Jaimie G. Transcript
My name is Jaimie Gant. I am a speech language pathologist. I’m the owner and lead SLP at Avec Therapy Services in Tampa, Florida. And I am a person who has experienced a concussion and now treats clients who have had concussions.
So I first got introduced to concussions with my younger brother. He’s four years younger than me, and he experienced a concussion when he was probably around four years old, so I had to be about eight. We were playing outside at our pool, and he slipped on our pool deck and just head over heels landed on his head. He woke up and immediately started vomiting. I had no idea what was going on. My mom is a nurse, thank goodness. She took him to the hospital. He was diagnosed with a concussion.
Fast forward. Just shy of 10 years later, I wrecked my car in high school. I didn’t realize it at the time, but realize now as an adult that I too have had a concussion.
A few years later, I go to school, I become a speech pathologist. I don’t necessarily know at the time that speech pathologists treat concussion. But I started my fellowship, which is the first year outside of your university graduate master’s program. Speech language pathologists go through a year fellowship.
And in my fellowship, I worked at a neurological outpatient center at a hospital, and I started receiving a few concussion patients. While I was there, I had a lot of more severe brain injuries on my caseload, and those people seemed very easy to treat. But I kept getting these mild traumatic brain injuries, and I was like, how do I help you guys? You’re passing all these tests, but you’re telling me that something’s still not right. You can’t remember things, but you’re acing all my memory questions. I’m like, how do I figure this out?
It truly kept me up at night so many nights because I’m like, how am I gonna help these people? So that is really what got me as a clinical professional into concussion management. I was determined to help these people—people just like me—trying to go to their jobs, and something happened, and now they’re telling me they can’t even get through the day.
I think what most people are really surprised to learn is that speech language pathologists play a very important role in concussion recovery. After someone experiences a concussion, I think one of the most common physical symptoms is headache, dizziness. A lot of people tell me that they’re experiencing those. And not always are they realizing that they’re having these cognitive communication changes as well.
That might look like difficulty paying attention, slower processing speed, problems with memory, organization, planning things, or even trouble just coming up with a little bit of words here and there. Maybe not something that the average person you’re talking to would even notice, but you, as the person who’s experiencing it, are like, why am I having so much trouble coming up with words? And that’s what all these clients were coming to me saying.
So it’s something that people describe to me a lot as a feeling of brain fog. And if you’re listening to this and you’ve had a concussion, I’m sure you are totally on par with exactly what I’m explaining—but your brain just isn’t keeping up the way it used to.
For me, as I now own my own practice, and back when I was in the hospital, something that I really started getting into was working on really practical, real-life strategies. Not trying to do things out of a workbook or work on remembering five numbers that mean nothing to someone. It’s looking more like: what are the things you need to remember? You have a doctor’s appointment coming up next week. You need to remember to take your medicine. Things that really mean something to you and help you get through your recovery, help you get through your day without needing to rely on other people. Getting back to your independence.
So for me as an SLP, that might look like teaching someone how to pace their day so they’re not overdoing it. It might be building rest breaks into their day, using different executive function tools. That might be a planner, phone reminders for memory. I really like desk timers for people who are having trouble focusing on things. And just really practicing tolerance for things like getting back into reading, working on computers, or having conversations in noisy restaurants.
So I try to simulate a lot of real-life tasks, whether that be schoolwork for my younger clients or the demands placed on you in the workplace for some of my working adults. Just helping them feel more confident as they’re getting back into their daily routines.
So I’ve treated a lot of clients with concussion at this point. I was a neuro specialist before. I’m a little bit more of a generalist now, but concussion management is one of my specialties.
So when you think concussion, I think a lot of people think athletes. That’s the first thing they think of right?. As far as athletes, I’ve treated all sorts of different athletes who play various sports. From a gymnast who had so many head injuries he couldn’t even tell me how many he’d had—because he was like, “I don’t know, I probably get a brain injury every practice, I’m always hitting my head”—to the point (and he was a High School student) where he couldn’t ignore his symptoms anymore. Or a football player who just had one bad hit, and also probably a lot of smaller hits before that, but one bad hit that really knocked him off his feet. He couldn’t play and was trying to get back into the sport he loved.
Outside of athletes, I get workers’ compensation cases. An example of that was a chef who was hit in the head with an industrial fridge door and had short-term memory difficulties for months after.
And then a lot of your general public—motor vehicle accidents, ground-level falls—those are probably the most common. So for those kind of clients, what would therapy look like? I do a lot of real-life examples with them like I mentioned before. For the football player, that could look like working on the plays for the upcoming week from his playbook. The gymnast, like I said, he was in high school, so with him we were actually working on memorizing French verb conjugations—which I don’t speak French, so that was an interesting bit of therapy for me.
I’ve worked on developing accommodations for returning to work in a graded scenario with one of my clients. Some of the people who are older who are more prone to falls, we’ve worked on developing some systems around the house to lessen their risk of falling again, making sure their pill boxes are organized and that they have systems in place to avoid taking the wrong pills at the wrong times or too many or too little of something. Setting up planners, calendars, and reminder systems in home.
For that chef, for him we worked on (he was a short order chef) and so we worked on the processing speed and the planning needed for him to be getting multiple tickets in at a time. And while we were doing that, we were playing some kitchen background noise to kind of add some distraction.
Overall, I really do my best to try to make therapy sessions really functional for my clients. They always tell me they appreciate it, because I know that some have been to other providers before me who maybe weren’t as versed in concussion management, and maybe just don’t have that experience because they’re not getting as many of those clients.
And to those SLPs, I say—It’s tough. I understand that too. It took a lot for me to figure out what are the steps for these people, and that it’s not just the workbooks we got in grad school. But I think as long as you don’t focus so much on what it looks like inside the therapy box and just treat it as these are the symptoms—how can we improve these symptoms?—it gets a little bit easier and less chaotic for both the therapist and the client.
Advice to Others:
I think that the main thing that I really try to hammer home to my clients is that recovery is not linear. You’re gonna have good days, you’re gonna have bad days. I tell this to all my clients: If you’re sick, if you’re tired, I’m sick today, your brain’s not gonna work as it would on a day where you’re thinking clear and you woke up and you’re at peace, right?
And so remembering that you’re gonna have those ups and downs all the time, and that’s super normal, but to not try to push through your symptoms. Once you hit a point you know when you’re gonna start going down. Right? And I think we all know that whether we’ve had a concussion or not, that our body can only withstand so much.
You just have to use the strategies you’re learning to support yourself, and let your brain heal at its own pace. Because we all know that progress is very possible, but you have to have the right support and people to get back to those things that you love doing.