Normally I blog about psych methods, or atheists, or other roughly “research interests of mine” and this one’s a bit different. Basically it’s a retrospective on head injuries, chronic health issues, and other shit that can really make this job (or any other job really) really challenging. And I feel we don’t talk about this stuff a lot. I certainly don’t. But like lots of things, bringing things to light might help. I’ve been thinking of writing this one for years, but the timing just wasn’t right yet. This one is personal, and has some dark patches. Cue up Black Hole Sun and let ‘er rip.
Post Begins Here
I’m a hockey fan. Never any good at the sport (my winter interests went towards ski racing, so I never got any good at skating), but I love watching it. These days, there’s one player on my Colorado Avalanche who I’m rooting for more than anyone. It’s not all-world stud Nathan MacKinnon, or giant-yet-awkward superstar Mikko Rantanen, or “too small for the NHL” Rookie of the Year Cale Makar. Nope, it’s Connor Timmins. For those of you who follow junior hockey, you might remember him. He was probably Team Canada’s best defender in the 2018 World Junior tournament, a notch above Makar. He looked poised to slot into the NHL soon, and projected as a top pairing all-around defender. Then, in the CHL playoffs later that year, he took a hit to the head and sustained a concussion. Timmins missed the rest of the playoffs. Then he missed the entire next season. Then it took him about another year to claw his way back to playing regularly. And now he’s an NHL player, getting sparse playing time. But dammit, he’s there. For every NHLer who’s overcome a concussion (future Hall of Famer Patrice Bergeron almost had his career ended early by a concussion), there are many who haven’t (promising Avs prospect Joey Hishon picked up a concussion and basically never returned).
There goes the modeling career….
I root for Timmins because not only is his story generally inspiring, but it’s one I can personally relate to. In the summer of 2017 I was out walking my dog and (from what little I can clearly remember), she bolted to chase a squirrel and I was caught off balance. I fell and caught my face on a rock wall. Luckily this occurred right in front of my house and evidently I was able to crawl up the stoop and ring the doorbell, where my wife found me leaking profusely from the face. I have snaphshot memories of the trip to the hospital, getting 18 facial stitches sans painkillers (I’m allergic), and trying to get myself cleaned up. But that night was just the start of my troubles. We left a couple of days later to head back to Colorado to visit family. I spent much of the next month in a quiet dark room. I’d get vertigo. Seeing similar rock walls seemed to trigger migraines. Post-concussion symptoms were interacting poorly with my chronic migraines (they’d been a more-or-less manageable pain in the ass since my teenage years). I missed my father in-law’s 70th birthday, hanging out with my family, meeting up and camping with friends. After 3 weeks of vacation, we returned to Kentucky. I was still unable to safely drive, so my wife Drew had to do the whole 20-hour trip behind the wheel.
Things hadn’t really settled down by the time September rolled around and university picked back up. The mental fog of post-concussion syndrome and migraines that would knock me out for 3-8 days at a time, I didn’t even think to reach out for help or accommodations…I just kind of tried to power through it. It didn’t work. I found that I couldn’t really do statistical coding. Just to hard to hold that focus. R is confusing at the best of times, and gibberish with a garbled head. So projects involving data simulation basically withered and died, except for those where my colleagues did all the heavy code lifting. My teaching suffered (tough to teach a class effectively when you frequently have to call in sick because you can’t see straight or form coherent sentences). I missed a lot of things. Professionally and personally. I missed out on dinner with friends visiting from Australia. I missed what we called “orphan Christmas” with friends who didn’t have family nearby. I missed fully participating in kids’ parties. And a million other things, big and small. Just a patchwork life. Migraines and vertigo and nausea saw me miss many meals and drop to a svelte 140 pounds (I normally hover around 170).
You know what can happen when you’re dealing with post-concussion symptoms and are also generally failing at life? You can also succumb to severe clinical depression, another of those things we don’t talk about enough. I did this in a big way, and also generally let my health suffer and made all sorts of poor health choices that only prolonged recovery. I was not coping well. 2017-2019 is largely a sad grey blur in my memory. I was miserable, but also kind of in a fog for a pretty big chunk of the time (hooray?). But the other weird thing about the combination of migraine-concussion-depression is that progress wasn’t linear and it wasn’t uniformly miserable. Good days were just fine. I had a lot of great times with friends and family along this way! I was able to carve out just enough of the good times to not entirely derail my career or social life. Teaching on a schedule was very challenging and I was flat out not good at it, but writing and research projects could be worked on when I had the acuity for it. I think I took a zero-publication year somewhere in here, and yeah I generally took a productivity hit. I wasn’t a stellar collaborator or colleague, and I knew it. I missed some key events and meetings (I missed an entire SIPS conference one year where I was holed up in my hotel room, curtains drawn…).
But the weird thing is that in a lot of ways I was able to fake it and hide it. My closest friends and family knew something was up. Basically my whole department knew I had hit my head over the summer but was more-or-less coping (I mean, come back from summer break with a shiny new 3 inch scar on your face and see if anyone fails to notice…). But casual acquaintances and colleagues probably thought I was a little flaky and mercurial, like an absent-minded professor type. Little did they know that my mind was literally absent, in ways that weren’t entirely normal. Case-in-point of this weird juxtaposition: a high point was SPSP 2019, when my daughter flew with me and we stayed with grad school friends in Portland and they got to see me go on stage to accept the SAGE Young Scholar Award, given largely for work accomplished prior to the head knock. No reason for anyone to even suspect that while I was on that stage, I was still dealing with lingering migraine postdrome (think of it like a migraine hangover) from a migraine I got en route to Portland the day before. High point of my research career, and I mentally wasn’t all there for it.
