Learning to Say ‘No’ with Patricia Grotenhuis
Show Notes:
If you struggle to say no, this one’s for you! Today’s guest, Patricia Grotenhuis, is a sixth-generation farmer, living in Wellington County, Ontario. She works alongside her husband on their dairy farm every day and they enjoy sharing that life with their four active boys. Needless to say, she has her hands full, especially on the back of a global pandemic. In today’s episode, she tells us the story of how a diagnosis of Post Traumatic Vision Syndrome was pivotal to her healing process. She shares her journey with Vision Therapy and tells us how it helped her symptoms, and describes how she has navigated memory and personality changes post-concussion. We talk about how Patricia’s daily life has been impacted by her injury and the role of mindset in healing and recovery. Patricia stays hopeful and reminds us that you don’t have to change your whole life because of an injury. She gives us some pearls of wisdom for parents: rest when you can, learn to say no, and ask your older kids to help you. Lastly, we talk about the influence of the pandemic on Patricia’s life in recovery and she offers us a word of advice: stay positive! At some point, it will get easier. We hope you join us today.
Key Points From This Episode:
• Patricia tells us about her four concussions and their symptoms.
• How Vision Therapy helped with Patricia’s symptoms.
• How the diagnosis of Post Traumatic Vision Syndrome helped the healing process.
• Planning the day around therapy.
• Symptoms Patricia still experiences: headaches, mild vertigo, irritability, lack of concentration, and a new inability to multitask.
• Navigating memory and personality changes post-concussion.
• How mindset has impacted healing and recovery.
• Ways that concussion recovery has impacted Patricia’s daily life.
• Why you don’t have to change your whole life because of an injury.
• Patricia’s advice for parents: rest when you can, say no, and ask your older kids to help you.
• How the pandemic has influenced Patricia’s life.
• Closing advice: stay positive, at some point, it will get easier.
Transcript - Click to Read
[INTRODUCTION]
[0:00:05.2] 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 concussions and post-concussion syndrome.
Welcome to today’s episode of The Post Concussion Podcast with myself, Bella Paige, and today’s guest, Patricia Grotenhuis. Patricia is a sixth-generation farmer, living in Wellington County, Ontario. She works alongside her husband on their dairy farm every day and they enjoy sharing that life with their four active boys.
Patricia is currently homeschooling her children and finds the farm a wonderful place for them to learn. Her hobbies include gardening, going for walks on their farm, baking, writing, and reading. She also enjoys spending time with family and friends when she is able.
[INTERVIEW]
[0:01:41.3] BP: Welcome to the show, Patricia.
[0:01:43.0] PG: Thank you.
[0:01:44.6] BP: Do you want to start with telling everyone about your injuries and what occurred?
[0:01:50.3] PG: Yes, through my life, I’ve had four different concussions. The first one was from hitting my head on a post, which was late winter of 2000 and then in March of 2002, I was playing hockey, collided with someone in the middle of the ice and suffered my second concussion. Both of those first two were fairly mild. The symptoms faded in the following weeks though I did have lingering headaches.
In September of 2002, I received my first bad concussion, I was kicked in the head by a cow during milking. I ended up taking two weeks off of school and I took about three or four weeks off of hockey. I struggled with school that entire year. My marks fell, I had trouble concentrating, I couldn’t do mental math as well as I used to be able to.
I also had trouble finding the words I wanted to say, which made oral presentations very hard. Lasting symptoms that stuck around from that in the following years, I still had some trouble with speaking, although it did get easier, I still had some trouble with mental math, I would get irritable easily, I had some vertigo issues and a bit of insomnia.
In October of 2018, I received my second bad concussion, which was also from being kicked in the head by a cow during milking and you would probably think why haven’t I learned by now? I’ve been around cattle since I was born and I’ve only had two bad kicks in all of that time so I think that it’s just one of those fluke things that happens.
My symptoms from my earlier concussion intensified and along with it, I had a very long list of new symptoms. The most alarming to all of us was the fact that I couldn’t move my eyes. I had to physically turn my head or my body to see things, my peripheral vision was gone, I couldn’t look from side to side and with all of both the eye trouble and all of the other symptoms I had, there was no improvement in the following months. I was just stuck in one spot.
