Evidence of meeting #2 for Subcommittee on Sports-Related Concussions in Canada in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was know.
A video is available from Parliament.
7:05 p.m.
Mr. Peter Fonseca (Mississauga East—Cooksville, Lib.)
Thank you, Mr. Dryden.
To conclude with the members' questions for the witness, we'll have Ms. Hardcastle from the NDP for three minutes.
November 21st, 2018 / 7:05 p.m.
Windsor—Tecumseh, NDP
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Earlier, you posed a voice—I guess it would be “we” or some other voice—saying, “Tell me what you're doing in your game.” I guess it's a matter of asking or insisting. Why do you think we're so hesitant to talk about a regulatory approach?
7:05 p.m.
Author, As an Individual
I don't even know whether it's.... It's regulatory if you have the authority over regulation. The power that you have, more than anything, is the power of visibility. What happens—and it goes back to that quote from House of Cards—is that whoever decides, that's the person you want to listen to; that's the person you want to ask. You want to know their why in it. You may have heard a little bit of a why up until now. You may not have heard more than a little bit of a why, but you have anticipated that there must be more of it that you haven't heard yet. Now you have a chance to actually ask. Oftentimes what happens—you've experienced it and I've experienced it—is that the answer is that there wasn't more of a why. Things are as they are just because they are. There isn't anything deeper than that.
You have the chance to ask those questions of those decision-makers. That's when it starts to get pretty interesting. Otherwise, as you know, you're always, as members of Parliament, criticized for dodging the question. At times it's a skill that everybody needs to have because sometimes the question is unfair. But sometimes the question is fair. If somebody tries to dodge a fair question, then you want to have the chance to say, excuse me, you're dodging a very fair question, and if you continue to dodge, what's going to happen is that people are going to see that you're dodging a fair question and that's going to say as much as any answer you would give.
You have that chance in this.
7:05 p.m.
Mr. Peter Fonseca (Mississauga East—Cooksville, Lib.)
Thank you.
That concludes our hearings with Mr. Dryden.
We want to thank you for being our first witness. Thank you for your testimony and your answers. On behalf of all the members, we want to thank you for your advocacy, as this committee works to make our playing fields that much safer.
We will be listening to athletes, many in our next hour. We will be hearing from some of those storytellers, some of those amateur athletes who are going to share with us their stories, what it was like, and what it's meant to them in terms of their lives and living with concussion.
7:05 p.m.
Author, As an Individual
I think you have a really interesting and important route ahead. It's hard to know now how important a road it is, but I think you'll discover that along the way, and it is.
Thank you very much.
7:05 p.m.
Mr. Peter Fonseca (Mississauga East—Cooksville, Lib.)
Thank you, Mr. Dryden.
Members, you would have seen that we have a couple of motions that we wanted you to take a look at. There's one on the budget and one on our communications plan. We'll be able to discuss this at the conclusion of our hearings today. If you could just take a look at it, we'll be able to go over that at the end of our hearings if you have any questions.
We'll suspend right now.
7:10 p.m.
Mr. Peter Fonseca (Mississauga East—Cooksville, Lib.)
We're going to reconvene the meeting.
I think some people are just getting some autographs and some pictures still with Mr. Dryden. Just having heard Mr. Dryden, now is an opportunity for us to hear from those athletes who have gone through concussion about what their experiences have been.
We want to thank you for being witnesses, and your parents for being able to come forward to this committee. It will make a big difference in terms of our understanding of how we can make things better. Thank you so much.
We have Sharra Hodgins and Carly Hodgins, and we also have Rachel Lord and Chris Lord.
Rachel, would you like to start?
7:10 p.m.
Rachel Lord As an Individual
My name is Rachel Lord. I'm 20 years old. I'm from Mississauga, Ontario. Should I start with the story? Okay.
I play soccer. I got my concussion in 2015, when I was 16 years old. I got my concussion at a soccer practice. We were just doing a scrimmage at the end of the practice and I took a header off a goalie kick from about three feet in front of me or so. The ball knocked me back and I fell to the ground. I didn't lose consciousness or anything like that. My coach told me to get up and keep playing, so I did.
I went on, and went to school the next day. I continued to go to practice. I had practice six days a week. I continued to do that and completely ignored the symptoms I had: dizziness, headaches, throwing up and everything like that.
