Don’t Give Up with Robin Mooney
Show Notes:
Concussive injuries can occur in a myriad of different ways, with vastly varied results and symptoms. Today on the podcast we are joined by Robin Mooney, to discuss her experience of a head injury in the workplace and the events that followed the physical trauma. Our guest has worked as a sales executive at the highest levels, including a position at Herman Miller. Her other focus, and something that has continued through her journey with post-concussion syndrome, is coaching, through which she has studied the frameworks of both Joseph Campbell and Martha Beck! Robin talks about learning to manage the headaches, the measures that have helped her improve, and the difficulties she still experiences. She has a strong message of patience and steadfastness, virtues that are not always easy but that will serve you in the process of healing. We also talk about how her life has changed since she was hurt, and how this relates to the global pandemic and a more remote lifestyle. Stay tuned to the end of the show, where Robin shares some of the products and tools that have aided her recovery and the importance of family and a support system.
Key Points From This Episode:
The details of Robin's head injury and the several symptoms she experienced.
How life has changed for Robin since her concussion; work, exercise, and self-care.
Understanding the 'Hero's Journey' and Robin's coaching work.
Robin's daily self-care routine; meditation, journalling, and more.
The different prognoses that Robin received about returning to her normal life.
Concussion and US healthcare systems; medical leave and the cost involved.
Robin's thoughts on acupuncture and chiropractic treatments for her condition.
Responsibility and concussion; what it means to be a parent with an invisible injury.
The importance of communication and sharing with the people close to us.
Products that help Robin on daily basis to manage light sensitivity and her headaches.
A final message from Robin about exercising patience and kindness with ourselves.
Links Mentioned in Today's Episode:
Robin Mooney on LinkedIn
Herman Miller
Higher Ground Leadership
Martha Beck
Wayfinder Life Coach
Courage Kenny
Joseph Campbell
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Transcript - Click to Read
[INTRO]
[00:00:05] 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.
[INTERVIEW]
[00:01:03] BP: Welcome to today's episode of the Post Concussion Podcast with myself, Bella Paige, and today's guest, Robin Mooney. Robin has a high-performing and multiple award-winning sales executive in the office furniture industry for 30 years, including working for the world-class leader in human-centered research and design, Herman Miller. In addition to her role as a consultative sales professional, Robin has led numerous teams around the world of work. The trends affecting businesses worldwide including globalization, attraction and retention, generations at work, communication, and creating work environments as a business tool. Her constant passion for inspiring transformation, whether within individuals or in the workplace, led to her training and certification in Higher Ground Leadership.
Most recently, she was trained by Martha Beck as a Wayfinder Life Coach. The concussion led to a two-year journey of self-discovery deficits. Facing fears in her own hero's journey, she has rewritten her story of coming home to honor her gifts that remain but also those she continues to cultivate every single day. Her purpose is to help others navigate challenges and excavate their beautiful unique genius and share it with the world.
Welcome to the show, Robin.
[00:02:22] RM: Thank you so much, Bella.
[00:02:24] BP: To start, let's tell everybody a little bit about how you received your head injury and how long you've been dealing with post-concussion syndrome.
[00:02:33] RM: Absolutely. Well, I received my injury at work. I had shown up for work about 7:45 in the morning and I usually have a little teeny office space that I use when I’m there. I’m not there every day, but the environment that I work in is an office furniture dealership and their showroom. The spaces that we work in are made up of glass walls and doors. The doors and the walls don't have any markers to delineate them, and other people have walked into these walls and doors. I happened to be one that morning where I was on a mission and I was walking and I saw out of the corner of my eye. I thought that the glass door was open but it wasn't. I managed to hit that thing I guess hard enough because literally, I rang my bell.
[00:03:29] BP: That reminds me of once on a family trip. My sister – There was a glass door and then the pool glass door, and she ran into the wrong door head first, and she actually bounced back. That's how hard you can hit. If you don't realize it's not there, the speed at which you can hit something. A glass door is very – it’s quite intense.