[0:04:38.3] BP: It’s amazing how many symptoms can occur and it kind of seems overwhelming sometimes when you start to list them out, it’s like, and this, and this, and this, and this.
[0:04:48.4] PG: It is, that’s why I didn’t go into a full list there because it’s way too many to list.
[0:04:56.8] BP: It can be really long. Did you find anything to help you with the word -finding because that’s a really common problem that a lot of people tend to have?
[0:05:06.9] PG: Well, I found one treatment that helped to lower all of my symptoms actually. My doctor kept urging me to look into Vision Therapy. I called my optometrist and thankfully, we live in a small rural area but my local optometrist who I’ve been going to for years actually has a really good vision therapy program so I was really fortunate that way. I called and asked them if I could get assessed for it and that was in January of 2019.
By the end of the month, I had started the actual therapy process, I was diagnosed with persistent Post Traumatic Vision Syndrome, which was what most of my symptoms were actually linked to. The very first step they took was prescribing me bifocals with prism because my left eye wasn’t working. My right eye was doing the vast majority of the work and it was just too much for my brain to handle.
Without my glasses, I couldn’t even sit up straight or stand up straight. My whole body would tip to one side because of that left eye not working. For 40 weeks, I went to therapy sessions every week that were about 50 minutes long and every day at home, I would do 20 to 30 minutes of exercises.
I am still doing daily exercises but my list has been shortened a lot in time as I’ve retrained my brain and the amount of exercises I do, it’s fluctuated based on how I’ve been feeling and how my symptoms have been managed. I am also down to just reading glasses now, instead of needing to wear glasses all the time and my prescription is actually quite weak, the prism is gone so that’s a really big relief.
[0:07:21.1] BP: Yeah, that’s quite the improvement. Did you find eye therapy really tiring? I know when I did it, it was exhausting.
[0:07:28.0] PG: It is, the days that I had my appointments, I couldn’t plan anything else those days because I knew that just getting there, doing the therapy session and getting back home would take everything I had out of me and doing the exercises at home, I always had to plan on having an empty block of the day after I did the exercises because I would be so tired by the time I finish them that I just needed to lay down.
[0:08:03.8] BP: I get that and I get you plan for the therapy because I still do that for certain appointments. I find the dentist because the noise and the light and everything. That is my day, I’m like, “Okay, go to the dentist, day’s over.” The hair dresser, because the scent of the dye and the noise of the hair dryer and all that, day’s over. It’s kind of interesting.
[0:08:31.0] PG: It’s true though, you plan your whole life around, how am I going to feel after that?
[0:08:37.9] BP: I don’t even think about it anymore, I don’t realize that I have trouble, I go to the dentist and I bring like, I’m like preparing. I bring my own sunglasses and my own headphones with music to block out the noise. I’m all prepared to go there.
[0:08:53.8] PG: Yup.
[0:08:54.5] BP: It gets really funny. I actually like the mask at the hairdresser now because it helps with the smell.
[0:09:00.0] PG: It would.
[0:09:00.3] BP: That’s kind of funny. Now I’m like, this is what I’m – I’m just going to do it every time even when the masks go away.
[0:09:06.1] PG: Why not?
[0:09:07.8] BP: Yeah, I was just kind of laughing, you just don’t – I don’t realize it but it’s just a habit now. I’m going to the dentist, what are you doing after? Nothing.
[0:09:16.9] PG: I’m going to have a nap. It’s like, my day’s over, I know it is.
[0:09:23.0] BP: Yeah, it’s funny how you start to adjust with things like that. After all the eye therapy so far, do you still deal with symptoms today?
[0:09:31.8] PG: I do still have some symptoms. They’re worse if I go for a stretch where I think I’m feeling great, I don’t need to do my exercises, they take a chunk out of my day, I’m just going to push those aside for now and then I always pay for it after. The most prominent symptoms that I’ve been noticing lately, I do still have some memory loss, it’s just kind of turned into a running joke at our house that I won’t remember anyway.
I do still get headaches sometimes, normally if I’ve had a busy day or if I’ve been in front of a screen for a long time, sometimes I get vertigo but not nearly as much as I used to do. I used to literally stand beside a cow holding on to her to get my balance while I was milking them and now I don’t need to do that.
