Tag Archives: Nick Mercer

Nick Mercer: Why we continue to see players play

19 May

Nick submitted this article prior to the Bryce Harper wall escapade but it would certainly fall into this opinion piece.

While I didn’t intend to write a post about brain injury in sport, I was inspired to write it based on some events in the NHL playoffs.  Since it’s not my point to dissect the danger of the two hits, I won’t spend much time on them. In fact, I’ll just share the links to the Gryba hit on Eller and the Abdelkader hit on Lydman. Seriously, whether I think either of those hits was clean or delivered with malicious intent is not, in any way, the basis or inspiration for this post. What is, is the idea that we – the North American contact sports-loving public – have all but abdicated our right to a free conscience. Whether either hitter was deserving of the suspension they have subsequently received, depends not on the hit they delivered, but on which team you cheer for (or against), or whether or not you like seeing big hits in hockey. It has nothing to do with what happened.

Some people don’t like where the NHL or NFL are heading; the frequency with which penalties are called when a player hits anywhere near an opposing player’s head. I don’t think that either of these two leagues, NHL and NFL, understand the concept of risk and reward. Hard hitting contact sports are so popular because they exhibit risk in a raw form. That’s probably why some/many of the athletes who make it to the highest levels get into the types of trouble they do. We watch news about multi-millionaire athletes who crash Porsches or who get arrested, and we may think “why would someone with so much to lose risk so much?” However, the athletes actually made logical (that doesn’t necessarily mean good) decisions. They do what all of us do before making most decisions. They, however briefly, look at their risk/reward histories plus their confidence Continue reading →

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Nick Mercer: Spring’s on the way. Get moving

18 May

A while back I saw that Chris Nowinski tweeted this, study by researchers at the University of Buffalo about the benefits of exercise for people who’ve had a concussion, and I thought I’d post now. I was constantly told that my recovery from a severe brain injury (even though, by no means am I back to the way I was pre-injury) was due to my pre- and post- injury fitness. This is an issue I am passionate about and it seemed obvious to me throughout my immediate rehabilitation and continuing recovery/life after my brain injury that exercise and fitness are extremely important. It hasn’t solved my problems or made them go away, but it’s incredibly beneficial and allows me to deal with the effects/issues confidently.

I should know better than to write those four title words when we’re hardly clear of winter. So, first I will apologize in advance to the people of St. John’s. For all intents and purposes, I’ve just guaranteed another dumping of snow. In fairness to me, the title sounds good and I’m looking at a beautiful sunset out my window, so I couldn’t help but write with a tauntingly cheery attitude. Nevertheless, sorry, my bad.

It’s Sunday and the wind was really kicking up a fuss this morning. I, however, stayed safely inside and, although it was sunny and marginally warmer than it has been in a while, I had no need Continue reading →

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Nick Mercer: Impromptu Expectations

28 Mar

The thing about expectations is that they presume a certain course of events. In July 2003, I assumed that I would start my co-op job in Ottawa in September and I based my expectations for the coming years on that presumption – my previous post, Finding yourself after a brain injury. First step: Recon. Brain injuries themselves are unexpected, so you don’t know what presumptions to make that will allow you to generate expectations. You’re already starting off on the wrong foot. It’s not so much the issue of living up to, not meeting, or exceeding expectations, it’s more about the expectations themselves that I will write about.

After considering a patient’s health/medical history, age, other essential factors and the severity of most injuries, conditions, or diseases, doctors can only base their ultimate prognosis on probabilities. This is where expectations begin to go awry. Not to get into statistics or anything, but if the probability of surviving a coma of a certain length and severity is low, it’s because it hasn’t happened very much, therefore there will be few cases upon which to build expectations. The fewer cases, the fewer reliable prognoses can be made, hence few, if any expectations.

Those are for others to make. The most important expectations are the ones you make for yourself. I had been making those ever since
I can remember. When I was a kid and used to catch insects, I had Continue reading →

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Nick Mercer: Finding yourself after a brain injury, first step – Recon

18 Mar

As has been said countless times in countless articles about brain injury, “every brain injury is different”. I don’t know and don’t care to know how many times I’ve heard or read it. That phrase is used primarily for the benefit the general public to explain or define a lasting injury about which little is known. Although geared towards people who have – seemingly – little or no experience with brain injury, the statement should still be understood as fully as possible by those of use who have such experience.

