Finding the Silver Lining in PCS with Conner Eko
Show Notes:
Coming to terms with a traumatic brain injury can be hard, but sometimes there’s a silver lining. Today’s guest, Conner Eko found his when his post-concussion syndrome forced him to take time out from his Ph.D. and allowed him to focus on his music (which incidentally helped with his symptoms). Conner talks us through his experiences with concussions growing up, and how the most recent one has affected him. We discuss the various techniques that he and Bella have both found the most useful in managing their symptoms and keeping the boredom at bay, and how Bella prepares to face busy environments.
We hear why taking a break is important, and how you can come to terms with shifting your timeline. Conner opens up about his struggles with mental health, and why destigmatizing it is so important in enabling people to reach out for help. Find out how treating concussion and depression worked for Conner, and what his advice regarding medication is. We look forward to you joining us today for this inspirational episode!
Key Points From This Episode:
• Who Conner Eko is: indie synth-pop singer, songwriter, Ph.D. candidate, and post-concussion syndrome sufferer.
• Conner’s history of concussions, and why the most recent one was different.
• How Conner managed his concussion symptoms: finding reprieve in his music.
• Why doing simple tasks is sometimes frustrating for people with post-concussion syndrome.
• How having a concussion can affect your tolerance for external stimulation.
• Hear Bella’s hack for entering loud public spaces!
• The impact of Conner's concussion on his Ph.D.
• Understanding why taking a break is important, and accepting that you need to rest.
• The unexpected silver lining of Conner’s concussion.
• Destigmatizing mental health, and how concussion and depression are intertwined.
• Conner's advice to people struggling with depression: reach out, don't be afraid to medicate and find a friend.
• Bella’s solutions to her “depression waves”.
Check Out Conner’s Music:
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Transcript - Click to Read
[INTRODUCTION]
[0:00:04.1] BP: Hi, I’m your host Bella Paige and 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 concussion and post-concussion syndrome.
Welcome to today’s episode of The Post Concussion Podcast with myself, Bella Paige and today’s guest, Conner Eko. Conner is an indie synth pop singer, songwriter in the Bay Area of California. Conner participated in previous musical projects as singer-songwriter but has been away from music for years.
During this time away, he spent his time a as high school science teacher and recently began working on a PhD in astrophysics. He studies planets around other stars and thinks about the idea of life elsewhere in the universe. Although his science pursuits are exciting, the hiatus away from music song writing deeply affected him and increased his struggles with a lifelong battle of depression.
In March 2021, everything changed when an accident gave Eko a traumatic brain injury, which led him to developing post-concussion and an increasing depression in other health problems. Forced to take a leave of absence form his PhD and other activities, he found solace and healing in music with writing and playing music being one of the few things that he could do that wouldn’t result in migraines and to her concussion symptoms.
Conner began to craft new songs and completed his debut, Sink. Conner’s sophomore release, Christmas Morning Goodbye releases on December 3rd 2021. In mid-2022, he will release a series of singles that will blend indie synth pop, retro indie singer songwriter Anne [Biracly 0:02:35.2] will tell his own personal story, his battle with depression and includes philosophical things and metaphors relating to humanity our place on earth and in the cosmos.
[INTERVIEW]
[0:02:45.2] BP: Welcome to the show Conner.
[0:02:47.0] CE: Thanks, how are you?
[0:02:49.1] BP: I am good, how are you doing today?
[0:02:50.3] CE: I’m doing not too bad, thank you.
[0:02:53.2] BP: Great, do you want to start with telling everyone kind of about your injuries and what happened?
[0:03:00.0] CE: Yeah, I had a recent concussion this past March but also had several concussions a long time ago. I’m in my mid-30s and when I was in high school, I did a failed attempt at playing football and had several pretty serious concussions back in high school and then this past March, I got another one and this particular concussion. It wasn’t very exciting actually, the trunk on our vehicle broke as I was going to get groceries out of it and it came slamming down on my head as I was walking towards the trunk to get groceries out.
