Heather G. Transcript
Hi, my name is Heather Grant and I’m a physiotherapist working in Ontario, Canada. I work in the orthopedic side but also do a lot of work with clients who have had a concussion. I unfortunately sustained a concussion myself back in 2017. I was from an off-roading vehicle accident where I had hit the roof twice.
Didn’t think anything of it at the time, but over the next, as the hours and days went by, symptoms just built, kept building and building and building. And unfortunately those symptoms lasted honestly about 10 years. So I am, or I was, one of the chronic cases and took me a while, a couple weeks honestly, to admit that I had one and to even go to my doctor and say, okay, like, this is what happened.
Unfortunately we didn’t know too much about concussions at the time or take them as seriously as we do now, and there’s a lot of research that has come out in the last number of years. So my doctor just said, just don’t run for a month and you’ll be okay.
I was a competitive runner at the time, and a month went by and I still felt all the symptoms under the sun. Pretty much any symptom on a list, I’ve had it, and it all at once. So that led me down the path of seeking out a lot of rehab from many different professionals, which I think is pretty common in people who have had persistent symptoms where you start off potentially in physio or you just start off seeing your doctor and then you start to realize all the different people that can be helpful post-concussion and who can be on your team there.
I am happy to say that honestly in the last two or so years I’ve been able to get back to running and feeling 100% now, but it definitely was a long haul for myself. And in the meantime I’m in school and I’m also in physio school trying to work through all these symptoms. So now that then led me to work with clients who’ve had concussions on the physio side of things.
So I see people who, if their concussion happened yesterday or it happened three, four, or five years ago and symptoms just haven’t quite cleared up, we’re trying to figure out why. Each person I treat very individual. There is not a cookie-cutter recipe for people who have had concussions. The biggest thing is to seek care as soon as you possibly can.
Within my day and what my assessments typically look like is we’re trying to figure out what are the main drivers to somebody’s symptoms. Those can come from your eyes, your neck, your inner ear or vestibular system, or the autonomic system, which means essentially your heart rate and blood pressure response. Sometimes that can get a bit thrown out of whack because your nervous system is in a fight-or-flight mode when it doesn’t need to be.
We figure out what are the pieces to that person’s puzzle. Then there are a variety of techniques that we use to try and work somebody through those symptoms, getting them back to work and life and school and sports. I see people whether they’re athletes or they’re a mom or dad just trying to chase after their kids and bending over, they feel dizzy, the noise sensitivity and whatnot. Everyone’s goals can look very different and we go based off the person that’s in front of them.
That’s me in a nutshell to start off with.
Q: In those early days after the accident, what made you hesitate or delay going to the doctor, even as your symptoms were getting worse?
I was in denial because at the time I just thought, there’s no way I have one, that just happens to hockey players. You just hear about it with ice hockey a lot, and I just thought, no, that can’t be me.
Also you’re not thinking straight after a concussion, so you genuinely just can’t sometimes make appropriate decisions. That was definitely me. You bring up a good point though about having other people around you encouraging you to go and seek help, because now that we know a lot more about them and what can be done about them, because there are lots that we can do, it’s important that teammates and parents and friends and whatnot encourage each other to seek out care and to seek a full recovery. Because your brain is more important than one game or one practice or whatever it is.
I was just in denial and eventually realized these symptoms are not going away. I had my last year of my undergrad starting and I’m like, oh, I better do something about this because I actually just can’t function right now because of all the symptoms. The mornings I would wake up and my eyes would be so sore to the slightest amount of light coming through my room. I like to block out all light in front, so it’d be like the sliver coming through the side of your window, and it would take me like 45 minutes to be able to just keep my eyes open in the morning. It hurt to lay my head on the pillow. It hurt to just think or exist in general. It just felt exhausting.
So I was like, I need to get help once that wasn’t going away. I’m also a little bit stubborn, so that played a part in it too. That’s what led me to seek help. But now we know, speaking from the physio side of things, that the earlier you can seek care, the better. The more likely you are to recover faster.
You want to get started on a good recovery plan, have someone guide you through this process rather than guessing. More often than not, it’s just reining somebody in because we always want to try and jump back into what we were doing before. I say those type A people that are go-go-go-go are the hardest people to guide through the concussion process. Me being one of them, full disclosure. Your mind is just going, going, going, or if you’re a parent or something like that, it’s hard to give yourself the space to recover rather than being in this busy lifestyle.
Q: Can you tell me about your running background—did you compete individually, on a team, or both?
So I ran for my university, both cross country, and then I was a part of a club team for track. More of the distance running. 3000 meter was my go-to or favorite. My whole goal was just I need to feel myself again, I need to get back to running, and unfortunately that took a very long time to get to.
You feel like you lose your sense of self if your identity has been tied to a sport for so long. I was always known as the runner in high school, and then that transitioned into university. Oh, Heather’s the runner, the two just went hand in hand. And then, oh, now Heather’s not the runner. Who is she? That took a while to figure out.
Seeing some psychologists and sports psychologists can be very helpful in that realm as well. I guess the summary of that is people can feel like they’ve lost their identity, which in itself, in the mental health aspect, doesn’t help your recovery either because it can make you feel quite depressed to be honest.
I would just say that from an awareness perspective, people will often think of concussions as a short-term thing. Oh, I heard my friend got one and they were back in two weeks playing their sport or they were feeling great in two weeks. Then people get worried when that’s not them.
On average, if we’re giving the brain a full amount of time to heal metabolically as well, it’s probably around three weeks or so from what research says. Just normalizing that it won’t be a few days and you don’t have to rush back. On the flip side, it can also be a number of years, and a lot of those people are suffering in silence because a lot of practitioners don’t know what to do with people who have persistent symptoms.
When you get into that realm, we have to work a lot on your nervous system and calming that down because you’ve had however many months of letting it build and stay in that fight-or-flight mode. So just normalizing that it sometimes takes longer. Often concussions are underreported, so the data often makes it seem like they recover a lot faster than they do.
If your symptoms are lasting a couple of weeks, hopefully you’ve already started seeing somebody. It doesn’t mean that you will have this for the rest of your life. It won’t mean you’re ten years like myself. My story is quite rare, but it’s not necessarily unique. Some people do have that.
Advice to others:
Finding a practitioner, whether it’s a physio or whoever, and often if you’ve had symptoms for a while, you’re going to need a few different people on your team to address all the aspects. Make sure you feel confident in the practitioners you’re seeing. You need to have that connection and it needs to click. If you don’t trust them, there’s always that worry in the back of your mind.
Try not to shop around too much always looking for the fix that’s out there, because that unfortunately doesn’t exist. They’re absolutely treatable, but give your practitioners the time. Sometimes we just need to try one plan and see how it goes, and if that’s not working, we pivot. There are lots of options out there for recovery. We just need to give each a good amount of time.
When you’re going through a concussion and it is such an invisible injury, no one can see it. You don’t have a cast around your head. You’re not on crutches. Your world feels like it’s being flipped upside down sometimes, literally if you’re quite dizzy, but you feel like your life has been flipped upside down. On the outside you look normal and you always feel like you have to justify yourself to other people, but you don’t. That can be exhausting in itself.
You’ll find your crew of people who support you, and they get it, and they don’t need you to explain it. Those are your people to keep close.
Controlling what you can within concussion recovery is what I always tell my clients, because it can feel very uncontrollable. Your sleep, what you’re eating, what you’re drinking, doing little bits of your exercises that you can do — that consistency will pay off, I promise you. The mundane things are what build the foundation, and then the fancy exercises and stuff come after that. You need to have a solid foundation before you build the house.