In 2003, until making a hard and fast right turn on my bike on a hill in Victoria, BC, I had every intention of completing my upcoming 8 month MPA work term with the Auditor General in Ottawa, and while there, continuing to ride my bike and join a local water polo club. When I finished my MPA I would work somewhere for a few years, then, hopefully, pursue a PhD.  The next morning, all that changed. Two weeks later, when I woke from my coma, I was a different person. Not completely different – I was lucky – but different enough that I had to change my plans for my future.

My focus wouldn’t be on finding an apartment in Ottawa or impressing my Continue reading →

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Nick Mercer: Bubble Times – Is it going to pop?

21 Feb

Continuing with my analogy from my last post, “Brain injuries and pro contact sports: Bubble times” , in which I compared the concussion issue in pro sports with the financial crisis, I thought I’d try to complete the comparison without, hopefully, forecasting the end of contact sports, notably the NFL and football in general.

In my previous post I said that fans, teams, and leagues play the same role in the concussion issue as the banks/financial institutions did in the recent financial crisis; interested only in their short-term benefit, making them unintentionally complicit in the looming collapse. Players are like the borrowers; they want to play the sport they love and make lots of money doing it. Consequences be damned. Just like people wanted to buy houses and a bunch of other stuff, not thinking, wishing away the potentially negative long-term consequences. It’s about the looming collapse that I will write.

Since my last post, I have listened to Malcolm Gladwell talk about the undesirable, yet inevitable decline of football. Then I read an article on the Oxford University Press blog ‘Why football cannot last’ discussing Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) – a neurological disorder resulting from repetitive blows to the head. It got me thinking about the optimism shown at the end of my last post – had I not considered the situation fully? Was it simply wishful thinking?

Gladwell makes a convincing case Continue reading →

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Brain injuries and pro contact sports: Bubble times

31 Jan

As much as I can, I read about and watch professional contact sports. I also read, and have read, a lot about the financial crisis; more specifically, what led to it. Naturally, since I was brain injured in 2003, I have become very interested in brain injury. Hence this blog.  I have also taken a bigger picture view of almost everything and, influenced by many books I’ve read, notably Collapse by Jared Diamond, I’ve been noticing similarities between different situations and events in society. Not connections or links. Similarities in our perception. They make sense to me – that’s why I thought of them. They’re not perfect or identical, they’re similar, the theme is the same. I see the same prevailing theme in the lead up to the financial crisis as we have seen in the current concussion/brain injury issue in professional contact sports.

For the purposes of this post, I’ve picked two themes that I think run through both situations; “arrogance” and “wishful thinking”. It was arrogance on the part of banks who thought they could make the market do what they want, creating financial instruments (and fitting mortgages into these securitized instruments)  that would generate big short-term profits, ignoring the long-term consequences. The bankers had to sell/lend these instruments/mortgages to someone. Whether the buyers/borrowers were deceived or not is not what this post is about. The buyers/borrowers of these financial instruments ended up losing a lot.

The banks are like the teams, Continue reading →

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An Act of Digression/Maybe I’ll write about this stuff

16 Jan

I’ve been on long hiatuses from writing before, but coming back from this one feels a bit strange. Lots of stuff happened, but I couldn’t decide how, or if I wanted to write about any of it. My decision not to write was probably based more on lethargy than I want to admit, but it was also based on my desire to take a break. A real break. A do-nothing break. I apologize in advance for the sequencing and general disorder of this post because I still haven’t figured out what I’m going to say. Right now, I’d place bets on ‘nothing’, but there’s a chance, however small, that I’ll pen (or type as the case may be) the most eloquent and poignant piece of literature in the English language. That would actually be a better bet, because the odds of that happening are astronomical, so betting even a penney would net you more money than you could spend in 5 lifetimes. But I digress…

Actually digressing seems to be the way this post is going to go. This country, or more to the point, TSN, is losing its mind about the return of the NHL. In September, the main story in Canadian sports was Continue reading →

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Nick Mercer: Understanding Runs Both Ways

12 Dec

First off, Movember 2012 is over and the moustache is gone. Thank you to everyone who donated, whether it was to me or not, the money goes to the same very worthwhile cause.

