Head Games Christopher Nowinski, The Drummond Publishing Group (page 2 of 4) Page 2 of 4

After a Dudley Death Drop (or “3D”) sent me smashing through the table to the great joy of the crowd, I crawled backstage and found another place to lie down. The headache was much, much worse. This time I saw a different doctor. Again, I was told that I might have suffered a concussion the day before, which could explain the pain. The doctor said he couldn’t be sure because he hadn’t been there the night before. The pain went away after another hour or so, and I felt well enough to leave the building.

After the match, I headed to New York City. I was scheduled to wrestle on Monday Night RAW at Madison Square Garden the next night, in front of millions of people. I had no idea that it would be my last televised wrestling match ever. And not even a good one at that. I looked so sluggish when I arrived at the arena that two WWE agents, Fit Finlay and Dean Malenko, who were aware of my head problems, changed my match, over my objection, into something quick and simple—with no chance of head trauma. I survived the match without incident.

As a former college football player and a guy who couldn’t shake recurring post-concussion syndrome, I couldn’t stop thinking about all those high school football players who had died in 2003 from brain injuries. I continued to scour newspapers and the Internet for similar stories, and over time I began to see a pattern.

Jacob Snakenberg was a freshman football player at Grandview High School in Denver. During a game, Jacob mysteriously collapsed after what appeared to be a routine tackle that did not involve contact to the head. He died two days later, and a neurosurgeon who operated on him said he died from a recent blow to the head. In the days following his death, his friends revealed that Jacob had been suffering from headaches during the previous week, following a big hit to his head in his last game. His father told the press he had specifically asked Jacob if his head hurt during that week, as he was concerned after watching Jacob take that blow, but Jacob had denied it.

Jacob’s story reminded me of something I hadn’t thought about in ten years. During my sophomore year of high school, I played for a coach who had lost his own son to a head injury on the football field. I vaguely remember my former athletic trainer used to mention it every preseason. I called him to get more details. “Kurt Thyreen got a concussion in a game. He didn’t tell anyone,” Hersey High School trainer Hal Hilmer explained. “We later found out from his friends that his head hurt so much that week that he couldn’t play his trumpet in band class. No one bothered to tell us or the coaches. He took the field for the next game, took a hit to the head that ruptured a blood vessel, and passed away.”

There seemed to be something extremely dangerous about getting hit in the head again shortly after suffering a concussion. I read that 16-year-old Californian Michael Pennerman, a cousin of 1994 Heisman Trophy winner Rashaan Salaam, fell unconscious on the sideline after being tackled during a football game. He had walked off the field on his own, gone over to his coach, and told him, “It feels like somebody is pulling me to the ground.” He then collapsed, and died the next day. There was suspicion that he may have suffered a concussion earlier in the game, both due to his behavior in his last minute of consciousness and because his stepfather said he was taking hits all game long.

Adam Melka, a 15-year-old linebacker at Arrowhead High School in Wisconsin and the son of a former University of Wisconsin football player, became dizzy and started vomiting on the sideline after a hit to the head. He was rushed to the hospital and underwent emergency brain surgery. His coaches and teammates were puzzled because the last hit he took wasn’t an especially violent one. When Adam’s father Jim rushed back from a hunting trip, he asked to see the game tape. While he agreed that the final hit wasn’t anything special, he noticed that Adam took an extraordinary hit earlier in the game that left him visibly shaken. “You could see him go onto his knees and bend backwards,” Mr. Melka said. Adam survived, but has a long recovery ahead of him.

These articles introduced to me a new term, second impact syndrome (SIS), which describes the severe brain injury that athletes can suffer after they are hit in the head again soon after suffering a concussion.

The fact that I wasn’t familiar with SIS concerned me. After my head injury in Hartford, I ignored my headache, and participated in four more matches over the next few weeks.

I began to wonder just how many kids were playing through headaches like mine, or Kurt Thyreen’s, or Jacob Snakenberg’s, so I went to the Harvard Medical School library and started exploring the stacks. I found a medical study that recorded the number of concussions that high school football players suffer. The author was appointed to the National Football League’s committee on mild traumatic brain injury, so I assumed he was the best. He collected data from athletic trainers, and reported that approximately 4 percent of football players suffer one concussion in a given season.8 After having played the game for eight years, and reading those articles about the SIS kids, I was under the impression that football players didn’t always tell trainers when their heads hurt. “The real number is probably a little higher,” I thought, as I continued researching.

I came upon another study that focused on how many football players get headaches in games. Doctors found that 19 percent of players suffered a headache during or after their most recent game, and 90 percent suffered a headache during or after at least one game that season. If I compared these two studies directly, they told me that approximately 1 out of every 50 headaches was caused by a concussion, and the other 49 were caused by something else. While I knew that having a headache didn’t necessarily mean a concussion had occurred, those numbers didn’t add up. Yet without more information I still couldn’t be sure exactly how many concussions kids on the football field were suffering.

This excerpt is provided as a courtesy to BrainLine by The Drummond Publishing Group. Any commercial or noncommercial duplication, including in electronic form, is strictly prohibited by the publisher and by applicable law. www.chrisnowinski.com.

 Comments [3]