Am I Making A Mistake? with Bella Paige
Show Notes:
Maintaining physical health at the cost of your mental health is no use, so sometimes we just have to take the risk and enjoy ourselves! Bella has been doing this over the last little while and it's opened a whole new can of worms. From her fears and self-doubt while snowboarding, to her sister's rage, today Bella talks us through her thought process around risking yet another concussion. We dive into why there doesn't seem to be an answer to the question "How many concussions is too many?", and how being nervous can negatively affect your performance. Bella describes how her perception of her injuries is different from that of her loved ones, and how this changes their opinions of risky behavior. We hear why taking these risks is so important to Bella, and why it’s important to understand that your thinking in the past is not your thinking now. Tune in to hear why Bella thinks it might be better that people can’t see the pain of post-concussion syndrome, the dangers of toxic positivity, and so much more in this solo episode!
Key Points From This Episode:
• Why Bella chose to do two solo episodes so close together.
• How many concussions are too many?
• Reminding yourself just to go slower: how being nervous can affect your choices.
• The adventurous activities Bella has been doing in the last month!
• How your memory of your experiences of times when you were in pain shifts.
• The importance of taking care of your mental health over your physical health.
• Why Bella feels the benefits of having fun now outweigh the risk of receiving another concussion.
• How life might be different for those with post-concussion syndrome if others could see their pain.
• Why it’s important to recognize toxic positivity.
• How your thinking changes with time and coming to terms with the decisions you made in the past.
• Why living in fear isn’t going to help you.
• Where you can reach Bella, and the exciting new group starting in March!
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Transcript - Click to Read
[INTRO]
[00:00:05] BP: Hi. I’m your host, Bella Paige. Welcome to the Post Concussion Podcast; all about life after experiencing a concussion. Help us make the invisible injury become visible.
The Post Concussion Podcast is strictly an information podcast about concussions and post-concussion syndrome. It does not provide, nor substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or another qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice, or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on this podcast. The opinions expressed in this podcast are simply intended to spark discussion about concussions and post-concussion syndrome.
Support the podcast. If you truly love the podcast, please consider supporting us through our tip jar, find the Support the Podcast link in our episode description. All tips are greatly appreciated.
[EPISODE]
[00:01:22] BP: Welcome to the Post Concussion Podcast, with myself, Bella Paige, and it’s just me today. I don’t always do solo episodes this close together, but it seemed necessary. I’ve had so much on my mind. And as you all know, I love to talk so much. I thought that this was a great idea to get back into the episode. Anyways, my biggest thought lately has been about fear and pushing my limits a little bit. But I wanted to start with how many concussions is too many? Do we know the answer? I don’t know the answer. And no medical professional has given me a straight answer either. Sometimes I question why we don’t have a straight answer about that. But at the same time, I don’t think there is an answer because I’ve suffered from more than 10 concussions. I’ve had people suffer from one and reach out and suffer for a very long time. Then there’s some who have suffered from way more than me and they’re doing great. I think it’s important to realize that there’s so many factors to a brain injury that we can account for. So maybe that’s not the number we’re supposed to be focusing on.
Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of adventurous things, and I hadn’t really for a long time. I’ve done anything that put me at more risk other than the odd snowmobile trip. And lately, I’ve kind of just been a little bit more brave, and I think that goes along with my mental health. As I’ve talked about the dirt biking before, I have been dirt biking, and should I be afraid, I sometimes question. For example, just last weekend, I went snowboarding with my best friend, and we were going down the hill and I mentioned that the ice made me nervous now. If there are icy spots on the hill, I would freeze up and that never happened when I was a kid and it happened now. I just had to remind myself, just go slower. What is the rush?
[00:03:52] BP: I love going out on the hill. It’s really fun. I’m also learning to ski right now after snowboarding for my whole life. I had to remember, I’m doing this because it’s fun. I am not a competitive snowboarder, I never will be and I guess had to kind of let go of that. And remember, just go slower then. I remember I hit a patch of ice, and my heart jumped and I remember going, “Don’t think about it. You know what you’re doing. Just go down the hill.” That helped a lot. I just kind of had to let go of that fear, and fear is something that can save us and definitely hurt us. Because if you are really fearful while you’re doing things, your body is tense, and you’re overthinking and maybe you’re not making the right choices.
