Childhood Concussions Take 2!

Hello! Welcome to my second blog! My name is Cacy Thomas and if you have not read my first blog you can click here to do so. If you have, thanks for coming back! I’m just going to do a quick recap of my last post because I know it’s been a while.

• My blogs are especially for my You and the World english project

• My You and the World project for english class is Awareness and Prevention of Concussions in Young Athletes.

• I have chosen this topic because I have had 3 concussions at the age of 12. These head injuries ended my athletic career in contact sports and forced me to go through 2 years of emotional and physical rehabilitation.

• It is imperative to spread this information out so that kids are not experiencing the same things I did.

To continue my childhood concussion adventure, I did some research and am still pursuing to do more. I received a link from my English teacher, Alexa Dunn, on concussions and helmets from cbsnews.com. I was really interested in the experiment shown on the web page as well as the results. This was helpful in enhancing my knowledge on the subject because even though I knew helmets did not do much to protect people from concussions, I did not know which helmets had the best results. I also did not know how helpful they would actually be in providing support for the brain. In my own personal journey I made a survey concerning concussion awareness. If you would like to help further my research you can take it here. I am also currently trying to set up interviews to collect more information. However if you would like some more information about head injury awareness in soccer, please click this link to read a summary of a concussion symposium I spoke at as well as 16 year-old Kim Zeffert, former Philadelphia Flyers captain Keith Primeau, and former professional soccer player Taylor Twellman.

The results of my survey were a little bit surprising. I asked what symptoms were caused by concussions with the choices, Headaches, Dizziness, Hallucinations, Fatigue, Possible death while sleeping the same day as the injury was received, Nausea, Extreme Hunger, and Sensitivity to light or noise. The majority of people who took it said that extreme hunger, hallucinations, and possible death caused by sleeping were symptoms. This just shows how uninformed a lot of people are about concussion side effects. Also many survey takers were confused about the definition of this injury. The most accurate response was,

“A bruise to the brain, often caused by impact.”

Others said things anywhere from, “head trauma,” to, “when your head or skull is badly damaged.” Likewise I was amazed just at the fact that just about half of the answerers said that concussions become less serious as you get older. No matter how you look at it a concussion is brain damage at any age and obviously brain damage is extremely serious. This research added to my understanding of this subject because it made me realize how much people are actually informed, and not many are informed at all. I am wondering how we can prevent concussions and what will have the biggest impact to really drive people to spread awareness.

The final part of my 9th grade You and the World project is being an agent of change. This means we go out somewhere into the world and help either informing others about our issue, or doing volunteer work to help solve it. For being an agent of change I am planning to make a presentation about information regarding childhood concussions along with my story and struggles. I will present this to my school community at Science Leadership Academy.