Now, onto the post…

Yesterday, I tweeted  a story from the New York Times, “Report Urges ‘Cultural Shift’ as Hockey Coaches Defy Concussion Specialists”. In the study, in the Journal of Neurosurgery, Dr. Paul Echlin writes, “Concussion is a significant public health issue that requires a generational shift. As with smoking or seat belts, it doesn’t just happen overnight — it takes a massive effort and collective movement.” I couldn’t agree more! Which leads me to this post.

I’ve previously written about this idea and I’m happy to see that I’m not alone. For this ‘generational shift’ and ‘massive effort and collective movement” to occur, we need to stop dividing ourselves. Right now, there seem to be two camps. Those who’ve had a brain injury or have a close relationship with someone who has, and those who play contact sports and relish the ‘contact’ aspect. The latter is the group that we’re trying to educate about concussions and the former is the group that knows about it all too well.

There has been a blatant ‘make them understand’ movement and, not surprisingly, it hasn’t worked overnight, or it’s been begrudgingly accepted. At times, the higher levels of an organization like the NHL or NFL  have fully endorsed changes to contact rules and have subsequently, unilaterally imposed them on the players and officials. In the case of the NFL,Commissioner Roger Goodell, counter-productively and idiotically, pushed for a longer season, so players could collide more and have more opportunity to be concussed. But I digress…

It feels like there is a discernible “you’re either with us or against us” attitude. Not to get too political here, but Continue reading →

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Nick Mercer: The Education of Nick

26 Nov

When I try to think of an idea for a post, I look to sports, news, pop culture, and usually find something that gets my mind firing. Sometimes, actually more often than not for my most recent posts, my idea seemingly comes out of nowhere, but once I get a hold of it, off I go. So, while trying to think of the subject for this post, although there were a lot of stories of concussed athletes – not the least of whom is Alex Smith of my favourite team in any sport, the San Frncisco 49ers – I have decided to take another tack and look more at society. I’ve written a bunch in this vein, so you could simply call this tactic ‘going to the well’, but there is just so much fodder here. Plus, it gives me a wider audience than  1000 words on Colin Kaepernick would have (nonetheless, he played an awesome game on Monday!). There have been countless stories over the past 2 years about concussion in pro sports, youth sports, and recreational sports. Every time a new story comes around, a catalog of articles are written, a fury of interviews are given, and an exhaustive supply of statistics are produced. As I’m the only one working alone on this blog, the only resource at my disposal, or at least the only original resource I have, is my experience as someone who’s had a severe traumatic brain injury.

Starting my blog (concussiontalk.com) was one of my best ideas. It gives me a place where I can share my views and vent my frustrations, all under the guise of thoughtful, and dare I say, good, writing. I have, not so subtlety, been able to integrate some pop culture events into my posts. From the start, the point of my blog was to write about brain injury in sports, notably football and hockey, because in July or August of 2010, it seemed a bit different, and as such, it would be interesting to write about. If anything, I’ve deviated from this, Continue reading →

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Ding, ding, ding!

16 Nov

I recently read a story in the Globe and Mail, “Stampeders backpedal on concussion talk” about Calgary QB Drew Tate who was hit in a head-to-head collision in the 2nd quarter of play on Sunday, November 11. At halftime, Tate said that he had his “bell rung” and couldn’t remember the first half of play, generating this comment from Eric Francis of the Calgary Sun, “All the questions Monday will and should revolve around the apparent silliness of letting Tate play after his halftime admission to TSN.” (emphasis added) Not to worry though, according to Tate all that really happened is that he was “dinged” and “felt some fuzziness”, besides, as Tate says, “As far as talk about a concussion, I didn’t get what the fuss was because I felt fine and just wanted to play.” The Stampeders administered concussion tests during the game, after the game, and Monday morning. Tate was ruled to be symptom free.

