The Unexpected with Wayne Rogers
Show Notes:
Awareness around the dangers of football and the head injuries that players can incur has been growing, and today we have a guest who knows all too well about the effects of a football concussion. Wayne Rogers was playing semi-pro football at the age of 32 and had a massive collision that triggered some serious and long-lasting issues for him. In our conversation, we talk through the experience of the early symptoms, and how this transformed when he realized some of the problems were not going away as quickly as he had imagined. We also talk about the effects of the symptoms on the different parts of his life, his relationship with a partner and twin daughters, and how the outside world generally responds to these kinds of problems. Wayne has a strong message of creating more awareness around post-concussion while underlining the importance of communication and support. He encourages anyone struggling with the after-effects of a head injury to avoid suffering in silence and recommends leaning on the people in your life you can trust and rely on when necessary. Despite the difficulties he has encountered, Wayne has a message of hope and progress, so listen in to hear it all!
Key Points From This Episode:
The basics of Wayne's initial injury which happened while playing football in 2015.
Symptoms that Wayne experienced immediately, and then subsequently for the last 5 years.
The realization that Wayne had around the longevity of his condition.
How Wayne's injury has affected his relationships; frustration and challenges he experienced.
Wayne's girlfriend's own struggles with post-concussion syndrome.
Perspectives and advice on parenting with post-concussion.
Masculinity and weakness; breaking down some of the stereotypes and stigma.
Wayne's thoughts on football, the rules, and the dangers involved in the sport.
Experiences of PTSD and the important ongoing conversation around mental health.
How Wayne manages his array of symptoms and the small steps that help him the most.
Connect with Our Guest:
Follow Wayne on Twitch @yakman_
Follow Wayne on Twitter @nyak1945
Follow Post Concussion Inc on Social Media to stay up to date on the podcast
Transcript - Click to Read
[INTRODUCTION]
[0:00:04.7] 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.
[INTERVIEW]
[0:01:03.6] BP: Welcome to today’s episode of The Post Concussion Podcast with myself, Bella Paige and today’s guest, Wayne Rogers. Wayne is a 37-year-old dad from Wisconsin who was very active before the first concussion he suffered while chasing his football dreams in a semi-pro league. He now works from home to help provide for his twin daughters as a Twitch streamer and content creator with the hope of sharing his story with others who are affected by post-concussion syndrome. Welcome to the show, Wayne.
[0:01:33.2] WR: Thanks for having me Bella. I appreciate being on and being able to share a little bit of my experience with something so crazy. It can really in affect in, I think we need some more awareness on it.
[0:01:44.9] BP: For sure. Do you want to tell everyone a bit about your injury and how it occurred?
[0:01:48.9] WR: Yeah, absolutely. I ended up finding out about semi-pro football in my area of Wisconsin in 2015 and by that time I was 32, so I wasn’t exactly in my prime but I was still fairly fit, I wanted to be more active so I joined and I’ve always loved football.
We were all kind of using kind of older gear, we were kind of a rag-tag thing where we’re just throwing things together because we just love the game and wanted to get out there in uniform and play. I had a helmet that was probably 10 or 15 years old. I was at practice one day and we were doing tackling drills and there was a guy in the team who — he is not super big in size but he is solid muscle, he’s just a superior athlete, I love the guy to death. Devon, if you hear this, I love you even though you rang your bell buddy.
He would usually – he was so quick, he would just quickly run around me and a lot of times, I couldn’t catch him, I was kind of slow being a big lineman and so after darting around me a few times, he said, “I’m coming at you head on this time.” I was like, “Yeah, right, okay Mr. Quick Pants.” We lined up and we squared off and sure enough he came directly at me head first and I was kind of leaning down into it too, we hit helmets pretty much on the top front of the forehead and he literally bounced back off of me like four feet backwards.
I kind of staggered a few feet back, that was it. I had this massive headache the rest of the day, came to realize later it was my first concussion and little did I know how that would then affect me, even now almost six years later, five and a half years later, pretty much daily basis. That’s how I had the first concussion, I’ve had some mini ones since then but that was the one that cracked the egg so to speak.
[0:03:49.6] BP: Yeah, the one that started the symptoms for sure.
[0:03:52.3] WR: Yeah.