[00:03:51] RM: It's amazing. I immediately got a goose egg on my head. I probably fractured my nose but I never got my nose checked out. I cut my lip and my mouth was swollen and my knee was the last thing to hit. I’m not kidding, Bella. My knee was the size of a softball. That was the one thing to hit. You know how hard I hit that wall.
[00:04:14] BP: You were on a mission. What symptom do you believe affected you the most?
[00:04:21] RM: Well, you asked me one symptom, for singular. But I am one of the few – Well, I don't know what the percentage is, and you might know this, what percentage of post-concussion survivors have more than one of the symptoms because I have several of them.
[00:04:39] BP: Most have several. Just like myself, headaches was the biggest. It's like it affected me the most but it also drowned out the other symptoms. So when the headaches started to go away, I started to realize that I had all these other symptoms going on, and I wasn't handling them because the headaches were just taking over my life at the time.
[00:04:59] RM: Okay. That's a really good way to describe it. I have had that same thing, although the good news with my chiropractic care and my acupuncture and sleep as you all know, which is really critical, my headaches are down to a minimum. I have them every day but they're much less.
[00:05:16] BP: You can manage them.
[00:05:17] RM: They're more manageable. Yes, thank you. If I were to look at my symptoms, so cognitive, that is the one thing that is so prevalent. It’s better. But the inability to really understand and take in a conversation or what's happening and then to be able to string thoughts and sentences together that makes sense. It’s far better today than it was before. I mean, I’m sure people would look at me and go, “What is wrong with you?”
The other thing that's really prevalent for me is my vestibular and my ocular, so visual processing. That I still challenge with, so reading and trying to take in information, whether it's an email or even – Oh, my gosh. I used to love to read, every day. Yeah. I was just a voracious student, and so that is really challenging for me, and my peripheral vision is still not right. Even driving sometimes I get nervous but yeah. Probably cognitive and vestibular and ocular are the ones that are really –
[00:06:19] BP: Affecting you.
[00:06:20] RM: Yes. I also have the reading trouble. I used to read a book a day during COVID. It got so quiet. I didn't have anything to do, so I started reading again and I read a book in a day, which a while ago really wasn't a big deal. But as you said, sometimes you can read it and not even remember what it said at the beginning of the page. I read a whole book and I spent two weeks almost in bed, paying for the book that I had. The brain was done.
[00:06:50] RM: Yeah, your brain, my battery. My therapist with Courage Kenny gave me a diagram, and she said, “Your brain has pretty much six burners if you look at this top of a stove.” That was part of my journey is to try to understand of those six burners, how much of each one of those burners was I turning up full blast.
[00:07:11] BP: That's a good way to explain it.
[00:07:12] RM: Yeah. The metaphor for me since I’m a visual person, it was really easy. It’s that, “Oh, my gosh.” Like you, I was using probably 12 burners.
[00:07:23] BP: Yeah, for sure. It's really easy, especially if you were an active person, whether it was physically or mentally all the time. It’s a big adjustment for sure. As we talk about that, life can look very different after a concussion as we're starting to create awareness for that. How is that for you?
[00:07:41] RM: Oh, my goodness. Well, I think when you and I talked before, certainly the whole identity of who I was before is different. So there's the mental and emotional side of it. The physical side of it is I was very active and I was doing water aerobics every single day and walking five or seven miles a day. I was also doing client meetings every day. I was planning and I would say executing. I don't know if that's the right word but holding presentations, doing presentations with groups of probably 10 or 20 or 40 people. I was engaging out in the community. I was speaking and I was really darn good at my job, which was as you mentioned earlier a salesperson.
Honestly, all of that had to stop. So my life is much different. It’s a very quiet life now. I’m at home. COVID has certainly helped that, working at home. But I really have gone inward, and I focused on my self-care and what I need to do to make sure those burners don't get turned up too high for too long. Truly, it's been challenging but it's actually been a peaceful journey for me.