I ignored it for about a week, until one day when I was at school I went to the bathroom and realized I couldn't function anymore. I called my dad. He came and picked me up. I went home and never went back to school for the next four months or so.
After about the first week of ignoring the symptoms, I went to my family doctor. My family doctor asked about the incident. She asked if I lost consciousness, which I didn't. She said, “You'll be fine. Take Tylenol. Take Advil. Take some rest and go back to school when you're ready. You'll be fine.” I went home, and then things got worse and worse. Eventually, we went to the hospital. At the hospital, they said, “It's a concussion. You'll be fine.” They gave me some pain medication and sent me home.
They put me on Tylenol 3, which I did not react well to. A couple of days later, I went back to the hospital and talked to a different doctor, who said that I didn't have a concussion because I didn't lose consciousness. He just said, “Go to school; you'll be fine. You can keep playing and everything. You'll get over it.” That didn't work so well. I continued to have really bad symptoms. I couldn't read. Holding a conversation was hard. I essentially just lay in bed for weeks.
A teammate of mine had also experienced a concussion. She was my goalie. She went to a concussion clinic at the University of Toronto. Her mom recommended that we go there, so I did. That helped a lot. There was a concussion therapist who worked with massages and pressures points and stuff like that. She was ultimately the one who declared that I had a really serious concussion, along with whiplash and all of that.
I continued to go to that concussion clinic for the next five or six months. I saw her twice a week, and she did massage therapy for the rest of...while I had symptoms.
My concussion happened early in March 2015. When I went back to school, they had a really good protocol where my teachers didn't expect me to do any homework or anything like that, obviously, because I couldn't. I was exempt from all my school. I didn't write final exams in my grade 11 year. I just got my midterm marks as my final marks in the classes I was taking.
Moving forward with that, I still experience a lot of symptoms related to the concussion. I'm in my third year of university now, and I get enlarged font on my exams because I still have a lot of trouble reading. I get my own private, separate room so I can turn the light down and focus, without the distractions of the professor walking up and down or the people beside me. I just get a lot of accommodations at school now.
7:15 p.m.
Mr. Peter Fonseca (Mississauga East—Cooksville, Lib.)
Thank you very much, Ms. Lord. Thank you for your courage, for being here and for that testimony.
We're going to move over now to Ms. Carly Hodgins.
7:15 p.m.
Carly Hodgins As an Individual
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.
7:20 p.m.
Mr. Peter Fonseca (Mississauga East—Cooksville, Lib.)
Thank you, Carly.
Thank you, Rachel and Carly, for your courage, for being here with us today and being witnesses and sharing your stories, and thank you to your parents who are here accompanying you. They've also gone through this journey with you.
I know the members will have questions for you now. They may also ask the parents some questions, if they are open to that, in terms of what it was like and what it's like today going through this with their kids who have gone through concussion.
We're going to start with Madam Fortier, for the Liberals.
7:20 p.m.
Ottawa—Vanier, Lib.
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Thank you very much for your testimony and, as the chair said, for having the courage to appear here. This helps us better understand those who are living with a concussion. Hearing people talk about it will enable us to see what we can do.
You live with that concussion, but before you got it, did you know that it could happen as you played your sport? Did you know anyone who had had a concussion?
Ms. Lord, could you begin?
7:25 p.m.
As an Individual
It was back in 2015 when I had my concussion. I just played soccer. I loved it. It was my whole life. I played it six times a week. My life revolved around soccer, so I didn't really think about the consequences it could have.
I tore my MCL, but that healed itself. It was fine. I never really thought about how if I took a ball to the head too hard, here I'd be, four years later, really struggling to read a piece of paper in school. I never really thought about that. If you hurt your knee, you're going to have some trouble running, but I never really thought about how if I hurt my head I wouldn't be able to function outside of soccer.
It's very different. The injury is different. If you hurt your knee, you can still go to school. It's completely separate. When I hurt my head, I couldn't go to school. I couldn't see my friends. I couldn't do anything. I couldn't leave my house, essentially. I couldn't even talk to my family members without having this headache where I would have to walk away and go and lie down in a dark room. I never really thought about the consequences of a head injury. It was more like “I don't want to hurt my knee because then I can't run and I'll be out of soccer for a couple of weeks.” I never really thought about my head.
As I mentioned before, my goalie had a concussion, but to me it was, yes, she's a goalie, and she kind of dives right into the ground. It made sense to me that a goalie would get a concussion. I was a centre midfielder. If I was going to get an injury, I thought it would be to my ankle or my foot. That's kind of what I thought about it. I wasn't worried about concussion until it happened.
