Ellie Transcript

Hi, I’m Ellie. I’m a sophomore. And I’ve had quite a few concussions unfortunately. I think I’ve had four over my lifetime, but I’ve had two while I’ve been in college. 

My first one was probably the worst one. And it was a second semester of my freshman year. And it was a really silly incident. I was just running and my bag got caught on a railing, and I ended up slamming my head onto that same metal railing. And at first I thought I was okay, but I started getting headaches a few hours after that, and I am prone to migraines, so unfortunately, hitting my head ended up triggering a series of really, really bad migraines for about five days. And at that point, I didn’t have a strong enough prescription for pain meds for the migraines so I was kind of just sitting in bed for these five days. I was crying a lot. I would listen to audiobooks, sometimes. It was just really, really painful. And then eventually I was able to like go out on some walks. I was lucky it didn’t last a super long time. It was just really bad for the short time that the migraines were bad.  So I probably took like two and a half weeks to fully recover, and I had more moderate headaches. So that ended up being good, but it was hard to just make up all the exams. And also this was during the height of COVID, and so I had to do online classes, which isn’t great when you have a concussion. So that was just really difficult. 

My second concussion was only a few weeks ago. And again, a really silly incident. But I hit my head on the side of the doorway when my head was turned the other way. And it was right before a politics class and my head started swelling enormously and I had an enormous lump on my head for the entire class. And it was very blue and I ended up getting ice about an hour and a half after it happened and icing that. And my head wasn’t really hurting at first, and more just like the throbbing, and so I didn’t really think I had a concussion. But for all the next day I felt really really nauseous. And I would say I felt nauseous for about two days and then the headaches really set in. And I didn’t get migraines; I was really lucky this time. I just got normal headaches. But this was during a time when I had to submit a lot of final papers. So again, not a great time to get a concussion, but when is? And so I ended up having to be on screens, but I just turned it all yellow. And my teachers were pretty accommodating. One of my science classes with a lot of people in it – the professor wasn’t very accommodating. But my smaller classes were great about it. And I didn’t miss a lot of class like I had for the last concussion, which was good because looking at screens was a really hard thing. And if I had just taken enough pain meds it would be fine for the whole day. But now, after so many concussions, my head is quite fragile so hitting it even lightly will give me a headache for the rest of the day, which really isn’t great. But I think overall I’ve been pretty lucky with my concussions, but they’ve definitely made me really scared about hitting my head again and I am a lot more careful, which is also difficult because I like to be adventurous. I like to play sports. I like to be outdoors. But yeah, that is my story with my concussions. Thanks for listening.