The kids are getting better, but it’s slow. It’s been two weeks for Molly – about the time you’d expect her to start to show improvement (understanding that these are concussions, every one is different, and the experience of one is absolutely not the experience of any more than one). Andy is closing in on one week, and his headaches are almost gone, but his concussion never seemed bad to start with. Just bad enough.
I say these things with the understanding that I will be proven wrong. A mild, slight, intermittent headache that persists for three weeks is still a headache. There’s really no difference in treatment or recovery time if you spend three weeks with an occasional twinge or three weeks dreading light and sound, seeing stars and feeling queasy. Molly and Andy could reach a state of almost-thereness and then plateau for days, weeks, months, or they could be back in action in a week. There’s simply no way of knowing.
Of all the ways concussions mess with modern medicine, this might be the most galling. What we expect from modern medicine, above all, is certainty. We may not be any better able to treat Lou Gehrig’s Disease than when Lou Gehrig first stumbled going for a ground ball, but by God, we’re hot stuff at knowing it when we see it.
And once we know it, our doctors can dish out a pretty firm prognosis. Look here. See that? Surgery can fix it. We’ll cut here, pull this out, put this in, shunt this down through there, close you up, wheel you out, and you’ll be good as new in three weeks. Give or take 15 minutes.
Or not: Look here. See that? You have six months without surgery, four years with chemo, maybe 10 with chemo and surgery. It’ll progress until you have to be institutionalized. Five years. A year. Nine months. Three months. Say your goodbyes now.
No matter how it breaks, we know. We know and we can move on. Get the recliner ready. A first-floor bedroom. A handrail for the bathroom. A cemetery plot. A nursery. An ambi-van. A minivan.
Concussions have none of that. We don’t know when you’ll get better. You tell us. When you think you’re better we’ll give you some tests. They may show something, but they may not. We’re not sure. It’s the brain. We don’t know much about the brain.
Frustration over medicine’s inability to divine our future is a recent malady, like texter’s thumb. There was an ad a while back – for GE Healthcare, I think – that traced the history of medicine in the form of its ability to diagnose the cause of a stomachache from primitive man to today’s resonating imaging thingamabobs. The point was that we’ve become much more adept at figuring out why we’re wrong, and that’s a good thing.
Of course it’s a good thing. Any person whose definition of cures has progressed past an onion on the ear on a lock of hair buried under a new moon can see it’s a good thing. However, this good thing in the course of becoming a good thing has destroyed our tolerance for equivocality in medicine. An indefinite timeline for an injury marked by indistinct symptoms is unacceptable to modern patients (and modern practitioners, too, I’d imagine), which is why I think many people with concussions just resort to lying and move on. If medical science isn’t going to tell me I’m okay, I’m going to decide. And I’m okay … though I do sorta have this headache.
Ann and I can knock out a dead-solid imitation of people handling the uncertainty of a concussion, but only because we’ve done it before. Molly and Andy #2 are our second and third children, concussion-wise. Similarly, Andy is handling his second concussion better than his first, because he knows what’s coming and because he’s out from the shadow of hockey. He’s going to run junior-high track, but big deal. The difference between playing youth hockey and running long distances for a junior-high track team is the difference between Marquette University and Marquette Elementary.
Molly is getting better at dealing with not getting better at the rate she thinks she should get better, but that may be the toughest aspect of any of the recoveries. Andy never gives a sense of being ready to be done; as I’ve said before, concussions play to his inherent indolence. Molly is so over her concussion, only she’s not over it.
And so it continues. The end may be in sight, or not. But we’re ready for whatever comes our way. Or not.
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