I do still have a little bit of the irritability, especially if I’m getting tired and overstimulated. My concentration is not as good as it used to be. I used to have really good concentration and I don’t think that that will come back and if there is background noise, I have trouble understanding what people are saying, which has improved with my vision therapy because that is one of the symptoms of the persistent post traumatic vision syndrome but it hasn’t completely gone away.
It does take me longer to understand things sometimes if people are talking to me, which obviously is worse if there’s background noise so having conversations when I’m out in a group of people is really exhausting.
I get migraines when the weather changes but that does have its upsides as a farmer because instead of having to check the computer to know that the risk of the storm has passed, I just say, “Hey, my migraine’s gone, it’s not going to rain now, let’s go back to work.”
I can’t multitask like I used to. All through university, it was always, you have to be a good multitasker, that’s how you’re going to get jobs. I can’t do it anymore, I need to have one thing that I’m working on, when I finish that, I move on to something else. If I’m trying to switch back and forth, I will forget what I was doing. I also find it hard to start things, the executive functioning is still slow.
[0:12:10.9] BP: I get that, I get the – quite a few of them actually. The concentrating, I find I’m better than I used to be but I only last for so long, even working out, I work on the podcast and the website and everything else that has to do with it and some days, I find if I don’t, I have to correspond my eating kind of with my energy for the day because I find if I haven’t had lunch and it’s like 3:00 or something and all of a sudden, my brain turns off.
I’m like, “And, I’m done” I’m sitting in front of the computer and I’m like, “I haven’t done anything in an hour, sitting here, getting absolutely nothing done” which I’m sure is common for people anyways but I also get the background noise. I used to be able to – when I used to read books a lot, I don’t really read anymore but I used to be able to sit.
I grew up with – I’m one of four and I used to be able to sit with all three of my siblings playing games, yelling, talking to each other, making all the noise and I could just sit there with a book and tune them all out.
[0:13:21.3] PG: I used to [inaudible 0:13:21.6]
[0:13:23.0] BP: It was great, I could just sit on the couch and people be like, “Bella, Bella, Bella.” I’m like, “Oh, sorry, yeah, what do you need?” Now, there’s no way, I cannot – I just have to reread the page like 10 times because I keep hearing all the noise around me.
Memory and conversations, I do good. Some days, other days, even recording the podcast, there’s sometimes I’m like, “Oh no, what did they say?” I started writing a word or two down. I knew while I do the podcast because sometimes I’m like, okay, well they just talked for like five minutes and then like, no. What did we talk about? I remember, some days I’m great and other days it’s just like, “And everything is blank” what do I say next? I’ve had that happen a few times so it’s funny. You just get used to it, I don’t expect.
[0:14:15.7] PG: Me too.
[0:14:16.3] BP: I expect them to maybe improve over time but I’m not expecting it to be like – all of a sudden, you can block out all the ways and get back to what I was before. I’m pretty comfortable with where I am now, I just have accepted it, right?
[0:14:29.2] PG: I feel the same. I feel like I will never be the person who I used to be but as long as I’m comfortable with where I am now and as long as I can still function and still get my work done and take care of my family and spend time with them, that’s all that matters. I do meet.
[0:14:51.5] BP: exactly, yeah. Something we talked about before the recording was, how your thoughts and mental thinking can really affect your symptoms and your ability to get better. How do you find that has affected you?
[0:15:06.9] PG: For me, it’s a huge factor, if I start thinking about my concussion or my symptoms or how I was before or anything like that. Even if it’s just thinking about head injuries in general like I hear someone I know suffered one and I start thinking, they must be feeling like this or they must just be awful right now. The worst my own symptoms are.
Every single time, it doesn’t matter if I read something about it, if I’ve heard something about it or if I’ve just thought about it, it is a constant trigger. At the start of my concussion, I was encouraged to do daily symptom tracking.
I did not start to improve until I stopped daily symptom tracking. Because even as I was in the act of writing them down, I was like, “Oh, you know, I think I feel this today too. Yeah, no, I feel this one too” If I wasn’t thinking about it and I was just carrying on with my day and coping, then I felt better because there wasn’t that constant thought of, am I dizzy today?
Did I remember what I was supposed to do today? How bad is my pain today? Instead, it was just, well, this is my day, let’s just deal with it.