It seems fairly clear that Tate was concussed. However, not according to Dave Dickenson, Calgary’s offensive coordinator and a former QB, whose diagnosis was that  he “can tell when I look into someone’s eyes if they are concussed or not,” and he didn’t see any symptoms. Nevertheless, Chris Nowinski knows a thing or two about concussions, concussion management, and the Continue reading →

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Defining success in rehab: exhaustion

14 Nov

Admittedly, I didn’t understand or even appreciate the importance of my physiotherapy rehab after my brain injury. When the doctors first told me that I’d be going to the Miller Centre (the rehab hospital in St. John’s, NL) I was really excited! At least I’d be out of the hospital! I couldn’t sleep. When I was eventually able to eat food it was terrible. I was bored to say the least. I was newly dealing with my double vision, so I couldn’t read. I figured, when I got to rehab, I’d be able to go to the rehab gym all day, at least it was something to do. They’d never seen me at rehab. I’ll be awesome! “Sure I can’t walk now, but you let me at that place for a few weeks and I’ll be running the stairs and doing burpees in the hall in no time!” “I’ll run home one day and won’t need to go back.” It’ll only be a few weeks, a few months tops.

At first, my motivation to get there was to get out of that GD hospital and get the whole ‘brain injury’ thing over. It sucked and there was a bunch of stuff I’d rather be doing. I had a co-op job in Ottawa for my master’s program that I had to get to. Most of my friends from Queen’s were in Ontario, so I’d see them a lot on weekends, whenever. That was the goal. Bang this rehab out and get back to life. An inconvenience. A pretty big inconvenience, and a good story, but an inconvenience is all it was.

I eventually realized that to get back to my old self, physically, was going to take longer than a few months. My motivation was then much harder Continue reading →

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It’s going to happen, learn from it

8 Nov

Yesterday evening, as I was about to talk to receive a call from someone from the Mayo Clinic about their Concussion Program to discuss how I could be involved, I was thinking about what it is about brain injury that I want to share with people. I’ve said it in a more muddled way before, in posts and talking to others, but that never translates properly into how important I think the point is. Another problem is that we, as a society, haven’t truly realized the prevalence and lasting consequences of brain injury until recently. The effects of brain injury had barely been recognized when it became an epidemic in sports and, not long after, a pandemic. Concussions are going to happen. Brain injury is going to happen. Of course we should look for ways to prevent it and ways to treat it, but perhaps most importantly, we should be responsible adults and stop kidding ourselves that this sort of thing is curable.

This post is not strictly about sports, but I will use sports as an example. Last year in the NFL there were 171 concussions among 1696 players. Approximately 10% of all active players in the league suffered concussions. ‘Wow! Even 1 is too many! That’s shocking!’…No it’s not! The average size of an NFL player varies by position, but to generalize, it’s about 6’2″ and 250 lbs. Average! We’re still not talking about power and the force with which they collide! The NHL is smaller but still above 200 lbs and similar height. However, these guys hit each other at higher speeds in many more games. Obviously, these are adult statistics, but these are adult statistics for people who have been playing the respective game for a long time and know what they’re doing. The youth level in either sport is filled with kids of varying size and drastically varying skill levels.

Look at those numbers and think about any NHL or NFL game you’ve seen, even if it was just highlights. Really think about it. Seriously, think about it. Thanks to all of the attention on brain injury, including concussions, in these past few years, it’s now blatantly clear that there are going to be these types of injuries. What’s truly surprising is that there aren’t more!

Better concussion policies. Better equipment. Better treatment. What seems to have been forgotten is common sense. People getting hit in the head is not some new phenomenon Continue reading →

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Call it what you want, just don’t panic

25 Oct

Confidence, arrogance, or indifference. It doesn’t matter which term you use, as long as you understand what it means to show any  of those characteristics. The popular conception is that confidence encapsulates valuing yourself, being proud of what you’ve accomplished and ‘standing up for yourself’. The unfortunate circumstance is that the word ‘confidence’ (as used in the phrase, ‘Have confidence in yourself’) appears to have been corrupted and used to connote an arrogant, narcissistic attitude. People who have been affected by brain injury, or any other health condition that has had detrimental effects on self esteem, are encouraged to  show confidence, with the hope that they will feel good about themselves when they go out into society. This is well-meaning, but perhaps, not the best way to go about instilling true confidence.