[0:03:52.7] BP: Well, thank you so much for sharing and it is really common for people where they’ve had a few before but never – they last – their recovery last a few weeks. A lot of people I find, there’s that one, that that was like the one that set off kind of the prolonged symptoms that they found where everything kind of started for a lot longer.
A common problem for many, that you mentioned, when we talked before was no one telling you or warning you how long you may deal with these symptoms or if you do go to the ER and most of it is like, “Well, in two weeks you’ll be okay.” How did that make you feel?
[0:04:29.5] WR: Yeah, obviously, you get a massive concussion for those who have experienced it and no, it can really hurt. Your head just pounds and you're seeing color and spots when your eyes are closed, it’s like a super migraine. I go to the doctor and they do the eye test and all the stuff and they tell you to go sit in a dark corner, don’t read, don’t listen to music, don’t watch anything and it should go away within weeks or maybe three or four months and to keep coming back in if it persists and that’s it.
My initial feelings was, “Okay, this is definitely not fun but sounds like we got light at the end of the tunnel and this should go away soon, cool.” That’s far from the case for a lot of people. Some people seem to be able to seem to recover in a timeframe like that. I think there’s a lot of us who don’t. There’s so little information on concussions that we aren’t told that this could potentially go on for years and you need to understand and learn about it.
[0:05:42.0] BP: No, it’s true. We don’t talk about that it might happen from one — we talk about NFL players, NHL players who have been playing for 10, 20 years and having problems but we’re missing that it can happen form one concussion. You can get prolonged symptoms, prolonged symptoms, don’t always occur from 10, 20, 30 plus concussions that they like to kind of mention like you hear in the news. Usually it’s like, “Oh this NFL player is now sustained their – who knows how many concussions and now they seem to be having problems” but they forget that there’s lots of people most individuals that I’ve had to talk to have only had one.
There’s one concussion that greatly affected them so it’s important to realize that it doesn’t have to be many but it also doesn’t have to be forever, everyone recovers differently. There’s so many different causes and intermingling things that can cause your symptoms to keep going. There’s so many factors out there, how your brain was before your injury is something that I’ve been talking lately to people is that sometimes if you had a lot of – how your brain was before mentally and like tons of other symptoms like that.
Then you add the injury and then you add your current lifestyle, what you’re doing, how buys you are, there’s so many factors in there that can affect how you recover. I had a lot of mental health problems, so that kind of held my recovery back a little bit but that’s so common with many people because your life’s changing so much. How are you expecting to get better when the physical symptoms are affecting you so much, right? Like there’s a fine line there. It can be really hard to accept I guess, right?
When did you realize that this was going to go on for longer? Was it like a few months out, like a year?
[0:07:35.4] WR: I mean, the intensity of it stayed for honestly, three or four months. I mean, it was really rough and going to referring to what you were mentioning with how I was before the concussion and I’m still this way a little bit but I’ve always been very quick on my feet. I’ve always been very witty. I’m good at cracking a lot of jokes and good guy to have at the dinner party kind of thing.
When I was dealing with the concussion for all those months, it was really weird because I would get what I describe now to my family, now that I know what’s going on, I describe it as thick-headed. Basically, very foggy. Your, I guess, cognitive awareness is hindered, you’re slowed down in response, it was hard a lot of days for me to even talk because the sentence would be in my mind, I'd know what I’d want to say and I just couldn’t finish the words, to finish saying what I was saying. And it was very strange in that sense to experience this mental hindrance from these ongoing effects.
I realized it wasn’t going to go away any time soon when we started hitting like the sixth and eighth-month mark and I was still very sensitive to light and sound and it would seem to flare up out of nowhere. I would think I would be getting better for a few weeks and then bam, we’d have another stretch of days, where it was going hard and burning.
[0:09:18.0] BP: Yeah, well, there’s so many things that can kind of enhance your symptoms too like I know myself if I get stressed out, stress is definitely not – like I don’t like to be like, “It’s just stress” but my stress does increase my symptoms. If I have a lot going on at some time. Like wow, I push myself too hard. I do really well now, I definitely have headaches every day or anything like that like I used to but there is sometimes where I’m like – that was on me, like I did, I did eye therapy yesterday for the first time and I can’t even remember when I was out. Great to do it but I paid for it. Now I got to do it before I go to bed because if I do it in the afternoon, then I just kind of wrote off half of my day, which is what I did yesterday.