[0:03:37.2] BP: Well, it’s interesting so many people often remember when they were younger, it wasn’t that long ago for you but lots of people go, “I think I had a lot in the past but no one really mentioned that it was a concussion but now that I think about it, it definitely was”. It’s interesting how that happens. Did you notice any symptoms when you got concussions when you were younger or like longer symptoms more than a week or two?
[0:04:05.0] CE: Well, I had several concussions right after each other because I only attempted to play football for one season, I didn’t even like it. I don’t even know why I did it looking back at it but the things we do. I do remember the one concussion was so bad that it knocked me out and I was immediately disoriented whenever I came back to and I remember the health medic of the team had put me in like the showers and I just — well yeah, I didn’t know what was going on.
I felt like I was just in some different world and then the next thing I know within the next day or so, I was being brought to the hospital. I think that last couple of weeks, maybe a month or something and then I had another one, then another one, and didn’t really do anything for, they said, “Oh you’ll just get better, you know, get out there and play more football.”
[0:04:58.2] BP: It’s crazy, that actually is still happening. It kind of blows my mind a little bit that it’s still a curse to this day that although we actually know so much more about this injury and the awareness around it is growing but lots of the time, people are still being sent home going, “You know, in a few weeks, everything should be good so don’t worry about it” but you could start therapy right away and it could make a really big difference but we’re still missing that and a lot of healthcare, athletes, a lot of that is missing but hopefully it starts to get better. Since your injury in the spring, what helped you recover? Have you tried anything?
[0:05:39.0] CE: Yeah. Well, I think many people that yet, this post-concussion syndrome, a lot of visual things would trigger my symptoms. Any time I get in a car that would make me extremely nauseous, induce really bad migraines. I was getting complex migraines. If I would be on screens too long, that would induce symptoms pretty bad too.
I really try to stay away from my phone as much as possible and television as much as possible, which is really hard. I listen to some audio books but I tried listening to I think like The Lord of The Rings audio book and then I told my doctor that and he said that that might be a little bit too complex and I agreed with him and he actually — it’s kind of funny, he recommended that I listen to some adult erotica, which I’m not going to comment whether I did it or not.
He said I should listen to something that wasn’t as complex but I’m also a musician and a songwriter and I’ve been out of music for a while and I found that going to the piano and playing the piano was pretty therapeutic and sometimes it helped with my headaches and I’m also a singer and I noticed that some of the breathing exercises and stack of singing itself too would help too because there was a lot of breathing and oxygen getting to your brain.
It also help with the emotional toll too. I’ve always struggled with depression but it got a lot worse since developing the post-concussion syndrome and as a songwriter, that also helped me cope with it a lot and on top of that, just seeing my physical therapist and doing vestibular treatments so we do a lot of eye training, eye pushups and balance exercises, aerobic exercise too, actually really helped me and I was told that this does help a lot of people so maybe there’s people out there that this will help too.
Anytime I’d get my heartrate up, that would help decrease my headaches by maybe a point or two if I felt like a migraine coming on, get up and walk and try to get my heartrate up and that can help.
[0:07:38.0] BP: No, it’s great advice and I like that you mentioned the no phone, no TV and we don’t always realize how hard that can be, especially if you're starting to be isolated like you’re not going out, you can’t go do things but you can’t do the typical things that you would do when you’re at home.
I remember, a lot of people be like, “Oh why don’t you just read books all day?” but I can’t read right now because I can’t remember what the book said and I get a headache from reading and there are so many little things like that that people be like, “Oh why don’t you try this?” Its’ really isolating and hard to deal with when you're already being isolated and then all of your — “Why don’t you try this? Why don’t you try this?” All of those ideas are things that you are going to struggle with or increase symptoms when doing, it’s amazing that you found music to help with that because it takes a while to find things that work for you.
I love puzzles, I can do puzzles now but at first, they would actually give me a headache because all the eye focusing on all the pieces. I was like, “This is not a good idea.” Like I was like, “This will be calming, I can just sit and do a puzzle for an hour. I have nothing else to do, I can barely leave the house” and then I made my headache so much worse that day, this is a lot of regrets about making a puzzle.