[00:08:59] BP: That's great. Mine was not peaceful. Mostly, I was very stubborn in accepting that my life needed to be different. I was a show jumper riding horses and a teenager, so accepting that my sport though was intended to be my career lined up with coaches and everything was set, I didn't even live at home anymore, was huge to accept. I pushed myself too far. I would end up in bed for months and then be like, “Oh, I’m better. Let's try this again.” It took me a long time, years actually, to learn that. Maybe you need to have a different goal. Stop pushing yourself. Focus on your health. As you mentioned, career change.
My career was supposed to be an athlete. I was going to go to university as a backup because I love school, but there was nothing else I was going to do and I actually quit being – I was going to be an accountant at one point maybe and I worked at a firm. One of my fears was the exam to get a CPA is like two days, full days of a test, and I panicked. I was like, “There's no way. I would never make it through my head. There's no way I could sit there and do a test all day and then be okay for the next day.” That’s how Post Concussion Inc eventually became what I was going to do.
[00:10:19] RM: You had to pivot, right?
[00:10:21] BP: Total pivot. Being on a podcast was never in my thoughts, to talk about horses but definitely not to talk about head injuries. Yeah.
[00:10:30] RM: No. True. I never thought that I’d be – Suddenly, I was going to use the word ripped out of but I felt like somebody sent me to my room, and I couldn't engage with my friends or my family or my colleagues, people that I had worked with in the industry for 30 years. It's really difficult, as you have described with yours. I was definitely somebody that was out in the community and very visible for a long time. It was hard, really hard.
[00:10:56] BP: It is mentally, especially I find. There's already all the physical things, and then you add the mental, and it's a big combination of things to deal with. We had discussed your life coach training and the hero journey when we talked before. I mentioned it a little bit earlier. Can you give us some insight on what that means?
[00:11:16] RM: There's an author, Joseph Campbell, who has written about the hero's journey. Martha Beck her Wayfinder Life Coach training talks a lot about – It’s called your Helen back story and what that means is – You have experienced that multiple times with your concussions as well, Bella. It’s going through an experience that is absolutely so painful, so difficult that you either didn't sign up for, you weren't prepared for, and you weren't even aware of this being something that could possibly happen. But you found yourself in it and you continue to through tenacity, through faith, through hope, through support, through resources. You continue to put one foot in front of the other and you were able to get to the other side.
My hero's journey, my metaphor is a mountain. If you look at any kind of a picture or painting of a mountain and you imagine that there's a lot of different kinds of terrain and it could be everything from the barren desert to the rain forest to incredibly jagged cliffs, that's what I feel like the last two years of my life have been. I would say that I felt alone on that journey, freezing in the bitter cold or starving or thirsty. Then when I finally reached out my arms and I was willing to ask for help and let the resources, whether it was medical or spiritual or even just the mindfulness and meditation work that I did. When I finally asked for help, I realized, “Oh, my gosh. I now two years later can look at that mountain and I’ve gone through the various terrain and I’m on the other side.”
[00:13:05] BP: For sure.
[00:13:06] RM: Yeah.
[00:13:07] BP: It's crazy what you can go through in such a short time. Sometimes, when I’m explaining it to people, they look at me like I’m crazy. They’re like, “What? How many doctors have you seen?” I had a friend a few months ago who got an IV for the first time, and I was like trying to be so supportive but she knew. She's like, “You were in the hospital for like two years.” She's like, “You had an IV every week.” It’s amazing how different our lives can be. She's one of my best friends and never had an IV in her life, and I was just like laughing so hard because she was freaking out. I was like, “It’s okay. It won't hurt.” It’s funny how different our lives can be. Even though like we're around each other all the time, if you saw us together, you would have no idea. A huge thing about this is it's invisible, right?
As we talk about mindfulness and that goes along with mental health, do you have any tips for self-care that you have started to follow?
