games
and do other leisurely activities
to reduce stress.
And most importantly,
I’ll remind him to wear his helmet
on the next time
he goes on his bike ride.
By nursing our brains with the same care
that we would a torn ACL,
we can change the future.
Encourage your friends and family
to continue protecting their heads.
Continue to educate yourself
and others on concussions and CTE.
Be mindful of your head
during your next sporting event.
We can even start advocating for change
right here at Moreau,
even if it is something as simple as
showing a five minute video on concussions
at the start of every sports season.
So let’s share this information,
do everything we can to protect our heads,
and together
we can step into a safer headspace.
Thank you.