Confidence is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as: the feeling or belief that one can have faith in or rely on someone or something; the state of feeling certain about the truth of something; a feeling of self-assurance arising from an appreciation of one’s own abilities or qualities.

That is what confidence means. What’s often impressed on people – recovering from brain injury or not – is that Continue reading →

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Why do I write?

17 Oct

Nick Mercers provides some insight into why he chooses to write for us and his blog.

Because, as much as it lets others ask questions, it encourages me to ask questions of myself.

Granted, I have always questioned myself, I’m hyper-self-critical. In general, it’s not necessarily a good thing. I hesitate or stop completely. I waste opportunities. I’ll pass up a good chance (with a woman, for a job,…) for a safer, if not longer, chance. However, in writing, my exhaustive self-analysis, is probably beneficial. It means I take longer to write, because I’m always correcting what I wrote and how I wrote it. There aren’t many sentences in this post that haven’t been ‘renovated’ in some way. That’s not to say there aren’t mistakes, or that I catch-all of those errors on the first, second, or even third read. I’m cognizant, but maybe not enough, of the propensity of my self-criticism to take the emotive punch out of what I write. So I try to guard against that. I try to be open, and I hope that shows through, but since this personality trait has been with me my whole life, it’s not completely natural for me to silence it. It is at constant odds with the my ‘newly’ acquired (9 years ago) impulsive nature.

My impulsive side has not completely balanced out my patient and measured side (or vice versa), but it has made some headway. That said, I’m certainly calmer and less anxious than I was before my brain injury, which could have more to do with the severity of my brain injury than with the injury itself, however I don’t know, I’m just speculating, and I don’t have any medical information to back up such a claim. See that? That was Continue reading →

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Still Relating

9 Oct

A few weeks ago I wrote a post entitled Relating. It was about the new (past 9 years, since my brain injury) difficulty I had relating to others. I discuss how it’s tough to convey the experience and how great the help from my friends and family was. Recently, I read an article, entitled Voyages in Concussion Land: the homeless, Sidney Crosby and me by Tabatha Southey in The Globe and Mail on Friday, Oct 5, 2012. In it, Tabatha wonders about, “the dissociation many concussion sufferers experience”.

Immediately I thought ‘Dissociation! That’s the word! Perfect.’ However, being my critical, nit-picking-self, I soon found reasons why ‘dissociation’ wasn’t, in fact, ‘perfect’ to describe me. This bit of criticism was made much easier by my recent trip to Toronto and London, Ontario to see my best friends from university. We had a great time! Not only that, I got to see their children (except one). Dissociated could in no way describe how I felt at any time that weekend. Even though all the guys are married and almost all have children, it was such an easy, if not natural, situation that it was as though we still all lived in the same house (Granted, their actual houses now are much, much, cleaner – I can’t emphasize that enough).

Then I came home and this past weekend had a much different, yet also easy/natural time at a friend’s party. So, I’ve started thinking  Continue reading →

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Relating

19 Sep

I’ve written two blog posts (attempted posts, really) about relating to people since my brain injury. They now sit in the ‘Posts’ section as drafts Relating 1 and Relating 2. I was happy with my first one until I realized that I just kept talking about my brain injury and recovery, very slowly meandering to a vague point. So I started a second post. That one was more direct and I was writing some good stuff! At least that’s how it felt at the time. That time, however, as I was really going at the crux of the post, I realized that I couldn’t truly relate to what I was writing. Bringing me to my this third and hopefully final attempt.

In my previous 2 drafts I concentrated my writing on why I found it difficult to relate to people since my brain injury, about how many of their experiences weren’t my experiences. In the midst of that narration, I began a spiel about how the comparison of the feelings from one experience to another, different experience, is based on a false premise. While writing that, I started to figure out Continue reading →

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NFL players: They’re not doing it for their health

12 Sep

With the NFL season getting started last Wednesday night, player health, at all levels, comes to the front of my mind. I have recently been thinking about health insurance with respect to sports. Living in Canada, it is definitely less of concern than in the U.S., but I thought I would share some thoughts about the college and pro levels of sport.