You kind of have to learn what works for you and it’s really easy to push past — life happens so then all of a sudden you’re like, "Wow, yes, I still have a concussion symptoms that appear sometimes."
[0:10:16.6] WR: Absolutely.
[0:10:17.1] BP: Yeah, something that we had talked about was relationships. How was your relationship affected by your injury?
[0:10:25.9] WR: I mean honestly, it made things frustrating, it made things difficult because dealing with a concussion and having that level of headaches, having that frustration of knowing what you want to say and you can’t even hardly talk, I would just get mad and frustrated about things. It became something where I was easily irritated, it was just a struggle because all of a sudden, I was dealing with this invisible problem that you can’t really see other than I’m riding the struggle bus and I don’t know what to do with it, I don’t know how to fix it, I don’t know how to ease the symptoms.
I didn’t know what I was doing to make things worse as far as the severity of it and so it became very difficult to communicate. I’ve got gorgeous twin daughters, I love them to death and I love being dad but when you are feeling hundreds of questions a day and you can barely tell someone that you would prefer a ham sandwich over turkey, it’s very difficult. It made it hard for them because you know, they’re just little kids, they don’t understand and as far as my relationship with my girlfriend, I was very fortunate with her that she was very understanding bruise she’s dealt with concussion stuff for quite a while. She’s definitely fighting the post-concussion syndrome as well.
Hers wasn’t trauma athletic injuries, hers was just from real life things. A year or two before I had my concussion, she had a really major concussion. She was babysitting for our neighbors, they came home, it was raining and late and dark out and she slipped on their walkway that was downhill, absolutely smacked the back of her head super hard, and she was down for months. She understood, but it was still difficult because I would get mad and just not want to deal with anybody and want to just shut myself off and she’d come ask me questions about the kids or about supper and I would just be kind of a snappy jerk because I didn’t know what I was going through, I just knew that I was hurting and I wasn’t myself.
[0:12:46.4] BP: I find snapping is really common. I used to snap, I guess when it started, it was mostly my mom and then you kind of react too harshly and then you regretted instantly and I still do it to this day. If I have a really bad headache on days, I almost try to avoid people a little bit because when I am around them, I do really well but there’s the odd time where I do snap like really hard and I’m like “Woah, definitely wouldn’t have said that normally”, definitely didn’t mean it and wouldn’t have reacted that way.
It’s a really common problem that a lot of people are dealing with and when you’ve been in a relationship for a long time but I remember, I started dating someone new, it was a while ago now but when we started dating, I had to kind of explain it because I did it once and it had never happened and we’d already been seeing each other for a few months and I was like, “Right, you don’t know that this is something I can do. I’m really sorry."
[0:13:42.1] WR: Right.
[0:13:44.7] BP: I guess I kind of have to like give him like I should come with a warning sheet, "She has head injuries and sometimes she snaps." Everyday people do snap too but I do find it’s a little bit, it’s almost meaner and it can react really badly but I remember I should come up with like a warning sign that’s like, “By the way, she can react really poorly if her head’s really hurting. Maybe don’t have good talks or anything important at those times.”
[0:14:12.0] WR: Right? Parental warning signs.
[0:14:13.7] BP: Yeah, right. That would be nice, it would be really handy. You can find Wayne on Twitch at nauticalyak1945 and on TikTok @paper_please but both will be found in our show notes so you don’t have to remember those. With that, we’re going to take a break and be sure to stay tuned to hear about some more parenting with a concussion and stigma around men being tough.
[BREAK]
[0:14:42.9] 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 “listenin.” That’s “listenin” and be sure to take Post Concussion Inc. in your photos. We’d love to see them.
[INTERVIEW CONTINUED]
[0:15:10.0] BP: Welcome back to The Post Concussion Podcast with myself Bell Paige and today’s guest, Wayne Rogers. We’ve talked about quite a bit so far but we’re going to get back into parenting. So parenting with post-concussion syndrome can be very difficult, do you have any advice to other parents out there?
[0:15:27.5] WR: Lean on grandma as much as you can, you know? If you’ve got some family members or some friends that are willing to help out that understand you’re going through something even if they can’t relate directly and they’re very supportive, try to reach out and lean on those people a little bit because when you’re dealing with the initial injury and the months and years after, there’s days where you wake up and your head is just pounding so hard, you can’t even get out of bed and turn the light on.
