Concussion is a big deal – even a mild one can cause major, lasting effects, it all depends on your individual brain’s ability to adapt and heal. I know, I’ve had one. And I still have fleeting moments where things don’t feel quite right, and my concussion was 2 1/2 years ago. Considered mild, the back hatch of my SUV came crashing down on me as I was getting my office laundry out of the back of the car (broken struts – always get those replaced!!) and I started feeling the effects within 30 minutes.
My head was fuzzy, then the left side of my head was “buzzing”, then came the headache. I kept working because I thought it would go away, and I had clients to see who needed to be treated. By the end of the day, my vision was blurry and once I got home, I was talking differently – I was blurting out things to my husband in a way I had never talked to him before. I was irritable. And I couldn’t for the life of me put a glass of water down on the counter without it hitting hard – my depth perception was totally off. I consulted a Neurologist friend of mine, and with his concern I saw my primary care doctor the next day. He did a full Neuro exam for concussion, and things were definitely “off”. He sent me for a CT scan of my brain, and thankfully everything was okay, no bleeding, but I didn’t “feel” okay. And I didn’t for almost three months.
Over that three months I was a totally different person – in all honesty part of it I was happy about: I was funny and I was very direct in my communication, I wasn’t afraid of offending people or saying the wrong thing, I just said what needed to be said. But the not so good: I would blurt out random things to people I didn’t know. And clients that I had been seeing for years, I was suddenly calling them the wrong name or didn’t know their name at all. It was embarrassing. I also had to REALLY concentrate on what my clients were saying because I couldn’t process their conversation and work on treating their body at the same time. It was so difficult. And I was tired at the end of the day. Very, very tired.
I finally started to feel myself around the 3 month mark. What really helped to turn my brain around from the concussion was NMT and cranial sacral therapy, for which Holly at our Studio provided. One benefit of Neuromuscular work is that it stimulates a different part of the nervous system to retrain your brain to not perceive the pain coming from muscular trigger points. W
ith concussion, it was helping my brain to reconnect with my body and to bridge the stimulus gap that had been displaced. I also had profound results from cranial sacral therapy as it reset the subtle, yet vital, cranial wave and cerebral spinal fluid flow between the brain and sacrum via the spinal cord. The cranial work also helped to realign the cranial bones that were shifted due to the impact of my SUV hatch. Every session I felt more and more “normal”, and I really attribute my recovery with those treatments.
If you’ve ever experienced a concussion, or if you do in the future, please consider Neuromuscular and Cranial Sacral work. It’s the healing hand your brain needs to feel whole again!