[00:14:04] RM: Well, you know what? That's a really good question because I do think working with practitioners and our caregivers is really important. But in the end, it's up to us. Every single day, we have to either do our therapies, whatever those might be. As I said earlier, this journey has helped me come home to myself. The things that have saved me that are pretty much my constant is I do a meditation every morning before I get out of bed. I do body scan. I start at my toes and I go all the way to my head. But then I literally do a visualization and I see light come from my toes all the way throughout my crown chakra.
I journal, I read some daily prompts that are inspirational, and I always write in my gratitude journal. Some of the things that I might even write would be, for example, yesterday. Oh, my gosh. I feel as though today I had clarity. My brain was actually supporting me.
[00:15:01] BP: Working.
[00:15:02] RM: It's maybe not the way that it used to but that's okay. The mental health piece of it though. I also have a coach. I have a life coach that I work with. She's amazing, but I also have a therapist who primarily works with concussion survivors, traumatic brain injury survivors. He's got about 100 patients, so I work closely with him. I probably only see him once a month now but I would say the cool thing about that, Bella, is because he works with concussion survivors, he knows what this journey is like.
[00:15:38] BP: He understands.
[00:15:39] RM: He totally understands because as you said earlier, it's invisible and it's just like any other autoimmune disease that's happening internally that you can't see on the outside like a broken bone or a cut. People on the outside don't understand what we're going through.
[00:15:56] BP: Something I always say, sometimes I wish I broke all the bones in my body so that people could have seen that I was in a cast for all these years kind of thing because then they would have looked at me. If I had a bandage wrapped around my head, they'd probably be like, “Oh, your heart,” when you're smiling and laughing. Even though you're handling a lot of things kind of on the inside, it's really easy to hide it. Mental health affected me the most out of everything dealing with the changes in life going through university and high school a lot differently than your typical person.
The mindfulness that you mentioned, I went to therapy and did a bunch of mindfulness training with her, and that has been one of the most helpful things ever in my life because I can calm myself down, relax, refocus, and then carry on my day so that it doesn't actually wreck my day anymore when just a small insignificant thing happens to me, so it's huge.
[00:16:51] RM: It is so huge and I felt so alone. I wasn't sure where to turn, so I ended up taking a course through the University of Minnesota Center for Spirituality, and it was called mindfulness-based stress reduction. It’s the course that was actually developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn in the ‘70s. I will tell you that it took every ounce of my energy and my brain power to do that course and to stick with it because that required focus, and the brain did not want to focus. Even just the fact that I could do a body scan for 20 minutes was a huge success.
[00:17:28] BP: For sure, yeah. My mindfulness was a lot about my body would panic if something went wrong or something didn't work the way it used to or something similar, especially with the mental health things going on. So it was a way to come back to where I am. Don't overthink. Stop freaking out. Stop shaking. Breathe. Carry on. It’s not as bad as it feels kind of thing. It helped me a ton. I don't think I don't know what I would have done without it. That's for sure, which I always believe. I always tell people, “If you need, just talk to someone. There's nothing wrong with talking to a therapist.” People that you can talk to them for a few months and then go back or do it when you need it. It doesn't have to be an all the time thing but it can make a huge difference in your life.
[00:18:14] RM: It can. It can. I was going to just say that because it's invisible, the looks on people's faces when I couldn't quite string my thoughts together –
[00:18:24] BP: For sure.
[00:18:25] RM: Even my brother said to me, “Wow. You're not having a very good day, are you?” This was early in my recovery, and we really didn't know what to expect. I wasn't getting a lot of information, Bella, and I’m not sure if you were but –
[00:18:37] BP: No. None when I started.
[00:18:40] RM: Right? That led to more of this beating myself up which contributed to some mental health challenges. You’re right talking to somebody, but I was also stubborn like you. My doctor said, “Robin, you want to be able to turn the dial and be healthy again and be fixed. We don't know how long it will take. It could be 18 months, two years, three years. This could be something that you have ongoing symptoms for the rest of your life.” Well, okay. I don't know if hearing that would have impacted your mental health but I just thought, “Oh, my god. I can't believe that this is something that could go happening for the rest of my life.”
