My Story of Healing from Concussions
A couple of years ago, I healed completely from a series of concussions, or mild traumatic brain injuries (TBIs). The following is the story of what happened, and what I learned.
INJURY
Fifteen years ago, a few months after I had begun working as an apprentice electrician, I fell off an eight-foot ladder. I woke up to hear an electrician yelling, “Oh sh_t, there’s blood.” At the hospital I was given attention for skin wounds—was sewn, stapled, and glued—and then sent home. No bones were broken, but I had badly injured a hand and wrist. No mention was made of concussion.
In the days and weeks afterward, as I discharged about how scary the fall had been and worked on the pain and rehabilitation of my hand, I did not notice any symptoms of brain injury and did not think about that aspect of my fall. I did gain important awareness about the danger of working on ladders and have not fallen since.
In 2014, I was rear-ended [hit from behind in a car] at high speed on the highway. I thought I was uninjured until later that evening when I started to have intense headaches and fatigue while teaching my RC class. The next day I left work after a few hours and went to the doctor, where they diagnosed “whiplash” and did a CT scan of my brain. [A CT (computerized tomography) scan combines a series of X-ray images taken from different angles around the body and uses computer processing to create cross-sectional images (slices) of the bones, blood vessels, and soft tissues.]
A CT scan, as well as the conventional MRI [an MRI uses a magnetic field and radio waves to create detailed images of the organs and tissues within the body], is only useful in showing bleeding in the brain, which occurs in a moderate to severe traumatic brain injury. It does not reveal anything in the more common mild TBI.
For about two weeks I slept much more than usual; was unable to work, read, or concentrate; and had headaches and sensitivity to light and sound. Then these symptoms cleared up.
In the summer of 2016, I was again rear-ended on the highway, this time at low speed. I felt my body snap forward, but when I saw there was no damage to the vehicles, I proceeded to work. I couldn’t tell [notice] that I was hurt until evening, when I began having headaches and feeling unusually tired. The next morning I went back to work but felt too weak to get up and down the ladder. So I left, went to the doctor, and then went home.
I assumed, since I had healed in two weeks from a bigger impact, that it would take only days to feel better and was dismayed when that wasn’t the case. How could such a little accident take so long to recover from? (It didn’t help that the insurance system in the United States assigns credibility for compensating auto accident injuries according to the damage done to the vehicles.) Were the symptoms coming from some piece of early distress? Was I giving in [succumbing] to my feelings, being a victim, and so on?
For the next seven months I continued having headaches that increased through the day, and limited stamina for mental work. Most difficult was that sensory input, especially light and sound, became painful and overwhelming as the day went on so that by evening I had to hide out in a dark room, resting or discharging. That limited my life quite a bit. I couldn’t manage the sounds of groups of people in which more than one conversation was happening at a time, so I withdrew from most social events, my daughter’s school, and RC workshops, to name a few things.
DISCHARGE
I did a lot of sessions throughout the whole period—one or more a day, of thirty to forty-five minutes each, whenever I could manage it—and lots and lots of mini-sessions. At the beginning, when I was confident of a quick recovery, I worked mostly on a memory of struggling to breathe soon after birth—that seemed like the earliest event that a problem with a key area of my body would bring up. However, as the difficulties from my injury stretched out, I had to work on fear, disability oppression, and discouragement. It became clear that my early life had scared me deeply about brains. (A Co-Counselor, Jenny Sazama, who had faced several concussions, called it my “scary brain childhood.”) I have an older sister who has a progressive brain disease, and I witnessed lots of epileptic seizures and mental disability from the beginning of my life. And my family are Ashkenazi Jews, a people who have survived terrifying things ontheir wits [by using their minds].
My concussion forced me to face and work on this material [distress] as never before. It seems that after being terrified by what happened to my sister’s brain, I resolved to not let my mind and brain ever falter. Now every day I was faced with things happening in my brain that I could not control or understand. Eventually I got myself to RCCR [Re-evaluation Counseling Community Resources, in Seattle, Washington, USA] and did an Intensive [twenty hours of one-way Re-evaluation Counseling, for a fee] on this material—which was hard, but useful, to face.
I also had to keep working on confusion and fighting for perspective. Brain injuries are confusing. The symptoms and what triggers them change, and there’s no formula for how or why. Both the physical struggle and what it restimulates happen in your brain, and it’s hard to tell [distinguish] one from the other in a given moment. And perspectives from medical professionals vary widely as to what’s happening and why, and how to approach it.