When you’ve got kids, they need regular meals, they need clothes because they dumped milk all over their lap while they were eating, they need new clothes because they were outside and they fell in the mud puddle. They need help getting their crayons, it’s very tough from a parenting aspect because there’s times where you feel like you can’t even take care of yourself, how will you suppose to help this little person that needs help with everything and has questions.
My best advice would be try to reach out to those that are close to you that you trust, that are there for you and to support you, don’t be afraid to lean on them a little bit. There’s been times where I’ve called my mom or my grandmother or great grandmother and said “Hey, my circuits are frying today, I can’t do this, I really need someone to come get the kids for the day.” Sometimes they can and that’s when I explain to the kids, “Hey, sit down and watch this movie, daddy’s going to be laying down in bed, come get me for anything you need but I just can’t hardly function today so daddy’s going to rest for a while.” It’s very tough that way.
[0:17:28.3] BP: Yeah and explaining to them when they’re little is hard but I feel like it is worth, like at least telling them like I have nieces and we just tell them that I was having a bad headache today so just don’t be extra loud, you know?
[0:17:41.6] WR: Yes.
[0:17:42.6] BP: Try to not scream today, I might have a nap that day but like in some days, I am out where like even with my niece and nephew, I’m like I know I am supposed to watch them today and I will but if anyone — like I have lots of siblings that wants to come and takeover for me that would be great because I’m struggling today and kids are loud. Like you said, they ask probably a million questions a day it feels like sometimes, which is great.
I do like that part but when you have a bad headache, it can be hard to answer all of those questions. And I like that. There’s nothing wrong with leaning on other people especially if you need it and I do think mentioning to them that you have a headache that day like they’re kids and they’ll probably forget in an hour and they’re scream about something but at least you mentioned it to them and they’re trying to understand too rather than not including them at all because I think if you don’t include them at all then it’s kind of just a mystery.
“Oh why is daddy off today?” You know? They need that little bit of understanding there and I think that really helps. It makes a big difference. I had a lot of trouble telling people how I was feeling and when I first started even telling my parents how I was feeling as like the reverse role and I know that telling them did help them at the same time because they knew how to handle me that day if they really knew how I was feeling.
Something else we talked about when we talked before was the stigma of men being tough. This is really common just in generally, men have to toughen up. Men can’t cry, men can’t be upset, men can’t be hurt unless like they break all the bones in their body.
[0:19:20.1] WR: Right.
[0:19:21.0] BP: That’s kind of what it seems like some days. What are your thoughts on that?
[0:19:25.6] WR: That is kind of one of the reasons I really wanted to come on and share my story with this podcast because you know, especially in some of the pro-sports scenes or I just always have been kind of a burly organic masculine male, you know, a cookie cutter wanting to wear flannel and go chop trees and you’re not supposed to show weakness. Admitting that something is wrong and going on to be seen as weakness, your buddies will tell you, “Suck it up, get out there buttercup, you got this, real men work through it.” All this stuff.
When you don’t go through it firsthand and you don’t understand, it’s really easy to stay in that mindset. I think a lot of people and a little bit specifically towards males are good at keeping that stuff buried and not talking about it, not sharing it because they’re afraid that maybe their sports buddies who they watch the game with or maybe they play sports with will kind of look down on them or a lot of times will just brush it off and completely invalidate that you are struggling and having these severe problems that are affecting you.
We don’t talk enough about this stuff, there isn’t enough awareness and I think some of that comes from the pro-sports scene where it’s kind of hush-hush. There’s money and contracts on the line, you can’t be injured, “We need you to perform for that contract.” A lot of the research that could have happened in the last 20 years hasn’t just because of this whole masculine mentality of sweep it under the rug and move on.
I think that’s something that those of us who are going through it, need to put their hand up and say, “No, stop. We’re not doing that, we need to talk about this. We need to figure out what’s going on with the human brain.” We need to figure out how it’s affecting our physical health, our mental health and move forward. It’s 2021, you know?
[0:21:40.8] BP: Yeah, no exactly. Yeah, no, and it needs to be talked about more and it’s sad actually when you think about it from certain perspectives like you can’t be upset because you’re a male or that you can’t be struggling especially mentality. It doesn’t matter, you can go through the exact same problems as a woman, it doesn’t matter, none of that matters. It’s just you’re human so you’re allowed to have human emotions and it should be more viewed as that like you’re human so you can have human problems.
