March 4, 2013: My Concussed Family

Almost two months ago – the ominous date 1.13.13, for those who put stock in such things – my son sustained a concussion. I hesitate to say “was given a concussion” or “received a concussion” because that suggests something benevolent, and there is nothing benevolent about a concussion. I had entertained the idea at the time of writing a “concussion diary,” in part such behavior is expected of writers.

(This is unfair, obviously, since no one expects a painter to paint “concussion studies” when their child sustains a concussion, or a dancer to choreograph “The Concussion Dances,” or a songwriter to do The Concussion Album, or Mel Brooks to direct The History of Concussions Part I, or less logically, for an auto-body repairman to do “concussion dent removal.” But when something happens in the life of a writer, people expect the writer to write about it. I always gave writers more credit than to fall into that trap, and readers more respect than to force them to read writers’ attempts to extricate themselves from the trap.)

I didn’t write a concussion diary and my son got better, albeit excruciatingly slowly. He’s a hockey player, and was concussed via a shot to the chops delivered by a player who had already concussed one of my sons’ teammates (and cracked five of his teeth) and broken a collarbone of another teammate over a four-game series. Hockey is one of the strongest, darkest threads running through our family. Hockey, dance, church: Remove those threads and there’s not a lot left – meals, maybe, and the loose, sketchy plaid of a family laid on a loom of love.

Watching my son play hockey is one of the joys of my life. I harbor no illusions about his modest skills. There will be no NHL hockey for him, no college hockey, very probably no high-school hockey. Every game he plays is a gift, and to not have him heal from his ephemeral injury and to have him miss game after game was like watching other people celebrate Christmas and not being allowed to go downstairs.

The redemption story, the finding in every loss a gain to match, is this: He got better. He returned to the ice, a different player in a different role but a player nonetheless.

I remember the redemption story today because several hours ago my daughter was diagnosed with a concussion.

Molly is 16, and a dancer. Not a dance-to-wear-the-costume dancer, not a contest dancer living in that made-up (in more ways than one) alternate universe, but a serious student of dance, of Balanchine and Baryshnikov and the Bolshoi. She was rehearsing a piece – with her best friend, ironically – that required them to enter from different directions with their heads down, like the entrance of the mushrooms to the “Oriental Dance” in Fantasia. They bumped heads. Molly got a headache.

When we came to get her at the dance studio after the hockey games she was sitting on the floor with her dance teacher, Tori, sorting out costumes for an upcoming performance. She looked absolutely, utterly normal.

"I think she's fine," Tori said.

"I just have a little headache," Molly said.

The headache didn’t go away for two days. When the physician’s assistant shined a light in her eyes Molly turned pale, felt dizzy, and had to lie down.

The PA didn’t even bother conducting the concussion test. “She has a concussion,” she concluded quickly. “Bring her back when she feels better and we can do a test.”

So here we are again, delivered accidentally, descending like a box-office bomb into the odd, floating otherworld of the concussion family. Let me try to explain what this world is like.

First, let me give you my concept of a concussion. It’s like your brain getting kicked in the shin, only it has more insidious side effects because it’s your brain and not your shin. You can probably focus in school after getting kicked in the shin. Daylight doesn’t make your shin hurt or your stomach ache or your hands and feet tingle or your head fog over. When you’ve been kicked in the shin there’s very little variance in how your shin feels. Your shin hurts like that guy’s shin hurts, and that guy’s and that guy’s and so on. Assuming you’ve all been kicked in the shin about the same way, the pain in your shins will go away at about the same rate – and if you went to a doctor, they would be able to tell you when your shin would stop hurting. That’s not the case with a concussion.

The reason I stick with the kicked-in-the-shin analogy despite these vast differences is because if you’ve been kicked in the shin solid and hard, it takes a surprising length of time for the pain to vanish. For months afterward you can press on your shin where you were kicked and feel the pain. You’re not incapacitated; you’re inconvenienced. But until the pain goes away you’re not completely healed.

That’s how it is with a concussion, only you are largely incapacitated for a big part of that healing process. Andy had four and a half weeks of forced inactivity. Molly’s sentence is nearly a week, and counting.

Forced inactivity, if the doctors had their way, would involve sitting in a darkened room with no TV or iPod or cell phone or computer or music or books or homework or noises or smells or stimulation of any sort.

(I wonder whether that embargo on stimulation would include thinking, because if I had no access to external stimulation I guarantee I would come up with some cracking internal stimulation. I’d be writing songs and stories and screenplays and books and blogs – and concussion diaries – in my head until I fell asleep. If I was a doctor, and serious about healing someone with a concussion, I’d recommend what my doctor recommended when I had bronchitis: boring movies. I’d think 15 minutes of Heaven’s Gate would flatline anyone’s brain.)

The lack of tangible progress during this healing process is maddening. You can’t peel off the bandage and see how the wound is closing up, or watch the bruise go away, or see range of motion return, or even watch the progress on weekly X-rays. And if the symptoms are ephemeral, as they were with my concussion children, this inchoate process becomes vaguer. My kids had to fish around in their brains for a headache – something they had never had to do before – and if they found one their day was shot, since healing is measured in symptom-free days.

Because it just takes one symptom to shoot a day, progress is measured in minutes and hours. A symptom-free minute has to build on another and another, and then the hours have to make a day, and the days a week; one headache resets the clock.

Negotiating a day with a concussion patient is like watching them run a 24-hour egg-and-spoon race. They’re wobbly but still in the race step after step and minute after minute, and you’re on the sideline cheering them on, louder and more enthusiastically with each step because this is going to be the race – This is going to be the symptom-free day! This is going to be the beginning of the end! -- but then they drop the egg two steps from the finish line and have to start over. Nothing has been accomplished. It’s just another concussion day.