MEDICAL SEARCH
Although concussion has been getting a lot of attention in the medical world recently, it is not well understood, and there is no standard method for assessing or measuring it empirically. A neurologist who specializes in the area told me, “We don’t understand what’s happening here.” It is accepted that the majority—I heard eighty percent—of concussions resolve within a couple of weeks. The other twenty percent are called “post-concussion syndrome.” The word “syndrome” is always a flag that something is not well understood.
I went to lots of doctors and alternative medical providers, listened to what they had to say, discharged, and kept trying things. I changed my diet and took various supplements. For a long time, the perspective I’d heard from an osteopath was the one that made the most sense to me: that rest was the key.
Resting the brain is a huge challenge, given the requirements of life, and for months I took it as my key challenge. I reduced, as much as possible, the amount of reading, e-mail, and computer work I did. I asked for help for myself and my family. Friends brought us meals. The osteopath taught me that being in nature activates the parasympathetic nervous system, which is also key for healing. I developed a regimen of taking long hikes in the nearby woods most days of the week.
Resting as much as possible made the most sense because I was experiencing fatigue in my brain and needing to sleep more, and it seemed logical that my brain needed to rest to devote resource to healing. However, as the months went by and I couldn’t tell that all the resting was making any difference, I kept wondering if it was the right approach. I kept discharging discouragement and trying things.
My breakthrough came when I found a book on a Co-Counselor’s bed stand called The Brain’s Way of Healing. It was written by Norman Doidge. Doidge has become a key spokesperson for “neuroplasticity,” the current model in neuroscience for brain healing.
For more than a century doctors assumed that the brain couldn’t heal because it does not, for the most part, grow new neurons to replace ones that die. In the last generation, scientists have understood that the brain has a vast capacity to heal through rewiring—building new neural pathways to replace lost or damaged ones. But much of the medical world is stuck in the old paradigm. The book documents instances of people healing their brains, with the help of practitioners, using touch, sound, electricity, and thinking. I recommend this book to everyone: it offers a hopeful perspective that much is possible for such things as Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s, multiple sclerosis, and more. I started to use it as my guide and to search for help along the lines that the book described.
A CLINIC IN UTAH
It described a clinic in Utah [USA] that had developed a unique approach to helping people with the long-term effects of concussion. Eventually I contacted the clinic and initiated getting treated there. In the week of treatment, I was able to completely heal my brain!
This clinic applies a particular kind of imaging technology called “functional” MRI, otherwise mostly used for research. It makes images of the brain over time, while the brain is working, and shows how much blood each part is drawing. Using it, they map how the injury has affected the brain. Some areas are under activated—not doing their share of the work—while others are doing extra work to compensate. They think this reflects the functioning that was necessary in the brief period of the injury, when some parts of the brain were inflamed or otherwise physically damaged and other parts needed to take over their function. The brain can get caught in an “inefficient” way of functioning after the physical challenge is gone.
Once they have pinpointed the under-activated areas, they spend the rest of the week giving the patient cognitive challenges, to push his or her brain in exactly these spots. They call it “boot camp”—five hours a day of various brain challenges, such as doing memory puzzles, playing computer games, taking quizzes while riding a bike, or hitting lighted buttons on a board. I had no idea I could work that hard with my brain!
I found the process very restimulating. I spent hours discharging before and after my hours at the clinic. It felt scary and unbearable to keep pushing my brain like that and to spend so much time at the places where I couldn’t make it do what was asked of it.
DISCHARGE AFTER HEALING
By the end of the week, the symptoms of concussion I had lived with for months were completely gone. It seemed too good to believe—I had never experienced such a dramatic “cure.” No one I knew had healed a concussion so completely and quickly. My sessions in the days and weeks that followed were to catch up to this dramatic change. I found it, once again, scary. I apparently have a key [distress] recording about brains. There were difficult feelings to face.
Within a week or so I had returned to full activity. I actually feel that my brain is working more sharply than it did before—at least since the fifteen years following the original ladder fall.
TWO YEARS LATER
In the last two years, I have continued to have full functioning of my brain. I even had a couple of accidents in which I hit my head, followed by a day or two of concussion symptoms, and I recovered fully each time! A number of RCers I know, and some I don’t, have been to the clinic since I went—and as far as I know they have all have had significant recoveries.
A number of Co-Counselors have asked why discharge itself shouldn’t be enough to heal a concussion. The way I think about this is that it’s like a muscle that’s been injured enough to atrophy. If you don’t do a program of rehabilitation that focuses on regenerating the lost muscle, no end of sessions by themselves will make the muscle grow back.
This experience has left me much more hopeful about what is possible in healing our bodies—given sufficient discharge, resource, and persistence.
Berkeley, California, USA
Alter-My Story of Healing from Concussions—counseling practice—PT 196, July 2019