Not that you’re a male so you have male problems, you’re a woman so you have woman problems. I think it can be a lot more generalized because it doesn’t matter and it is really hard to speak about and then you keep it bottled up and then that just creates like a whole endless ton of problems. It causes tons of problems, bottling things up is really easy. I did it and it seems easy I guess, it seems easier than talking about it because talking about it is seen as so bad I guess or so –
Like you said, people brush it off. So you don’t talk about it and then you keep it on the inside and then it is kind of like there’s a fire burning inside of you and it just gets bigger and bigger and then eventually, you burn out to the point where you are mentally drained, you’re done or you explode, why not? You know everybody’s done what – everyone reacts differently at issues like that but it is really important to talk about and I am really glad you shared that today. You got injured with football, so what is your current opinion on football? I always like to ask this about football because everyone is stingy about it sometimes.
[0:23:17.3] WR: Yeah and football is one of those sports that has always kind of had a thorn in the side of mothers everywhere so to speak and not trying to make any of this separated by gender or whatnot. But is growing and developing children to be playing these violent sports. We watch our superheroes, the NFL and these other pro-networks around the world and we idolize them. We want to be just like them, they’re so cool. Everything they wear is cool, whatever they’re doing is cool.
We want to be that awesome athlete that is making that touchdown that is getting that quarterback sack that is cleaning some guy off his feet 20 yards to the side. I think these pro leagues have done a lot to kind of stifle things in the past and while some of them aren’t, they’re still not really necessarily coming out with press conferences and saying, “Hey, we know this is a problem. This is what we’re doing about it.”
They’re quietly changing things behind the scenes. They’ve been quietly changing the rules on how you tackle, on protecting the quarterback in a little bit. You can’t just take wide-open shot on a wide receiver or quarterback anymore and then with a lot of like the younger leagues, some of the peewee leagues and stuff, enough information is starting to get out there that there are teams that start really young with the kids at six, eight, 10-years-old, on safe tackling.
25 years ago when I was getting into high school sports, there was no such thing as safe tackling. "What’s safe tackling, you wuss, get out there and smack the guy," you know? Now, there’s beginning to be awareness but I think we all needed to do our part to bring it more into the light, more to the forefront but I think we’re moving in the right direction like I said with these teams training kids young to make these safer and smarter techniques part of their everyday game play.
I think that’s definitely the right beginning step. Hopefully, we get to a point where some of these pro leagues are kicking some funding towards the research end to learn more but we’re I think overall, we’re starting to move into the right direction. It just feels really slow and behind the times.
[0:25:58.3] BP: Yeah, it is, yeah. Well, that’s kind of concussion research in general when you compare it to a lot of other research out there like in comparison to Alzheimer’s and dementia that we’re really behind in the whole concussion brain injury area when you compare research like for the baby and they’re adults already in research but it is good that they’re doing – I think it is important to start with the young kids because it’s really hard to change your mindsets when you’re older and the way you play a sport.
If you have been playing that sport for 20 years, it is hard to kind of adapt the way that you play so starting with kids will hopefully bring that where it’s just natural. Taking a break is normal from a sport because we don’t – we kind of see it as a really bad thing and like if we have kids taking breaks, I’ve mentioned this before but if we have kids taking breaks, then when they have to take a break in high school because they got hit, it’s not just a big deal because they’re like, “Well, I’ve done this before. I know I take a break and then I get to go back” because if they don’t think it’s normal then they don’t take the break and then they ignore the symptoms and then they just keep pushing through, right?
[0:27:08.0] WR: Yeah.
[0:27:08.4] BP: Changing that mentality is really important like I am not against sports. I am definitely pro-sports. I definitely think we can be safer about it and a lot smarter but hopefully will get better. I don’t think we should get rid of sports because I think it creates a lot of motivation and it teaches a lot such about being in a team or working towards a goal and football might be your sport or maybe tennis is your sport, you can also get football — yes, there’s definitely the enhanced risk obviously like I can’t watch it but I also can’t watch boxing or anything like that because hitting heads makes me nervous.
[0:27:42.4] WR: Oh man, right?