[00:19:20] BP: I kind of ignored it at first. I was like, “I’m fine. Everything's fine. Just don't tell anyone.” Some doctors were great, but I also had a few doctors that were not so great. They would look at me and be like, “Oh, well. I think you're actually doing really good.” But then they'd be telling me to drop out of high school and drop – Don’t go but I’m doing okay. You’re reverse. I’m trying to – You're telling me to get better but you're also telling me not to do what – I’m a school person. I love to learn. You're telling me to just drop out and try again later. That was a common word in my university and high school experience was, “Why don't you just take a break? Why don't you just try again later? This isn't working.” I was like, “No, it needs to work. I can't make it not work.”
[00:20:08] RM: That is so interesting that you say that because that's what my family. My family was so worried about me. No, you're not ever going to be able to go back to work again, but I couldn't get disability because my doctor felt that I had a long, long time to heal. There were other doctors the insurance company had hired, and they basically said, “Robin, no. There's nothing wrong with you. You should have been able to go back to work in one month.” Therefore, they pretty much said, “You're not telling the truth,” and they hired private investigators to try to prove that I was fine. I’m telling you, it was quite an incredible journey.
[00:20:46] BP: That's crazy. I know it's invisible but it's real. I’m not making it up. I had a doctor tell me I was making it up and I should see a therapist for that. She's like, “I don't think your head pain – I think a lot of it's in your head.” Of course, it's in my head. I thought is it like a teenager who's a little snarky and I know it's in my head. That's where the pain is. She wanted me to see a therapist to see if I could stop over imagining my pain. I was furious. I was like, “I’ve been in chronic pain. I dealt with it for seven years of a headache every single day. This isn't a joke. I’m not making this up, but it can be very hard to deal with.” With that and all of our talk about mental health, let's take a break.
[BREAK]
[00:21:35] BP: Want to create awareness for concussions? Want to support our podcast and website? Buy awareness clothing today on postconcussioninc.com and get 10% off using listen in that's L-I-S-T-E-N-I-N and be sure to take Post Concussion Inc in your photos. We'd love to see them.
[INTERVIEW CONTINUED]
[00:22:01] BP: Welcome back. We're back on the Post Concussion Podcast with myself, Bella, and today's guest, Robin. After our discussion with mental health and doctors, we're going to start about the US healthcare system which is something I have not had to deal with in Canada but Robin has. How are the financial changes and challenges for having to deal with your post-concussion healthcare in the US?
[00:22:27] RM: That's a very good question. When I was going through the medical leave process early on, all of my medical care was paid for. Then once I had the outside doctors who were hired by the company that was doing the – Oh, gosh. See, this is –
[00:22:45] BP: Oh, your disability.
[00:22:47] RM: Thank you. They were covering my disability. Yeah. The work comp company, they had outside doctors come in and assess me, and they felt that I should be back to work. It was nowhere near the time, so that created a lot of legal issues for me. But that aside, I decided to just continue on with the healthcare in spite of that. Minnesota in particular has amazing healthcare. Living in Minnesota, I think that's a blessing for me. I’ve had a lot out of pocket from a health care cost. But on the other hand, I look at it as though it's an investment, being able to get up in the morning and function.
[00:23:27] BP: You mentioned doing acupuncture earlier. How do you feel about acupuncture? I’m always curious.
[00:23:34] RM: You know what? Well, my chiropractor also does acupuncture. I would say for me, I have never done it alone. I’ve always done it in tandem with my acupuncture therapy.
[00:23:47] BP: Oh, no. I’ve never done it alone.
