Molly O’Brien (4/4)

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“I’ve obviously had a concussion and I’ve had concussions before but this one was pretty traumatic. I’ve had 2 major injuries in my lifetime that have kind of rocked me in a way where I have to put breaks on a lot of other things. I’ve had a back injury and I’ve had a concussion where been in bed for 3 months, not working, not really doing so much. With the concussion I couldn’t watch TV, I couldn’t read, I couldn’t even go to the grocery store, it was just too much. So for 3 months basically in isolation, away from my family, away from all the friends that have known me from like ‘little person’ age, that was hard. It wasn’t so much that I had to do anything other than just to accept where I was at, that there’s nowhere to go but to appreciate where you are, what you have the opportunity to do from here forward. So for me, just getting to the acceptance point of saying, ‘here’s where I’m at right now, I might have all these other goals that I want to achieve but just to be able to get back to being healthy is what I need to do right now.’ Acceptance sounds like it’s something that happens in day but when you are going through something that’s not healing the way you think will, it’s every single day you have to sit down and say, ‘this is where I am, I’m thankful for all these things and I trust it’s going to get better.’

It’s been 10 months now, so almost a year to go through that and say to yourself over and over again, to slowly get back into the things that you love but not consistently yet, it just take a lot. It takes a lot of character, takes a lot of recognizing that when you are in the position to guide other people through that process, through injury rehab, through disease condition, through whatever the approach, why ever the are coming in to exercise or to train. The months that you have around process goals, how you communicate that to people, how you get them to trust something is going to workout and it’s going to be fine and it may not be exactly what you dreamed it to be, there’s always a way to get better. To me, those are the intangible things that make great coaches and great teachers. If you can relate to people wherever they are at, wherever their goals are, but you can relate to them on the process level and be able to talk to them on the hard days, the good days are great, you can always talk to someone on a good day, give them a high five, pat on the back, like heck yeah it’s all good. But everyone has bad days. Everyone has days where the process is not going the way they think it’s going to go and the moments where you can relate to somebody in that, take whatever experiences you’ve had and put you in that position. Those are the times where you form real relationships that you are in it together, that person is trusting you to get them towards their goals. Everybody knows with relationships, when you get to that moment, first hard thing, boyfriend and girlfriend, first hard fight, if you get through that and you do it together it makes you stronger right? You have more trust in the relationship and that’s what coaching is. It’s when you get through your hard days, trust your coach on the hard days, you know that you are in it together then those are the times where you are like ‘alright, we are actually here to do something, we are here to do it as a team.’ And that’s cool, that’s when it starts to become people instead of just coaching sport, and barbells and weights.

Basically, I’ve had several concussions previous. I’ve had 6 serious concussions I got while wrestling. Serious enough to keep me out of competing, practice, school or all of the above for at least a week, some were bad enough I was out of school for about 2 months. I kind of thought I knew what a concussion was and what the healing process was like. Then February this past year I had a slip and fall accident on some ice, basically hit my head on the curb behind me. Almost immediately I can tell it was very bad and very different from the other concussions that I’ve had. My vision just exploded and went bright white. I just remember feeling pure fear. Feeling really scared because I knew something was really wrong. It was about 5am in the morning, weren’t really many people around. I was just a couple blocks away from my apartment thank goodness. I didn’t really know where I was, or what to do. I couldn’t tell you how long I was sitting in the streets for. Eventually I made my way to a coffee shop, I can barely see so things were pretty fuzzy. I got to the coffee shop and they called 911 for me and I went to the hospital. I just sat there and thought, ‘oh my god this is so bad my life is going to be different.’ Which is a pretty scary thing when you think life can change that fast and that dramatically. I was having trouble making full sentences, I didn’t know if that was the fear of what was going on, I still couldn’t really see too well so that’s a pretty scary thing when you can’t see the world. I was really struggling to get words to come out and string them together and express what things I was feeling and what I was going through.

After the initial stage I got home, the vision and speech was pretty bad for the first couple of weeks. If you ever had a really bad concussion, you’re not really able to stimulate yourself. You’re not able to watch TV, or read books or be in any sort of public space where there’s people moving around. There’s bright lights and loud noises so those first couple weeks I managed to come here (Fortius) to see the Sport Medicine doctor and get some assurance that I was doing the right things to take care of my head at that point in time at the really acute stage but the vast majority of days I spent in my apartment, alone, kind of scared, my family doesn’t live here so I didn’t have that natural support system that you usually have around you. My friends were great and they were really supportive but it’s still not quite the same as being around family in a time like that.