[0:08:51.1] CE: Yeah, I tried coloring too and some of the more simple coloring books that some of my family members got for me were helpful but then I also got I think a Bob Ross coloring book which was a little…
[0:09:04.0] BP: Intense?
[0:09:05.0] CE: It was a little intense so that didn’t help. Then you spoke about going out and seeing people. After I got my vaccine and stuff and you know, I was able to attempt to go out in public and stuff, I tried to do that and that was actually a really bad experience for me because at a busy restaurant or at a busy place, all the people walking by, I remember the first time I went to a restaurant and I had one of the worse migraines and now all of a sudden I heard people banging stuff on to the tables and like people walking in and out and then just the visuals, it just drove my brain into overdrive and gave me some really bad migraines.
I couldn’t even go out in public and be around people and I was told to go for walks and I try to go for walks to get my heart rate up but then if I go outside and there’s too many cars driving by, that would trigger things. It’s gotten much better in the past few months but especially in those first couple of months, it was pretty bad.
[0:10:00.0] BP: Well, something we’ve talked about before is, I used to be able to — I’m actually getting a lot better now. When I was a kid, I could be — I grew up in a really large family so I could sit there with all my siblings, all their friends, watching TV, playing, making all the noise, having conversations and I could sit there with a book. I could read the book and hear nothing, I could tune it all out.
I find a lot of the time, after a concussion, that ability kind of goes away. All of a sudden, to watch TV with people talking, I had to crank up the volume, otherwise I couldn’t hear the TV or like you said, in a restaurant, all of a sudden, you’re noticing every single sound and every single sound sounds louder than it already is and it becomes really overwhelming. It’s something that people deal with really often when they go out in public for the first time so we recommend a lot of things like ear pieces, they’re my favorite, they’re this little tiny earbuds that you put in.
They’re nearly invisible, that’s why I like them because I don’t like — I don’t always want to explain why I’m putting something in my ear when I’m out. Sometimes it’s fine but other times, people are like, “Oh, what’s that?” It’s like, “Okay, well, I have this head injury thing and I’m sensitive to noise” but the ones that I wear, the ear pieces, like I went to a hockey game the other day and hockey games are way louder than I could remember. I haven’t been to one in a long time and I wore those and what’s great about them is you can still have a conversation with the person beside you because they tune out frequencies instead of all of the sound around you.
[0:11:34.1] CE: That’s great.
[0:11:35.2] BP: Yeah, they’re really helpful. And so something that Conner has done was be a crazy person in school, working on a PhD.
[0:11:44.0] CE: Yup.
[0:11:45.1] BP: Definitely into school but how has school gone since your head injury? I know school was greatly affected by all of that.
[0:11:54.0] CE: Yeah, I started a PhD about just about two years ago in astrophysics so an easy subject.
[0:12:01.0] BP: Sure.
[0:12:04.0] CE: I found out real quickly that everything I do for my research is on a computer and for most people’s jobs now, everything’s on the computer. There’s very little that you can do without being on a screen and you know, especially trying to do some intense complicated research and thinking about how you’re going to do research and learning new things and trying to learn how to code and all the stuff, I couldn’t do any of that.
I had to take leave of absence from my PhD this past term and I’m set to go back. I’m still not 100% better but I’m doing, I think well enough especially in the past month that I’m going to attempt to go back to my graduate school work in early 2022, so I’m excited about that but also a little nervous too.
[0:12:49.0] BP: Yeah. No, it’s really great that you’re going to go back and it’s important to take the break like you did, it can be really hard especially as the student because you’re ambitious and you see an end date and all of a sudden, that end date gets moved but that’s totally okay. I know I got really frustrated in high school. I was really stubborn and they told me to give up and try again later and I didn’t and I probably should have.
[0:13:14.0] CE: It’s hard to do.
[0:13:15.1] BP: It was very hard, I was like, “Well, but all my friends are going to graduate, this June and I want to graduate with all of them” and it was really hard and I pushed myself really hard and I definitely paid the consequences of pushing myself really hard to get school done. The ability to take a break is something that concussions — if you can catch on early on that you can do that, you will learn that will help you a lot.
