Peggy K. Transcript

 Hi! I am Peggy Khayamian, and I live in San Diego, California. I have a 23-year-old daughter who suffered a severe concussion when she was a sophomore in high school during cheerleading practice. And at that time I had no idea what a concussion really could do, and how bad it could get.

We always heard that you either had to pass out in order to have a severe concussion, or, you had to have multiple concussions and then really see the consequences. But unfortunately with ours, um, she wasn’t able to do anything. She stayed in bed for about three months and we had to pull her out of school.

She lost probably all of her friends, because she wasn’t able to do anything. She couldn’t read, couldn’t write, couldn’t comprehend. She would tell me, Mom, I see the words and they are words. I know they’re words, but when I put them together, they don’t make sense. Light bothered her. Sound bothered her.

She couldn’t control her emotions. She was up and down crying, laughing, screaming, getting frustrated, agitated, um, constant headaches, dizziness, nausea, all day, 24/7. It was pretty crazy how we went from one doctor to the next, from one concussion clinic to another concussion clinic. Probably saw over four neurologists, which all told us that there wasn’t anything they could do.

There wasn’t a bleed in her brain. They couldn’t see anything. Her coach at school actually told her that this was all in her head and there was nothing wrong with her. We went through a lot, and I decided that I wasn’t going to get, take no for an answer and start finding alternative therapies to help her.

And that’s what we did. We started seeing physical therapists, occupational therapists, uh, speech therapists, vision. We did vision therapy, acupuncture, holistic chiropractors, nutritionists and everything that was out of the box, we tried. And started seeing a difference, started seeing that it was possible for her to feel better.

She slowly went back to school and was able to graduate with her peers, but continued, probably had three or four appointments a day from one therapy to the next, and she worked hard at home. She continued all the exercises that they had given her, no matter which therapy it was. Um. We also, uh, with different doctors started a lot of different vitamins and food.

She went completely vegan for about three years, which helped tremendously bring down the inflammation, and not a lot of people talk about nutrition. So, within all this and going through everything that we had gone through, that’s where we decided that we had to do something to be able to help other people and raise awareness.

Help them understand that they’re not alone, let them know that there are other therapies and other doctors that can help besides just the ones that you go to as a neurologist or the concussion clinic, and you are able to feel better. It’s, it’s an uphill battle because you might be able to feel better for a little while and then go back and have a relapse, but don’t give up.

That’s like the biggest thing that I can tell everybody. One therapy might help one person, and it could do nothing for another person. Every concussion is like a snowflake. They’re all different, just like we are, we’re different people, and everybody has a different path of healing.

So not two are identical. So that’s where we have to try everything, every single therapy that you can possibly think of you need to try to see which one will help you. And that’s what we have done with Beyond Concussion. Our nonprofit organization website has a list of all the therapies that we have tried.

There might be things out there that we haven’t tried there, or the ones that we have listed might not help everybody, but that’s, this is our personal experience. Everything that we have done, all the research that I did, and all the therapies that my daughter tried. Everything is on the website for people to be able to have access to.

All of this probably took me an entire year to find and I wanted it all in one place. For anyone that has suffered a concussion and has prolonged symptoms, has symptoms that will not go away, I wanted them to be able to just with a click of a button, see a list of all kinds of alternative therapies that they can try to help their symptoms.

The two biggest things is don’t give up and try different therapies to see which one works for you.