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.