If you're like me and it takes you a while, then often you pay for it because you just push yourself too far, right? You push yourself to those extreme headaches and you don’t realize that all of these can wait, it’s not going anywhere, your school is — you can go in the winter and it hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s really important to realize that your life isn’t completely getting put on hold. Did you feel like your life was on hold when you had to take a break from school?
[0:14:07.0] CE: Yeah, I mean, definitely. I had the same problem too at the beginning of the injury as thought I would be better in a couple of weeks or a month or something and so definitely took a break from things for the first month afterwards but then I tried to go back into doing work again as quickly, very quickly realized, “Woah, you can’t do this” and things weren’t the same and my symptoms got worse, I got worse.
It became this kind of fight, well, I try to do a little bit then take a break but then it just became that I was just prolonging my healing. I was like yeah, I just need to completely stop and then it was only after I completely stopped and really listen to recommendations and stay away from screens and try to do the exercises and stuff that I really started to make some minor improvements but even though I felt like my life was kind of on hold and you know, especially after I finally kind of let go, I was like, “Yeah, I have to take a break from things” there was a big silver lining in this too because music and song writing is something that’s always been kind of one of the top things I’ve always wanted to do but then I got the business of life to kind of get in the way and got away from it for a while.
Whenever I got the concussion and the post-concussion syndrome that brakes on everything just were hit really hard, right? All of a sudden, I wasn’t doing anything and the only thing that I could do was this thing that I had this intense passion I’d miss doing so much. It was like singing and writing songs, so I finally got back into that and I’ve committed to myself to make sure that I don’t like the business of life get in the way of that again.
Even though I felt like my studies and the progress I was making on my science and science outreach career that I am trying to develop, even though that was put on hold in a way that was a good thing because it helped me to get back into my music but it also got me thinking about life too and what I want in life and how I’d want to approach things differently like when I do come back, you know? There’s a lot of introspection that was kind of good as well.
[0:16:16.3] BP: No, I think it’s great to realize that our injuries can cause setbacks but also have benefits like to you it was music and getting back into that passion and it’s so important to realize that there can be benefits out of an injury. Sometimes, it’s hard to find them, it’s different for everybody. For me, it’s all of this, what I’m doing right now is definitely the biggest benefit out of my injury and the ability to understand people’s mental health a lot more.
I don’t think I would have the same understanding of it at all if I haven’t gone through what I’ve gone through but we’re going to talk more about that in a little bit and if you want to hear more about Conner and his music, you can take a look at connereko.com, which is connereko.com but with that, we’re going to take a break.
[BREAK]
[0:17:11.2] BP: I just wanted to say thank you. The podcast is just over six months old and I couldn’t be happier with the response. If you truly love the podcast, please consider leaving a tip in our support the podcast tip jar down at the bottom of our episode description. All tips are greatly appreciated and help cover cost of the show.
[INTERVIEW CONTINUED]
[0:17:35.1] BP: Welcome back to The Post Concussion Podcast with myself, Bella Paige and today’s guest, Conner Eko. Something we’re going to get a little bit into, which is my favorite subject as you all know is mental health. Something that you dealt with before all of your injuries, possibly not before since they started in high school was mental health. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?
[0:17:59.2] CE: Yeah. I’m a big supporter of mental health and against the stigmas that we have in it across the world. You know, it’s a real thing and I’ve dealt with major depression ever since I was a little kid and you know, went through some things to kind of help. I saw some therapists here and there but it was always hard to get a therapist. Health insurance doesn’t pay for it and then finding the right person or being able to see somebody more than once every three months, you know, all these struggles.
Whenever I got the concussion, one thing I noticed that happened very shortly after this most recent concussion is I just was most depressed that I’ve been in a really long time. My father passed away when I was 19 and that event, I was already depressed at the time but that made me really depressed whenever that event happened. That’s the last time that I remember the feeling as depressed as I did through the past six or seven months.
