I'm 17 years old, in grade 12 now. I had a concussion in grade 10, when I was 15. It was early on in the basketball season, so it was in September. It was the second week of school. It was just the high school basketball team. I've played sports all my life, and I've been on travel soccer teams since I was seven years old.
It happened during a basketball game. It was a loose ball, and a girl and I were fighting over the ball, and she was much stronger than me. We both fell to the floor, and my head went first. I hit the floor first, on my head, and instantly I felt the impact. All of a sudden I had a severe headache. I didn't pass out or anything, and I didn't throw up, but I could barely feel the whole right side of my face.
Moving forward, my coach ran onto the court. She herself had experience with concussions, so she knew how it felt, and she said that she'd never seen someone hit their head so hard in her life. She immediately took me out of the gym. We were at a different high school, so she put me in a classroom and waited for someone to come and get me so I could go to the hospital.
My aunt was at the game. She brought me to the hospital, and it was the same thing. They said, “Take a few days, a few weeks off until you have no symptoms and you'll be fine.” The doctor recommended two weeks off and then I should be good to go back to school and stuff. Most of the time I just lay in bed. I had severe headache symptoms. I was dizzy a lot. I couldn't remember a lot. Bright lights and music bothered me.
I lay in bed for two weeks and after that nothing was getting better. We went back and they suggested that we go to our local physio place. They had a concussion protocol, a treatment plan. We went there and they did an impact test, which was online, so I had to answer questions online about how I felt, what I was doing most of the day to make time pass, and stuff like that. I actually completed that. I passed that, and I got cleared to play sports after that.
That was probably about a month after I got my concussion, but I knew something still wasn't right. I didn't feel right. I always felt down, so we went back to the doctor. He scheduled an MRI just to make sure. Obviously with an MRI you can't tell if you've had a concussion or not, but it was just to make sure that everything was structurally okay. Obviously nothing came back, and then he suggested that I go see Dr. Lemmo, who is a functional neurologist in Windsor. No one had really heard of him before. He didn't know himself, really, who Dr. Lemmo was. He said that a few of his patients had a good experience with him.
We went to see Dr. Lemmo. At the original appointment he made me do something like a brain scan, almost. He would put these glasses on my head and I'd have to follow a red target on the wall. This was about two or three months after my concussion, when I went to see him, and my eyes would almost flicker up and down. You couldn't see it when you looked at me, but during the scans, mom was sitting behind the computer, and she could see my eyes flicker. I got really dizzy really quickly, and that's why. My eyes would flicker and I wouldn't notice it. I couldn't control myself, but I knew I was doing it.
He made up a treatment plan for me. I was out of school at that point for about four months. We got this app on the iPad and I would just do these exercises every single day, three times a day, to try to get my function back. After about the six-month mark, I started having mental health issues. I went through depression, anxiety. I lost 10 pounds. We didn't know what to do. Mom actually brought me to the hospital at one point because we didn't know what to do after a while. It's not that I didn't know why, but I couldn't help myself. I would try everything and I wasn't getting better. It was six months at this point.
Closer to the end, we actually spoke to Dr. Lemmo about my mental health issues, and he said that he does see these issues and severe depression a lot in athletes with concussion. I wasn't going to school. I wasn't hanging out with my friends—I didn't want to. Most of the things I wanted to do would involve getting a headache if I did that. He said that he saw that in a lot of patients, so I went to see a psychiatrist to try to uplift me, to help me get through that.
After about seven months, I was out of school, so I missed the entire first semester of my grade 10 year. I'm still working today to get those credits back, but my school has been really helpful with that. We have a student assistance centre in my school, where they deal with all kinds of students, whether it's for mental health issues, concussions, injuries, learning disabilities. They've just been really helpful. I'm finishing the last grade that I need this semester, so I have all my credits to graduate this year.
Without the help of Dr. Lemmo, I don't think I would be okay.