There is no way that I’m the first person, after all this time, to talk about what colleges and pro teams are doing about health insurance for players. I know there are a bunch of questions about whether or not concussions are pre-existing conditions, and other reasons players can’t be insured, but it should be a legitimate issue at the college and pro-level for contact sports. The NFL, NHL and NCAA have enough financial wherewithal to encourage some forward thinking insurance company to insure the players who are, perhaps unwittingly, putting their future well-being in jeopardy on the field of play.

As has been reported countless times, concussions are caused in a number of ways and the symptoms are diverse. So why should it be forced into the same insurance categories as other injuries with the “pre-existing” condition clause? If there was enough demand for some type of concussion insurance, a new category for a specific league/sport could be created. Taking care of players once Continue reading →

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Can you get there from here?

24 Jul

This is my first post since early June and I’ve got no excuse for being delinquent. I guess our unusually warm and sunny summer has made me listless. Nevertheless, I want to write and it’s about time I put excuses (however valid) aside and get back to writing something. It’s not like sports have disappeared this summer! The Olympics (and the media coverage) will undoubtedly come with stories that will encourage me to write. There I go, making an assumption. I shouldn’t do that. I know better.

When I started ConcussionTalk, my plan was for it to be a site where people can discuss their struggles with brain injury, exchange advice on how to deal with common problems or talk about brain injury in sports. (The discussion idea was thwarted by spammers and their ads for prescription drugs, without prescription. Nevertheless, Concussion Talk on Facebook and @concussiontalk on Twitter are there for discussion.) Two years later and the concussion and brain injury issue has become prominent Continue reading →

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Your brain needs exercise and nutrition too

8 Jun

The benefits of exercising, keeping fit and eating healthily have been impressed on us (society, specifically North American society in which I live) for a long time. Unfortunately, it hasn’t exactly caught on. It came close when Jared lost a bunch of weight eating subs everyday. Although Jared is to be commended for deciding to eat healthier and smaller portions, that campaign ended up being a better marketing gimmick than a healthy eating trend. Magazines, ranging from fitness to news, have urged us to exercise and eat healthily as well, but these attempts have generally failed when the timelines to do this fall outside of one week – a month at the longest. Magazines also compete with each other to give “the best” advice. However, “the best” advice is no match for “the easiest” advice and as magazines compete with each other, conflicting diets and exercise routines can very easily overwhelm someone whose commitment to keeping fit equates to their commitment to picking up a magazine. I should be fair, some of these routines actually work and give good advice about being healthy. Another option is using common sense. We’ve been cautioned about remaining sedentary and eating unhealthily and the negative consequences that has for our heart, one of our vital organs. But what about another vital organ, the brain?

The importance of exercise and nutrition (the first two articles) for brain health cannot be understated. Exercise, notably aerobic exercise, is like practice for your brain’s neural pathways. The better trained your neural pathways are, the stronger and more efficient they are. Not only that, aerobic exercise also improves the adaptive abilities of the brain. When I was brain injured, some pathways in my brain were disturbed, but my brain has found new routes in which it Continue reading →

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Now what?

2 May

So I turn 32 today. It’s kind of a non-age. In my mind, 33 is a bit of a milestone, 30 is an obvious milestone, but 32, that’s nothing. Of course, I couldn’t care less either way. Age means very little to me now, but I guess this is as good a day as any for me to reminisce/write about the past 9 years (8 years and 9 months, actually) and where I am now.

I’m fairly surprised about how happy I am now and how good I feel. On this day 9 years ago, I was with a friends in London, ON, on a inter-term break from my Master’s program (in Public Administration – MPA) from the University of Victoria. The next day, I would get picked up in Toronto and would get a ride  to the Ottawa River, near Cobden, to go whitewater rafting for the weekend (along with about 15 more friends). Good times!

I then went back to Victoria for term 2 of my MPA program and I continued training for triathlon, a sport I tried for the first time in January of that same year. Three months later, I crashed into a tree and my life changed.