[0:27:44.7] BP: Yeah, I know it makes me nervous when I hear it but it is also important to realize that like you said, your other half got hurt slipping on ice. Head injuries happen anywhere anyways so you can also live in fear. It’s not a good way to live because that mentally can make your injuries way worse. Is there anything else you would like to add before we end today’s episode?
[0:28:11.3] WR: I just want to touch maybe quickly on kind of the mental health end just because for me –
[0:28:16.6] BP: I like to talk about mental health.
[0:28:18.9] WR: Yes, it’s important. For me personally, I have PTSD. I didn’t realize I was living with it. A lot of it stems from when I was younger and some of it from some things that happened in my 20s. What I didn’t realize at the time was that having concussion makes the PTSD worse, which I didn’t know I had at the time yet and vice-versa, the PTSD makes the concussion symptoms worse and that’s really weird to understand if you don’t go through those things.
I ended up having all of these like weird daydream and night dream flashbacks going on and started realizing and I’ve honestly starting to remember some things I have gone through and been through and so it ended up leading me to go to counseling after two or three months because I’m like, “I’m having all of these crazy thoughts that seemed like memories but I don’t – did this really happen? Am I going crazy? Did I totally scramble my eggs in this one football practice?”
I didn’t know what I was dealing with, so if you are noticing things going on with your mental health, with your thought processes, if you feel like you’re going crazy, don’t just try to hide it and don’t try to handle it yourself. I went to a therapist and I started talking and then I started talking with my mother and I was vividly describing details from my childhood. I described the trailer house that we lived in when I was two years old and I described it to a tee.
The yellow linoleum, the dark wood stained cabinets with the black trim, the exact layout of the house we had lived in, they weren’t all bad memories but there were good memories too but you know, sometimes you’ll have some extra side-effects that you don’t expect. Don’t be afraid to reach out and talk to somebody on the professional end because that’s when I ended up realizing that I had to fill up the sheet of all of these bad – you know, what’s happened to you that you would consider bad that has had a negative effect and I had this list. I had a list man, and we went through all of the symptoms and how it affected me and he’s like, “You’ve got PTSD.” And I’m like, “What? I thought you only get that serving in the military.” That’s the general misconception.
[0:30:52.0] BP: It is, yeah.
[0:30:52.6] WR: He’s like, “No, I mean it’s post-traumatic stress disorder. It’s not post-military disorder.” It’s post-traumatic, if you go through trauma you can have it. Going to therapy then learning what I was dealing with from the PTSD side was helping me learn to kind of cope with the post-concussion side and learning how to navigate, you know, not staring at a bright white screen. I’ve got blue light glasses that filter out the blue light.
If I’m starting to have a pounding headache, this happened to me yesterday. I was live streaming and I’ve got this lights on for the green screen behind me and I started getting this pounding headache and I powered through and I finished but the last two hours I was just hurting and so when I was done, I stepped away, I threw in the blue light glasses, I went and laid down for a little bit, I took Excedrin and it settled down.
It settled down eventually after a couple of hours but sometimes you might go through some extra stuff that you might not expect or understand and don’t suffer in silence is how I like to put it. Don’t be that guy who is putting on that macho face. Don’t be afraid to go talk to somebody and explore what’s happening because you might learn a lot about yourself you didn’t know that you need to know that can help you cope with it down the line and help you regain yourself, so to speak. Because sometimes, going through all of these unknown things you feel like you’ve lost yourself.
You don’t know what to expect anymore, so don’t be afraid to reach out. That’s so important. That’s one of the reasons I really wanted to have this talk. I feel like more people need to realize there’s help out there for some of these things and sometimes you got to do some research but don’t be shy about it. Deal with it head on, tackle it head on and make yourself aware so you can – you and your family can cope and move forward.
[0:32:59.7] BP: I agree and I’m all for therapy because it definitely changed my life. It doesn’t matter if you have family and friends that you can talk to because they – well, number one they’re not trained in it. Number two, they don’t give you the tools to deal with it. It’s great to get it out but you also – a lot of the time you need tools to how to handle it when you’re not sitting in that conversation. How do you handle it when you’re going for a drive or you’re sitting in your room and your brain is spiraling?
It’s important to have those tools that a professional can give you and always remember, one a professional might not be the best match for you so try another one and find the best fit, because that is important too.
[0:33:38.0] WR: For sure.
[0:33:39.5] BP: Thank you so much for joining and sharing your story on living with post-concussion.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[0:33:47.1] 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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