I went snowboarding, and then the next day, I went ice racing, which is on a dirt bike on the ice, on the lake. You go really, really fast around an oval with studded tires. That’s what I started doing and I didn’t really think that much about it. I just thought this is going to be really fun and something to try. I love being outdoors and an excuse to get outdoors in the winter I will always take. When I was going to grab stuff, my little sister was enraged at me. What it reminded me of is that, I sometimes forget what I’ve gone through and I think it’s a coping mechanism. I often don’t think about the past, because I think I’ve blocked a lot of it out because it helps my mental health. I think if I constantly thought about all the pain I was in, I would have a really hard time going out my door every day. I don’t think she forgets like I do. I don’t think she’s blocked it out like I do and she was so mad. “All these other people don’t have head injuries like yeah, you should think about yourself. You should think better, Bella,” and the rage that can come out of her some days. But it was rage with care, it was rage with fear.
[00:06:09] BP: I remember just telling her that I could get hurt anywhere, and it is true. I could get hurt anywhere. As many of you know, we’ve had guests — I know many of you have been injured at home, walking down the stairs, slipping on ice, a car accident with a drunk driver not being at fault for anything and still dealing with the consequences of post-concussion syndrome. So, there’s that thought, and then there’s the mental illness, mental health thought. I have suffered from severe depression, as you all know. The adrenaline rush helps. I don’t know how to explain it. I know everyone’s brain is wired very differently, but that’s how I’m wired. It really does help me, and I think, sometimes I have to put my mental health before my physical health, which might seem sort of crazy. But that’s how I think and that’s how I’m going to carry on. Sometimes I question, am I making a mistake? Is this a mistake? Getting on a dirt bike and jumping it in the air or now racing it on ice, snowboarding, snowmobiling? Literally anything that I do outdoors.
Should I be questioning it? Am I making a mistake? I don’t know the answer. I might find out one day that I’ve made a mistake, but for the enjoyment that I’m receiving now, and the place that I’m at now, I think it’s the right choice. I don’t think we ever always know the answer and I think that’s okay, too. I think it’s okay to not know. I think we just have to accept the not knowing, but what I do know is that concussion research has come a long way. What I do know is I’ve gotten better in the past, which means, I can get better again. So, if I do happen to receive another concussion, I really hope not. I am very careful while I do all of these things. And I wear a lot of protection, as we know doesn’t prevent concussions, but at least I hopefully won’t end up with a lot of broken bones.
[00:08:24] BP: I know that I am doing what I love, and I think that’s what matters in the end. Of course, I have fear of going backwards. And I think that’s why I blocked it out. Because I used to wear a hat every day, because I was in so much pain that I was afraid of someone touching my head. Even when that pain started to go away, I was still afraid of someone touching my head. Because the fear of having a headache again, was terrifying. The fear of not wanting to get out of bed, the fear of that excruciating pain was kind of terrifying. I think it’s something that happens. As we talk about that, I think we need to understand how much pain a person can be in even though they’re smiling and laughing. And I’ve said this before, and I sometimes question, do I wish they could have seen my pain? And sometimes I wish they could have, but is that true? I don’t think it is.
Because if people could have seen how much pain I was in, they wouldn’t have let me do the things that I’ve done. They wouldn’t have let me go to school. They wouldn’t have let me walk out the door. I wouldn’t have had the life that I’ve had because my family would have been so afraid because the pain was terrifying. When I think about someone being in that much pain, it makes me sick to my stomach. It’s not a natural amount of pain. And when it’s pain in your head, it controls everything. It controls your thought seeking, it controls your ability to think properly. It controls your ability to speak. It controls your ability to walk out the door, until you get so good at hiding it that you do it anyways. I don’t know if that’s a good thing, but I do think it’s important to keep carrying on and taking it one day at a time. I think if I walked into high school, and people knew how much pain I was in, one, I would have been treated better and people would have believed me more, so that would have helped. But also think they would have asked me to leave the school, because I think they wouldn’t have thought I was capable of being there, which is like a half truth.
[00:10:41] BP: It’s a really hard thought. Do we wish our invisible pain was visible or not? I think it really just depends on what’s going on in our lives, and what we’re going through. Like if you’re a parent, we have lots of parents on the podcast, I don’t think you would have wanted your kids to see how much severe pain you’re in. I’m not a parent, so I don’t know for sure. But I think sometimes the ability to hide our pain is a benefit. But I also know it can be a curse. Like for me, I hid it for eight months, I didn’t tell anyone I had a headache. And then those headaches were crazy. I don’t always talk about the past so much. Because it’s kind of dark, I guess, really dark. I was in so much pain that I didn’t want to live at all. It was a crazy amount of pain. And relearning how to do things that you’ve done before is so frustrating. I’ve talked about it before, and we’ve posted about it on social media about why we don’t recognize our own progress in brain injury recovery. That’s because we’re relearning things we already knew how to do.