[0:16:37.0] BP: Yeah, that’s really interesting because I’m trying to think, two years ago, when I stopped riding, I decided to start tracking my headaches when I was like, just finishing, I was still writing halfway through the month that I ended up giving up, taking a very long break and I started tracking my headaches and something I was tracking was where they hurt because my headaches move and it depends, I have found that the location of my headaches really affects, it’s based on what I did. I get a headache, on the side of my temples if I’m around really loud noise and I have –
I wear a watch that announces when I’m around loud noise now. I know to put my headphones in, it’s kind of funny. Things like that like I know if I’m stressed, I have a headache on the one side. I was starting to track that and see if like, riding was causing a headache in a certain spot.
I remember reading, I had like the big list and then the shading, my head and going, “Maybe it – does it hurt there? Trying to think, did it hurt there today? Then I just end up coloring my whole head every day because of that hurt everywhere.
[0:17:48.9] PG: Yeah, it just hurts.
[0:17:50.9] BP: Yeah. It’s coming true because it was just like yeah, no, the whole head hurts. Throughout the day, it’s all hurt. I just shaded the whole thing in. When I’ve done symptom trackers, I usually like to do the tracker for about two weeks and then kind of assess like, “Now, can I make changes in the next two weeks to make things better” rather than doing it for like a really long period of time?
Also, it’s kind of something you don’t want to do every day, I do it and then I would fall out, it’s like writing – some people are great, diary entries. I remember, lots of doctors and therapist told me, “You know, start a diary” I last like a week and I’d be like, “I forgot. I forgot. I forgot.” I don’t know, it’s one of those kinds of things. It’s true how your thoughts can definitely affect your symptoms. Not that those symptoms aren’t there but if you start thinking about them, they can be exasperated.
[0:18:42.0] PG: Yeah.
[0:18:43.0] BP: Yeah, with that though we’re going to take a break.
[BREAK]
[0:18:51.5] 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]
[0:19:16.2] BP: Welcome back to The Post Concussion Podcast with myself, Bella Paige and today’s guest, Patricia Grotenhuis. Something that is a huge part of your life is being a dairy farmer and the thing about being a farmer is you don’t really get these off because that’s just not how it works. Even with my horses, there’s no days off. People are like, “Oh you go every day?” I’d be like, “Yeah, that’s part of it.”
[0:19:42.3] PG: They need to eat.
[0:19:44.1] BP: Yeah, they need to eat, yeah they’re living animals so how did your inability to take off work impact your symptoms?
[0:19:52.4] PG: It was in some ways, I think it slowed down my recovery. It did make it so that I couldn’t get the rest that I needed early on. We have a small farm, we don’t have any hired employees. It’s just myself and my husband and our children helping out with the small jobs where they can but I just couldn’t get the rest I needed. I would wake up when before I took the boys out of school to home school them, I had to be up at four in the morning so that I could go to the barn and get chores done before bus time.
I would be up at four, I would go do about three hours of physical work in the barn, come in, get the kids on the bus and as soon as they were on the bus, I would come back into the house and fall asleep. My husband would wake me up a few times during the day to make sure I ate something and then he would wake me up at bus time and supper would magically be on the table. If it wasn’t for him, we all would have starved I think.
I would go get the kids off the bus, we would eat supper. I would do another three hours stretch of physical work, come in, get the kids to bed and I would go to bed and that was our lives until I was in vision therapy long enough to start seeing some improvement but at the same time, it gave my life a pattern. There was a pattern to my days, I couldn’t just sit and do nothing all day. It kept me active. It did help me to retrain my brain.
Early on, there were times that I would be standing beside the cow trying to remember what I needed to do and not the cow and I would be standing there concentrating so hard, “Okay, I have to do this step and then I do this step” but even within a few weeks, that started to improve because all of my muscle memory was being triggered and it was coming back and I realized that I could start to trust my body that I did still know what I was doing.
That I could still work, I could still function and that I wasn’t a write-off because of the injury so that helped in some ways. It also let me keep doing something that I love. I grew up on a dairy farm, I married a dairy farmer, it is my life and it always has been. The only time I wasn’t actively dairy farming was when I was at university and the first few years after graduating when I worked off the farm but even in university for one summer, my job was working on a dairy farm.