[00:23:49] RM: I am going to tell you that I was featured in the local magazine because of the acupuncture and the chiropractic care that I did with my doctor because I would say that it really helped my headaches, and I had neck pain because of my injury, and I still have neck pain every day. What happened is because of that, I was clenching my teeth which totally messed up my bite and my jaw pain. The acupuncture was really helpful for headaches and my neck pain and my jaw pain and relieving the stress, so I would say I am a huge advocate of acupuncture.
[00:24:31] BP: That's great. I did acupuncture back in high school when I was going through – It was when I kind of did like a few years where I tried absolutely everything that existed. Then I took a bit of a break and then I did it again. When I did acupuncture, my thing – It wasn't the needles. They don't hurt. Nothing hurts. It was they would stay in for about like half an hour or it felt like half an hour and I would have to not move with needles in my head. I remember my friend at the time. She would text me and be like, “Don't roll over. Don't move.” I’m like, “Thank you. You're not helping.” I was always so nervous that I’d like fall with all these needles in me.
I do find a lot of people really like it and I find if it helps you, then you keep doing it. That's always my recommendation because every brain injury is different. Our symptoms, a lot of them seem the same but they affect us in different ways. If you find something that works, just keep up with it. Even if it didn't work for me, it might work for you, so you might as well keep going, right?
[00:25:32] RM: That's a great suggestion.
[00:25:35] BP: Because I’ve had people, they suggest things that I had tried and they said it was a miracle for them, which is I’m pumped. I was like, “That's so exciting. I’m so excited and happy for you that it worked for you.” It did not work for me and that's okay. Everybody's brain is different.
Something else I’d like to talk about because I find it's very prominent with a lot of people that a lot of the concussion community has been missing is because we focus on athletes, which I was and still sort of am when I can, is that a lot of people that are suffering from head injuries aren't athletes. They're parents. They're in their careers. They're a lot older. They're not just teenagers. Being a – imagine that you're a mom. Do you have any tips for individuals going through the same thing?
[00:26:24] RM: That's such a great question. I’m actually a little bit emotional when I think about that because, again, remember it's the invisible injury. I would say that I really didn't share how bad I felt, how much of a struggle it was with my family for a really long time. My tips would be this. Be honest, share your feelings, and ask for help. But also, the other thing that I did with my kids is I invited them to tell me how they were feeling. I discovered that they were really suffering from anxiety, and they were so afraid for me because I was not the mom that I was before the injury. The communication piece of it is so critical, and I also encourage them to get their own support. They both ended up working with a therapist and they still are today.
[00:27:22] BP: I really like the ask how they are because I have, as I’ve told you, quite a big family and I didn't tell them anything either for way too long. Even when I was going through it and they knew some of things that were going on, they didn't know the full extent of it because, well, one, I didn't like the sad looks. Siblings would look at me or my parents would look at me and they try to hide it, but they just looked devastated. I’d come upstairs or I’d get out of bed, and my mom would see me in the morning and ask how I was or she'd look at me. I know I looked terrible or like I could barely stand for a while.
Just seeing that on her face, I didn't want to add more bad news. “How are you feeling?” “Just normal. Just okay. Just how I usually feel.” Because if I went into the details of I, I always thought that they couldn't handle it. I learned the horrible way by laying in a hospital bed that I probably should have told them everything and that they were the most supportive people that I could have ever asked for when I went through all of that. I should have also asked how they were doing. Maybe because I was younger at the time, I didn't ever think of seeing how they were handling it. I find that's really important that it's not – It’s a whole family. It affects the whole family. It didn't just affect me. It affected my siblings. My parents’ focus was on me. They couldn't make me better. I was the common topic of conversation, and that's how it always was.
I found it really interesting to see how they reacted when they kind of found out the reality of how I was doing and how smart they were. I was like, “Oh, wow.” I should have known that from the beginning but I would not believe it.