When we were rafting/bouncing our way Continue reading →

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Tralfamadore

23 Mar

I just finished Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. It’s about Billy Pilgrim, an optometrist in Ileum, New York who was a World War II POW in Dresden, Germany when it was fire bombed (Vonnegut, himself, was a POW in World War II in Dresden in Schlachthof Fünf (Slaughterhouse Five). He, like his future character, Billy Pilgrim, was there during the bombing in February 1945). After the war (in human time – more on that further down) he becomes an optometrist, has a wife, daughter and son, and is abducted by aliens to their planet of Tralfamadore and ends up with an ability to haphazardly time travel within his life. It’s funny and makes its anti-war points through satire. This is not a book review, I just figured I would give a general overview of the book before I launched into an exhortation about my brain injury and the Tralfamadorian view of life.

The Tralfamadorian view kind of relates to my point that I wouldn’t change a thing about my being brain injured because it leads me to where I am now. The Tralfamadorian view of life is that no one ever dies, they just jump around to different parts of their life and that things that happen will always happen and have always happened. By no means am I saying that I can travel through time Continue reading →

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This isn’t about Tebow…but it kinda is

14 Dec

Nick Mercer is a guest author and his original blog can be found at concussiontalk.com.  Nick is a survivor of TBI using his experiences to educate and opine about current issues in the realm of concussions.  Nick has presented on these issues in his native Canada as well.  Enjoy!

On Sunday I watched the Denver Broncos score 10 points in a little over 2 minutes to tie the Chicago Bears and then win in overtime. This is an impressive comeback, but it wouldn’t be so believably unbelievable had it not involved the Broncos and their quarterback Tim Tebow. Last week Chuck Klosterman wrote an excellent article on www.grantland.com  entitled The People Who Hate Tim Tebow and he tries to find out why Tim Tebow is so fascinating to other people and why he’s so polarizing. Klosterman inevitably talks about faith and belief. I think the reason a nice, genuine guy is so polarizing are very similar to explaining concussions and brain injury in sports.

Tim Tebow is the Broncos quarterback and seems to lack most of the apparently ‘essential’ skills of the modern-day NFL QB. Football purists and many former players are quick to note his lack of skill, his inability to make accurate passes and his reliance on running and scrambling. Continue reading →

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Lucic hit on Miller: Penalize or Punish?

18 Nov

I was at the game in Boston on Saturday, November 12, 2011, so I saw the play in which Milan Lucic crushed goalie Ryan Miller. Immediately there was a quick groan in the crowd around me. My friends know the seriousness of major strikes to the head better than most people, so they could see how bad the hit was and how much it could affect Miller.

After the immediate shock of the hit, the crowd went crazy. There was long and sustained loud cheering for Lucic and jeering of the Buffalo players for their reaction. There was also intense booing of the 2 minute penalty assigned to Lucic for the hit. This was followed by equally intense cheering as Milan Lucic was celebrated in a video shown on the scoreboard screen, profiling his big hits and physical style of play. It seemed the fans couldn’t be prouder. Of course, there is a whole separate debate among hockey players and media about goalies being able to play a puck outside of their respective, claustrophobic creases.

The referees didn’t assign a larger penalty because Continue reading →

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Post-concussion symptoms, see concussion symptoms

7 Sep

I was brain injured in 2003 while cycling in Victoria, BC. Concussions are also known as mild traumatic brain injuries and while what I sustained was a coma-inducing severe traumatic brain injury, from what I hear, and what makes sense to me, there seem to be many overlapping symptoms. I read about how Marc Savard has “post-concussion” symptoms and I’m really wondering why they call them post-concussion symptoms and why I always say ‘I was brain injured’. I guess the major traumatic blow to my head  is a thing of the past, so, on a technicality, I can get away with saying “was brain injured”, but plain logic is enough to tell you that you don’t have symptoms from an injury that doesn’t exist. I still have major symptoms and even though you can’t see my injury just by looking at me today, doesn’t mean that my brain has completely healed. Some parts of my brain seem unaffected, but Continue reading →

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TCB Contributor Speaks

13 Jun

Nick Mercer a contributor of The Concussion Blog and author of ConcussionTalk was recently in Newfoundland giving a talk about recovery from concussions.  He was part of Newfoundland and Labrador Brain Injury Association meeting.  We value what Nick has to say and feel that if you have time you should view the following videos (3 parts).  And visit his blog for the videos of Dr. Falah Maroun, neurosurgeon.

PART I

Continue reading →

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