It’s just who I am and I can’t change that and I’m glad I haven’t had to. It was exhausting but it helped me realize what my body is capable of and it helped to show me that yes, we can retrain our brains. If there is something that we are passionate about and that we want to do, we can work towards it and we may not do it to the same extent we used to. I can’t play piano like I used to, I accept that. I play when I feel like it.
I can’t read like I used to but there are other things that I can teach myself again and I can still do that. I didn’t need to change my whole life because of an injury.
[0:23:50.1] BP: For sure and it definitely takes time and it takes time to accept that as well.
[0:23:55.7] PG: It does.
[0:23:56.4] BP: Yeah, it does and I find that has a lot to do with when you have a lot of head pain after a concussion. Some people do, some people don’t but the ability to think, it’s like you’re almost clouded but you said you’re standing there and your brain is just like not doing what you wanted to do and you’re like, “What is happening? I tried to think so hard and I am not thinking about anything, this isn’t working” and I found that was my headache days are like that.
When I have a bad headache, this is just a day to do like if I am going to work it’s like social media making images and stuff because I don’t need a lot of brain power for it. There are things that I don’t have to think too much about and something you mentioned is your children and as a parent of four, do you have tips for parents going through something similar? Because it is definitely something a lot of people reach out to me about is, “I have kids and I have a concussion and this is a lot.”
[0:24:59.1] PG: Yeah, it is a lot and it’s very hard. You have to go back to how you acted when they were babies and rest whenever you can but it is hard to do that when they’re running around and getting into things. In the early months, I relied on my husband to cook meals because I couldn’t do it. I didn’t care what we were eating, there was food on the table and thankfully he is a good cook so we still had good meals but if it means prepared food, who cares?
A few months of prepared food, everyone will survive. It doesn’t have to be a beautiful meal every night. It just needs to be food in tummies. I had to learn how to say no. I have always been a person who’s gotten involved in things, who likes to take part in the community activities, who wants to be involved in the kids schooling, who wants to just be part of everything going on around me and I realized pretty early on that I could burn myself out very quickly that way, so I had to say no to school fundraisers or the school trips or volunteering in the classroom.
It wasn’t going to happen, it would set me back for a week. You can ask your kids to help you if they are old enough. They can sweep the floor, they don’t need to get it done perfectly. It just needs to be done to some extent. Catch up on that stuff later when you’re feeling better. Another big thing that I did, I think I was about three weeks into the concussion, I talked to all of their teachers. I sat down with them at parent-teacher interviews and I said, “I have a brain injury, I cannot function very well.”
“Their homework may not get done Sundays, I might not be able to read with them every day and I can’t come in to volunteer for class work” once I was open about it and upfront with the teachers, it really helped because they started keeping my kids in for half of recess if they have to finish something up instead of just putting it in their bags for them to do at home. They stopped sending notes, “Can you come in and help with this? Can you volunteer on the school trip?” all of that stopped.
It was, “This is going on, if you’re able and you feel like it, you’re welcome. If not, don’t worry about it” so a lot of pressure was taken off. I did have to find ways when the kids were home from school like on weekends to keep them quiet so that I could rest. Some days, it was okay, let’s watch an hour of cartoons so mom can lay on the couch. Some days it was, “How about you guys go out and help dad in the barn with a job for a little while.” It was whatever worked for us that day.
The kids are still fine, the extra TV time didn’t ruin them, the extra jobs didn’t ruin them, they are still doing just fine for us, but yeah, whenever the house was empty, I needed to rest and I learned that very quickly.
[0:28:31.9] BP: Well, that’s some great advice. I really like the teacher recommendation because I never thought about it that way but it’s true. You are getting sent home all these homework and it’s like, “I can’t help them.” I never think about it but it’s important to also inform people in their lives that you aren’t as available to help them with things outside of school and things like that. Yeah, it’s really important. I really like that and I like you mentioned being learning to say no.
Now, I am starting to wonder if I am a no person because I’ve had a [inaudible 0:29:08.7] as a teenager. My first response to someone is no before it’s yes and it’s funny because my mom is the opposite, it is yes before no like, “You want to help volunteering in something?” yes, “Oh you want me to run this committee? Yes” “Oh you want me to run another committee? Yes.” It’s like, okay now you’re running four and these are almost full-time jobs and you have four kids?