Some days, I just felt hopeless and having some pretty negative thoughts that I didn’t enjoy and was able to get with a therapist that now I see weekly, which does help but it wasn’t until honestly that they had changed my medicine around where things really started to get a little bit better. I was on Nortriptyline to just for managing the headaches and helping with the insomnia, right? I was on a low dose of that and you have to ramp up your dose overtime with that medicine.
Take one pill a night for a week, then two pills and then I’ve grow another week until you get to the right dose they want you at. One thing I did notice back in May or June, whenever I finally got up to that dose that they wanted me at for the Nortriptyline is I did notice that the depression got kind of worse and I think that it could have been possibly the medicine also with the post-concussion syndrome, I don’t know but it was my guess.
Then they tried to most recently like about two months ago, change me to some different headache medicine. I can’t even remember what it was called but I think it is used to actually treat epilepsy patients but it is also used to help manage migraines.
[0:20:13.1] BP: Topamax?
[0:20:15.0] CE: I think it might be, yeah Topamax.
[0:20:16.2] BP: It’s the name for it, yeah.
[0:20:17.2] CE: Yeah and they tried to put me on that because I was still getting headaches every day several like really bad migraines a week. At least one complex or a few complex migraines a week and so they were trying the Topamax for that and I noticed that when they put me on that that made my depression even worse like within a couple of days, there’s like, “Yeah, stop taking that immediately.”
We stopped that and then they tried to put me on a different antidepressant and to actually treat with the depression, it would increase the depression I was having and I noticed within a couple of weeks that I was almost like a different person and for the better like now it’s almost two months into this new antidepressant and very little side effects from it and I’ve noticed that my headaches have started going down, my mood is tons better.
I don’t actually feel depressed really anymore. It’s amazing and it’s like I wish I would have tried something like this years ago, so it was another silver lining the fact that I’ve always had pretty bad depression throughout my life that I never really gave medicine a chance to help with that and this kind of forced me to do that because I was going through some pretty dark times this past year and I really think that this medicine could have possibly saved my life in a lot of ways.
You know, a lot of people might say, “Well, it’s just in your head. You know, you take medicine for that.” Well, you know what? There’s this thing called epilepsy that we mentioned before and people used to think that people that were epileptic, they were possessed by demons but now we know it’s just misfiring’s in the brain and there’s medicines that can help with that. People that have diabetes, they take insulin shots for the rest of their life.
You know, there are some people that probably need help like with some medicine, you know, with the combination with therapy and just trying to make themselves a better person with the actions they do and stuff like that but you know, I think it’s an important thing for people to consider. If you’re on the fence of worries about trying it, take it from somebody who is kind of scared and a little bit skeptical to try it themselves.
It really made a big difference for me, you just have to find the right stuff that works for you and not everything is going to work for you because I’ve tried things that didn’t work for me. The stuff that I am on now is actually working for me and that’s working for me really well.
[0:22:28.0] BP: Well, thank you so much for sharing all of that and it’s so important to mention antidepressants because you’re right, there is definitely a stigma about depression and then antidepressants have another stigma around them and something we actually recently talked about in the podcast was the chemical reactions in our brain that change after a head injury, which increased our chance of depression and mental health issues.
It’s important to realize that it is not all in your head. Technically, it is but there’s a lot more to it than just in your head as people like to say and like you said, medications have a lot of side effects. I was on one that gave me night terrors so badly that actually my partner told me to go off of them because he said, “You can’t keep doing this” and I was like, “Can’t keep doing this what?” and he’s like, “You’re waking up screaming every night.”
He was like, “This isn’t okay. This isn’t normal” Topamax or Topiramate depending on its brand and stuff, that is the one that actually affected me a lot health wise with my weight. I just spent two years learning how to eat after taking that for three months so it is interesting how everybody’s reaction is different. I had a friend who is on it at the exact same time as me, perfectly fine, no side effects.