[00:29:06] RM: Well, we're kind of taught at least in this culture here, fake it till you make it, so I kept pretending that I was just fine. Also, I was raised don't tell anybody if you feel bad because then you're complaining, so I didn't want to be perceived as being complaining or a Debbie Downer. I would say that this is one of the biggest gifts that's happened both for myself and for my family. It’s just like the autoimmune disease that we talked about before or even anybody that's dealing with addiction or anything else. The family around or those closest to somebody that's experiencing this kind of trauma are really deeply affected as well, but I wasn't thinking about that because I was so focused on, “Oh, my gosh. I’m not the same person I was and struggling.”
But when I finally got healthy enough, Bella, to step back and realize, “Yes, we are a family,” and I could see those sad looks on their faces and I could see them struggling, honestly the gift that I gave them to give themselves permission to say, “This is how awful and scared I’m feeling. I’m worried. I’m sad,” they've lost the identity of who I was as well.
[00:30:17] BP: For sure. Well, you changed. Sometimes, I think about it's hard for me because when I went through all this is when you change the most a lot of people say from like teenager to becoming kind of an adult. I found like my personality before, it's more I have to think a little bit more before I do things. If you ask me to go do something like kind of crazy and adventurous, I have to think. I’m like, “Is it worth it? Am I going to regret this later?” I have like that subtle warning system that goes through my body that's like, “Should you really be doing this? Are you going to pay for this?” That's always –
[00:30:55] RM: That's your inner wisdom I think, right?
[00:30:57] BP: Yeah, for sure. There's medications and there's doctors and all those kinds of things. We also use products. Not exactly products but like myself, as I mentioned I go to a dirt bike track. It’s really, really loud. I used to go to the bar, and the bar is really, really loud. I still have them. They're attached to my purse, these little ear pieces that would go into my ears so that I wasn't overwhelmed and I could still talk with them in. Is there any favorite product that you had that you believed helped you?
[00:31:28] RM: Well, I love the idea of the earpieces because sound is one of those things. I’m going to say my sunglasses, my prescription sunglasses honestly because light, even just sitting here in my dining room with the light coming through the window, I have to wear tinted glasses even inside because the light bothers me. So that's one thing. I will tell you honestly, I use essential oils faithfully every single day. I use lavender and I use frankincense together. Frankincense is really known to help headaches, and I use it on my forehead, at the back of my head. But honestly, instead of taking an Advil, I would put a couple drops of peppermint oil in my palms and then slowly inhale that. I will just say that essential oils have been a really natural way for me to either enhance my mood or help reduce my headache. Yeah. So those have been really great.
[00:32:22] BP: Do you find the scent bugs you at all or no? I’m sensitive to the scents. I noticed sitting in a car, my sister put lip chap on a few years ago, and I remember going, “What did you just put on? What is that smell?” They started laughing, and my mom was in the vehicle, and she's like, “Yeah, she's really sensitive to smells.” It was lip chap. It was nothing but it just like overwhelmed and gave me a headache instantly, so I was just wondering if you noticed that at all.
[00:32:51] RM: Yeah. There are some candles that I used to burn that I can't burn anymore because they instantly give me headaches. I had a couple of really beautiful little French perfumes that I loved before the injury. I can't wear them anymore.
[00:33:04] BP: But the oils you don't notice any too much scent?
[00:33:06] RM: No. The oils I haven't noticed.
[00:33:08] BP: That's awesome. Is there anything else you would like to add before we end today's episode?
[00:33:13] RM: My gosh. Well, first of all, I wanted to say thank you to you for inviting me to come on and just share a bit of my story. I also want to say thank you for being courageous and carry the baton to help others understand the challenges of post-concussion recovery and that there's hope. I love that you're shining a light on all of this because we need more people to understand that. Yeah, the last thing I would say is that it is one day at a time and one step at a time. Some days are going to be really great and others were going to be challenged but not to give up and to be kind and gentle with ourselves.
[00:33:55] BP: I’m all about one day at a time. That's the way I get through life right now. So thank you so much, Robin, for joining us today and sharing a bit of your story and thoughts on living with post-concussion syndrome.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[00:34:08] 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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