Let’s be clear here. There are many of us who are foolish enough to ride horses, which are fine until someone lets loose the Dreaded White Plastic Bag, or a bee bites his butt. Most others who get head injuries aren’t professional athletes. We collect them during life. A brutal, abusive parent. A bad boyfriend. A car accident. A slip and fall in the bathroom which breaks a hip, but Mom also whacks her forehead on the sink on the way down.
Soon after that, she’s on her way down, too. It’s not the hip. It’s the head.
Living with post concussion syndrome can be down right nasty. Anyone who has seen the movie Concussion starring Will Smith will know what the symptoms look like. They’re terrifying. I know. I dealt with them all the time. Doctors prescribed more and more drugs, which exacerbated all the symptoms, especially the 24-hour a day suicidal thoughts. You don’t know what that’s like until you live with it. I know precisely what Junior Seau was dealing with (http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jan/10/sports/la-sp-sn-junior-seau-brain-2013011)0. I deal with it today. I have at times come very close to offing myself, and the meds made it vastly worse. They always do. You can count on it.
The problem is exacerbated by the fact that the medical community’s standard response to just about anything is to medicate. When I went to a specialist to get tested for brain damage, she told me to increase my meds. It’s a knee-jerk reaction. And it is WRONG. Just plain WRONG. Increasing my meds increased my suicidal thoughts by a factor of ten. That is part of what led me to dump my entire regime of meds- most especially anything in the anti-depressant category, the very pills my docs insisted I gobble down like candy. That’s insane. They were driving me insane.