After couple weeks, some of the acute symptoms got a lot better. So, I could see again, I was definitely really sensitive to light but I could at least see clearly, make out shapes, clearly see my friend’s faces and their facial expressions. My speech was all resolved and hasn’t been a problem since. The recovery process took me just before Christmas, so better part of 7/8 months to getting back to the point where I was back at work and feeling like I was a functioning somewhat of the person I was before this. All my other recoveries from concussion were pretty linear, they got progressively better and better. The hardest part of this one was totally unpredictable day to day. I saw so many different specialists, doctors and therapist who were all tremendously helpful offering tremendous expertise. I’m so lucky to have the kind of people around me that I do. But everyone will tell you that concussions are very individual, they respond very differently to different types of therapies. You can under stimulate and over stimulate pretty easy, finding the right balance and progressing the things that I was doing in my recovery at the right pace, at the right time, it’s a hard thing to do. There would be days I would feel really good, and confident that I’ll be able to slowly work back into things then the very next day you’d be back in bed again and be like, ‘oh my goodness has anything changed? Am I going to be like this forever?’

I was able to come back to work just before the summertime. I think I started my return to work in mid April. My work is a very busy environment, there’s lots of people, lots of noise, lots of light. I had a very tough time coming back. It’s hard with concussion because there’s not a lot of outward symptoms. People can’t look at you and see that you are still dealing with an injury. Even you yourself don’t really know what you are capable and not capable of on a daily basis. The struggles were for sure being able to come back and be consistent in anything. I kept feeling like I was letting people down because I would feel good, try to take something on and have to let them know either the next day or next week, it just feels like I was constantly dropping balls. I felt like I wasn’t being a consistent teammate, friend, coach or anything of the things that I wanted to be so that was really tough. It was very tough to kind of be back but not really and to feel like you are just disappointing people more than you are able to fulfill the things you wanted to do.

By the end of the summer, I got through the summer just honestly on backs of a lot of great people who helped me out on the day to day. There were once or twice a week where I would have to call it and sit in a quiet room for the rest of the day or just go home. Without the people I have working with me there is no way I would be able to get through to the summer time. Then once the summer ended, I was feeling like I was around 60-70% of where I wanted to be. I was able to function for the most part and get through days but my brain was just slow. I couldn’t contribute in the way that was purposeful or meaningful to me. It felt like just doing a job rather than doing the career that I worked so hard to get myself into. It was very upsetting to not really perform at something you care about so much, which is my job.

Luckily we have this program in our building called “Watson Brain Group”, they work with some of the cognitive symptoms not only come with traumatic brain injury but with a lot of other injuries and illnesses that affect the brain. It’s basically a group program, and we are all dealing with cognitive symptoms that arise from different conditions but affect us on a daily basis. Basically, for the things that I’m still dealing with after the summer, this was the only group and program that would let me work on some of the symptoms that I was still having. We work on things like memory base tests, on recognizing and piecing together larger symbols to help our brain make sense of the world around us. Work on some of the processing that our brain needs to be able to do. I’m still in the program, I started in October, I spent another 4 months in this therapy-based program. Luckily I don’t have to do any of the other therapies anymore which is amazing. For this program I was still feeling less of myself at work until December. I really started to notice a huge difference around the middle of December where I started to actually feel excited, energized, and enthusiastic to come to work. I felt like I could think more quickly, come to meetings and hear what everyone was saying and be able to articulate a response. To me, I wasn’t really sure if that was something I was able to do again. The last couple months have been really amazing. When you lose something that’s so important to you, you learn how to appreciate all the small things you get back. It’s definitely a challenge day to day but in the big picture you are just so grateful and thankful to have the things in your life that you have. Everyday that you are able to wake up and be healthy, go to work and be around great people is fantastic. Not to be too cheesy or anything, it’s definitely made me a lighter person. I find I have more time for fun, more time for people, more time for the things that I maybe pushed past before and didn’t really appreciate the value of the things in life that are not so serious. It’s definitely changed my perspective on what concussion is, it’s changed my perspective on how you need to be grateful for all the things in your life and you need to take some time off and just enjoy what you got going on. I just had my very first real vacation as an adult and that was something that I probably wouldn’t have done unless I had something that forced me to slow down and recognize that there’s a lot of life to enjoy. Not just the serious work base stuff but there’s a lot of other things.” – Molly O’Brien, Director of Strength and Conditioning at Fortius Sport and Health. (4/4)