I continued doing the “nah I’m fine whatever” routine for a while until it just wasn’t working (note to anyone in a similar boat: don’t do this). In January of 2019 or so, a full 18 months after the initial head trauma, I applied for some disability leave. Formal listed reason was concussion and migraines, but that doesn’t really capture the whole depth of shittiness I was wallowing in. Concussion-migraine-depression is a good example of an interaction: each on their own is bad, but all three is QUITE BAD INDEED. My symptoms had been progressing quite nicely (December 2018 IIRC was pretty okay), but like I said none of this is linear. And the lows were too low to do my thing consistently well. Early January wasn’t good. The whole leave application process was a pain in the ass. I had to get paperwork from my head doctor giving my prognosis 6 months out, then that had to go to some university decision makers or other. And evidently I was basically not supposed to not do university stuff until the final decision came in. So I avoided campus and department events, which to an academic means missing a chunk of your social life too. So if you’re a depressed acadmic and you get cut off from a lot of your social contacts, that ain’t fun. The doctor’s note came in, noting the progress that had been made and making a general guess as to what the next six months would look like.
I had a meeting with a person I won’t name at my former university. This person, door closed, told me that my doctor’s note did not indicate a severe enough disability to warrant temporary leave. And I vivdly remember him then directly accusing me of lying about my medical condition (“you are either lying to me or lying to your doctor”). I explained the nonlinear nature of these things to address what seemed to be confusion between his perception of my symptoms and my doctor’s prognosis, he said it wasn’t that (perhaps he was, unbeknownst to me, an expert in concussions and migraines). When I later brought this up with him in writing (he left the lying accusation out of his meeting summary email), he offered a vague nonpology (“not my intention to imply…”). When I still later brought it up in a meeting with further-up-the-chain admin, he denied his words entirely, and the Associate Dean of Faculty shrugged it off as (in his words) “a he-said-he-said.” At that moment, I knew it was time to find a new job. Preferably in academia, but who knows with the market these days? Living with a disability like this is tough with support; it’s not tolerable without. Cue depression intensifying. Not fun to realize you’ll have to leave a home and friends you love, as well as a department you’ve put a lot of yourself into over the years.
The concussion continued to clear up, albeit nonlinearly. Pharmaceutical intervention and therapy helped immensely with the depression. And as all of this cleared up I went back to work rebuilding my life. It was bumpy and nonlinear, but progress was made. I’ve now got a good track on things. The fog’s gone. I now keep a pretty stringent routine that helps keep stress and other migraine triggers in check. I wake up early, try to get in some exercise before the kids are up, manage my working hours and don’t beat myself up over little things. I meditate regularly. I try to (believe it or not, lol) steer clear of too much social media drama. I’m pretty deliberate about what projects to jump on so I don’t get overcommitted. And I’m IMMENSELY grateful to be in a position of privilege (tenure, white guy, great family and friends, kick ass new job) where I can manage these things. My new circumstances offer me the flexibility to build the routine that keeps me stable and healthy and happy. Lots of circumstances wouldn’t.
In the big picture I think I’m now on much stabler ground than I had been on prior to all of this, so all’s well that ends well. Managing fallout from concussion-migraine-depression leads one to make a lot of changes in life that are just generally healthy and positive. But it took like 3 fucking years to get here. I don’t think there’s any real lasting damage still lingering from the concussion, and my migraines are better managed now than they ever were before. I feel incredibly fortunate that my decision to leave my previous job coincided with an opening at what is basically my dream job. That could easily have gone otherwise. Most importantly, I can be present for my kids in ways that I wasn’t for a couple of years there. They’re awesome little goofballs. And my wife Drew isn’t doing all the heavy lifting anymore, for the kids and for me.
I initially thought of writing this concussion post a year after the initial injury, just to mark the anniversary. But I wasn’t better yet. Then two years later. Still not fully over it. At long last, I think the skies are clear enough that I felt comfortable enough to open this up beyond just a few “in the know” folks. Huge thanks go out to all the family and friends who helped out over the bad years...you know who you are! Jazmin Brown-Iannuzzi and Christal Hirsch really stepped up and helped out in different ways back in Kentucky, and I’m eternally grateful. When COVID clears and we can visit the states again, stops in Lexington and Charlottesville are in order. I hope that I can offer that kind of support to any people in my life who hit these kinds of speedbump-brick-walls. And I hope to never be the kind of anti-support I unfortunately experienced from some other people. But I don’t hold any grudges or bear them any particular ill will. Concussions and migraines are kind of spooky and weird and tricky to understand, even as one who has them. I can totally see how it might be tough to believe someone’s self-described symptomology and a prognosis of improvement in the face of inconsistent day-to-day results. Noisy data are tough to interpret. I wish these people greater insight, compassion, and tolerance moving forward.
Back to hockey: Connor Timmins is only averaging about a dozen minutes of ice time per game. He’s fallen down the depth chart, and he shows some clear signs of having missed a crucial year of development. He got derailed, and may never become the player it looked like he was becoming. But dammit, he’s there. He’s beating a scary injury and contributing to an all-world team alongside some superstars. I can relate. When he’s on an Avalanche team that wins it all (this year or next, book it chumps), I’ll be cheering like hell as he takes his lap with the Stanley Cup. He’s more than earned it.
First ballot Hall of Famer Patrice Bergeron