I already knew how to read a book. I already knew how to walk in a perfect straight line. I already knew how to talk. Sometimes it can be really frustrating, but you have to just keep taking it one day at a time and not beat yourself up about it. But there’s also such a thing as toxic positivity with all of this. I think it’s important to recognize what toxic positivity is, and realize that some people can be not that supportive, even though they sound supportive. It’s important to recognize these types of things because they can help us.
As I continue to write books, multiple books, because I’m that type of person, I sometimes start to question as I made decisions in the past, and then I have to remind myself, that I made those decisions with my thoughts at the time, not the thoughts that I have now. I wasn’t thinking the same way I am now, because now I’m reflecting on those thoughts. I have all the answers. I know what happened. I know what could have happened. Now, I obviously have a very different perspective on the issue. But at the time, 17, 18, 19, 20-year-old me had very different opinions. When someone told me to take a break from riding in school, I thought they were crazy. I was like, “This is impossible. This is never going to happen. I’m doing my dream. This is what I want. This is the only thing I could ever want in life. There’s nothing else.” And I made a decision with what I knew at the time. I knew I had headaches. I knew I could push through the headaches. And I knew I could hide them being a stubborn teenager and this is where the invisible aspect of our head injuries can be really bad. I knew I could carry on and I did. Carry on like that actually hurt me. It hurt me a lot.
I ended up here though, and I never thought I’d end up here, and I really mean it. I never thought I would have a podcast. I love listening to them. I never thought I’d write a book or a few books. I never thought I would be afraid of doing something and I never thought I’d be questioning things like getting on a dirt bike because I never planned on riding dirt bikes. But I never used to question what horse I used to swing a leg over. In the few years before I stopped, I did start to question it. I started thinking, “Okay. You love this, but you also need your health if you want to keep going.” I think that’s an important thing to think about is, if you want to be doing this, you still need your health intact. So you never want to push yourself to such a limit that you’re guaranteed to get hurt.
[00:15:14] BP: But living in fear isn’t going to help us either. And that’s why I’m going to get on a dirt bike this weekend and go skiing again. I’m going to have as much fun as I can, because that’s what life is for. I’m going to help as many people as I can while I do it. I am not telling you to go ski right now. I am not telling you to go dirt bike. I am not telling you to get on a hockey rink. I am not telling you to get out there and do these things. because I don’t know where you’re at in your recovery and you need to be at a place where you’re not in pain every day and your symptoms aren’t affecting you like they used to affect me. I don’t get a headache every day. I don’t get dizzy anymore. I have an adaptive lifestyle, as I love to talk about it, and I have headphones that I carry everywhere I go called earpieces and I’ll include a link in the description because those helped me walk out the door.
I plan my day around certain appointments because I know they’re going to limit me. I know when I’ve pushed myself too far, and when I need to rest and naps are my best friend. They’re my favorite thing, and I will always take a nap every single day. I know when I haven’t taken a nap at the end of the day, because my energy levels still aren’t perfect and that’s okay. Because living an adaptive lifestyle isn’t a bad lifestyle. It isn’t an unhappy lifestyle. It’s an adaptive lifestyle. It’s something that we can all live as long as we just take it one day at a time and just keep going.
[00:16:51] BP: I just want to leave you with this. Am I making a mistake? I don’t really know, but I do know that I’m happy and I haven’t been happy like this in a really long time. I think that’s what really matters and I think mental health matters just as much, if not more than your physical health. Make sure you’re taking care of both. And if you need help with both, make sure you reach out, because that’s what I’m here for. We are also starting a support group at the beginning of March, so make sure you look out for it. I will be sure to share more on all of our social media pages about it, and we’ll be able to really connect with each other, and talk to others who are suffering and hopefully we can help each other too.
I hope you all have a fantastic week, and hopefully it’s not as freezing where you are as it is where I am right now. Love you all, Bella
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:17:57] BP: Has your life been affected by concussions? Join our podcast by getting in touch. Thank you so much for listening to The Post Concussion Podcast and be sure to help us educate the world about the reality of concussions by giving us a share. To learn more, don’t forget to subscribe.
[END]
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