For you, you got depression side effects, so that’s why it’s important like you said to try it because everyone might get a different result and if it works for you, it is going to make such a big difference in your life and something else you said is your headaches have gone down and it is true that depression and stress of depression can increase your headaches. Now, that’s obviously not the reason for everyone’s headaches but if you can lower them a little bit.
I know when I’m in a really bad, I call it like the depression waves, if I’m down in a depression wave, I find my headaches are worse and it’s almost because I’m stressing about it and another is you mentioned the bad thoughts. We’ve talked about that a lot on the podcast and I always like to explain it as like there’s you and then there’s someone else and you’re arguing with yourself.
You have half of you that’s telling you, “This is all terrible” and then there’s the part of you that’s like, “Oh no, this isn’t that bad.” When we do have a brain injury, it gets a lot harder to fight that bad person inside of you.
[0:24:56.1] CE: Yeah, the thought distortions.
[0:24:58.0] BP: Yes and that’s where the antidepressants can make a huge difference because they kind of allow you to fight those bad thoughts and also prevent them from coming up. I think it’s so important to talk about mental health as much as we can.
[0:25:12.0] CE: Yeah and you’re not alone and there’s always someone out there to talk to. Sometimes, it’s hard to get a hold of somebody but don’t give up. You know, there is the crisis hotlines and you can even text message these hotlines to even text with somebody if you’re too scared to actually talk on the phone. Just don’t be afraid, you’re not alone and you kind of have to be a scientist in a way.
As a scientist myself, it’s kind of hard to do that especially when you’re so depressed and your brain is just not working like it used to but you have to be kind of objective. You’re like, “You know, do I really want to do that or do I really feel this way?” you know? We try to be a little bit more objective about this and that’s a little bit of like cognitive behavior therapy and trying to identify these thought distortions and just naming them. That can help you to fight them and talking to somebody about it can help a lot too.
[0:26:05.9] BP: Like you said, you can call. There’s professionals out there and then there’s friends and family and you’d be surprised. It’s nice to have one person or a few people that do know about your mental health. For myself, someone who has been a suicide survivor and has had crazy mental health and depression, my intensity days and something actually that my best friend does is when I have those really bad days, they’re very far.
They happen very rarely now but what we do is we go on Facetime and we have this routine of usually me having an anxiety attack and her telling me to do things and it’s amazing. It’s always so funny because she’s like, “Oh, why don’t we have soup?” I was like, “I made soup. I don’t want soup” and she’s like, “We’re making soup anyways.”
[0:26:54.2] CE: That’s great. That’s great that you have a friend to help you with that.
[0:26:57.2] BP: Yeah and it’s things like that and it’s goofy and eventually your brain kind of calms down and so there’s lots of different relationships that you could do with. It is not always such — you can really calm it down by getting up and getting busy. Make a piece of toast even if you don’t want to eat that toast. Getting up, you know, putting the garbage out, sweeping the floors, vacuuming your house.
Well, that might not work so well but it is important to get up and move when you do feel really depressed if you can because it can really help with kind of those stir crazy thoughts if you can start thinking about something else but with that, is there anything else you would like to add before we end today’s episode?
[0:27:38.1] CE: I think just having something like this sort of people can hear about other people’s stories dealing with this is really helpful Bella, so thank you so much for having this podcast and all the other people that have come on to be a guest with you and the other concussion podcasts out there. I think just raising awareness and it’s hard because a lot of people don’t really understand what we go through when we have this.
They look at you and they think that you look fine because you don’t have a broken arm and a sling or something, so it’s hard for people to really understand like the severity of head injuries especially how our media and our love of sports has portrayed it, you know? Just stick in there and follow I guess what your gut is telling you to do for things that could help you and try to look at the silver lining and the bright side of things even when it’s really dark.
You know, sometimes it’s hard to find that light but it’s there. I mean, you just have to find it and chase after it and don’t be afraid to get help.
[0:28:40.2] BP: Well, that is some great advice. I just wanted to say thank you so much for joining and sharing your story with us post-concussion.
[0:28:48.2] CE: Thanks for having me.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[0:28:52.2] 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 concussion by giving us a share and to learn more, don’t forget to subscribe.
[END]
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