7:25 p.m.
As an Individual
I did know what you can get from a concussion. When I was 11 years old, I had a minor concussion. I got hit in the head and sat out for two weeks. I had a headache for a couple of days and then I went back to playing sports. I didn't know about the severity that it could lead to. I didn't know anything about mental health issues, losing out on school, and not having the social aspect that a teenager should. I knew some of the consequences but not to any extent.
7:25 p.m.
Ottawa—Vanier, Lib.
Knowing that you are now in a position where you have a story, is there something you would change or suggest or want to share with us that we might want to look at? In the course of our study, we'll look at a lot of things, but would you have something that you want us to really remember from your story? Also, maybe, what kinds of changes could we bring about? What would that be?
7:25 p.m.
As an Individual
For me personally, most of the problem was that when I fell to the ground, my coach was like, “Get up. Keep going.” It was like, “You're fine. Keep playing. We have a game going on.” I think a lot of the issues stemmed from the fact that I got a hit to the head, fell to the ground, and got up and continued to play that night as if it was nothing.
Then, moving forward, I was back at soccer the next day, even though I'm sure that if anybody had looked at my eyes they would have been able to see that something was wrong. It's not to say that my coach was a horrible person, because he wasn't, but I feel like more should have been done in my coach's eyes to say, “She's not okay and she needs to rest so that this isn't going to be an ongoing problem.”
If I had done the concussion protocol right away or gone to the hospital that night, I'm not sure that I'd have the same symptoms moving forward. Because I kept pushing myself, kept going, and didn't take the rest I needed initially, that could have had an effect.
7:25 p.m.
As an Individual
I agree with Rachel on that one, too. Everyone knows what a concussion is, but no one knows what it could lead to, and I feel like getting what it could lead to out there and telling people stories and showing what could happen.
Even if you think it's not going to happen to you, you could always get hit in the head. I would have thought that, out of all the sports I play, soccer would have been the one, and I got hurt in basketball. Anything can happen in all the sports and you never know if it will be to you or someone you know and it can really affect them.
7:30 p.m.
Mr. Peter Fonseca (Mississauga East—Cooksville, Lib.)
Thank you.
We're going to move over to the Conservatives now with Mr. Kitchen.
7:30 p.m.
Souris—Moose Mountain, CPC
Thank you, ladies, for being here today.
I really appreciate your telling your story because it must be pretty scary in so many ways to be in front of us, not knowing what you'll experience.
I will quickly tell you that I was a victim of a hit and run by a drunk driver and was left in a coma. I had a fairly significant head injury and issues that related to concussion. Often I found that it's easier to talk to someone who knows because concussions are invisible; people don't see that. People you think are your friends ask why you're so depressed, why you're looking so down, and that has a big impact on how you work.
I'm wondering if you experienced a lot of that from your friends as you recovered. The recovery process takes a long time. Should that be put out there to educate your fellow students so they can understand that?
7:30 p.m.
As an Individual
Definitely. A concussion protocol went on at my school. It started in June, and I would try to go back for my first class of the day and see how I would react to that kind of stimulation. I was out of school for five months, and I didn't see the people I would see every day. People thought I had transferred schools and were surprised I still went there.
At home all I could think about was how badly I wanted to go back to school, and that's not a normal thought for a grade 11 student. I don't think you want to go to school. Then when you go back to school people are surprised you still go there. They have no idea what you've been going through. I think that definitely has an effect.
A lot of people, especially people who don't play sports, wouldn't know what a concussion is like, and even people who do play sports who haven't had a concussion wouldn't know what the symptoms are like. I feel it's one of the things you don't know how to relate to, or what someone is going through unless you've experienced it yourself.
7:30 p.m.
As an Individual
I had similar experiences. I'd go back to school and people would question why I was gone, or they would think that I just didn't want to go to school, or I was lazy and didn't want to come. Since my concussion, if other students got hit in the head they would ask me whom I went to see or if I had any advice on how to get better or what they should do or whether the school was helpful.
I've had both sides of it. Students made comments about my not coming to school, and then when I came back they'd say, “Oh, you're still here” or that I was magically better after a while. Then I've had the other side, where it's like, “I just got hit in the head. I know you've been there. Can you help me get through it?” I've had both sides of the spectrum.