I’m like, yeah, she is always like that every school event if she could help, she’s there and eventually I will be like, “Do you ever say no mom? Because you look exhausted” but I’m the opposite. I’m always like, “No, wait tell me what it is before I say yes” and I wonder if that has to do with the fact that I do, I’ve been struggling with this for almost nine years so it is kind of just a habit now that it’s no before it’s yes and then I think about it.
[0:29:59.9] PG: Probably it is.
[0:30:00.9] BP: Yeah.
[0:30:01.9] PG: Yeah, because from my concussion back in 2002, I didn’t slow down as much as I should. I’ll put that one, I know that now but when I was a teenager, it wasn’t going to stop me. There wasn’t a lot of research in concussions at that time. It was just take your time, everything will come back and I kept pushing myself and I was faking that I was okay for years and then when this one happened, I went, “No, I’m done faking it.” I need to just tell people, “You know what? I can’t do that. I have a brain injury.”
[0:30:47.4] BP: Yeah, something I like to ask because of what we’re living through right now is how was COVID impacted you and your symptoms?
[0:30:57.4] PG: COVID has been really challenging in some ways but really restorative than others. I can’t handle being in big crowds so it has really helped that way. I’m not expected to be going to meetings and appointments every day. I don’t need to be driving places, I can just stay home and that has really, really helped me but with four kids who are all school age, last spring when the schools closed and they switched to online learning, it was horrible.
I had a huge relapse from trying to coordinate four different school schedules, four different screens at once and through that, I just kept getting worse and worse and finally in May, I threw up my hands and said, “I can’t do this anymore.” I sent the teachers emails, I said, “I’ve told you before I have a brain injury so it shouldn’t be a surprise but I cannot do online learning with the kids. I will check in each day to see what they’re supposed to learn. We’ll do some activities at home based on that.”
Once a week, I’ll send in some pictures of what they’ve done. I didn’t pull back enough because I still had to be going on to see what they were learning and I still have to go on to send pictures and that was probably not enough of a step back but things we know in hindsight, right? What I did was in the summertime, we made a decision to pull our kids out of school completely for the year because there was too much uncertainty.
The stress of listening to every announcement made by Doug Ford to find out if there would be school or not, the stress of not knowing how long it would go for when schools opened or how long they would be closed for if they did close down was too much for me and I couldn’t handle that and my kids couldn’t handle it either because they like their routine and their structure, so we pulled them out and we homeschooled for the year and doing the homeschooling has been great because we can do hands-on activities.
We planted a garden, they are learning biology from watching the plants grow every day and it is another great thing because these activities are things that I can do that don’t bug my head. I’m finding new hobbies for myself that I can do for a few hours a day without hurting myself, which is really nice. Sometimes doing the extra work with them does trigger headaches. Sometimes, I get completely exhausted because there has been no break since COVID started.
They have been here with me all day everyday so I don’t get the quiet time I used to but it’s still a lot better than it would have been if I stuck with the uncertainly of the school system this year.
[0:34:25.2] BP: It’s been quite all over the place. Right now where I am, they’ve been in online school since January and so it’s been six months of them online and it’s a long time and most kids right now are burned out. They don’t –
[0:34:40.4] PG: They are.
[0:34:41.2] BP: They don’t want to go on the screen, they sit there and they are spending because they’re bored or they want to see their friends and they can’t and yes, it’s a lot and it is a lot to do it. I’ve done it quite a few times and you’re pretty tired. You are running from screen to screen between kids and helping getting, “Oh you need this? Okay, I’ll get it. You need this? Okay, I’ll get it” or “Okay, I don’t understand this.” “Well okay, I’ll sit with you for 10 minutes and help you do it” and then, “I need help.”
Okay, it’s quite the – yeah and with four, it would be quite – yeah, I have done it with two and never four, yeah.
[0:35:14.3] PG: It’s a handful, so I really helped myself with that decision this year.
[0:35:19.2] BP: Yeah, well that’s great. Is there anything else you would like to add before ending today’s episode?
[0:35:25.0] PG: I think just, I really want to emphasize, stay positive. At some point, it will start getting easier so focus on the things you can do rather than the things you can’t and you might find yourself finding new things that you never thought of before, that you do and actually enjoy doing.
[0:35:49.9] BP: Well, that’s great. Thank you so much for joining and sharing your story post-concussion.
[0:35:55.0] PG: Thank you, Bella.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[0:36:01.7] 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.
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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