SPORT and the BRAIN (LINK)
May 7th 2008 21:58
Signature Tune
Here is Gwen's story - link above, with many thanks.
I'm thinking of doing a little series of posts about sports and head injuries, and about the NFL in particular. I'm not committing to it, because of school mainly, but I've had some thoughts kicking around in my head for a while that I think I'll write about. So let's pencil it in for now: Head Injuries and America's Gladiators.
Yes, I am a woman, but I also grew up as the only daughter in my family. My father is a football man, my older brother as well, and especially on Sundays, if I wanted to relate to most of my family, sports were necessary. It took me some years to become a true sports fan in my own right, but as an adult I came to love football, and then baseball, and then all sports.
But along the way, I became a trauma nurse, too. There are trauma nurses who love full-contact sports like football, but a lot of us have a hard time watching them. The first time I was turned off of football was the fall of 2000, when Curtis Williams, a safety for the University of Washington, sustained a spinal cord injury in a helmet-to-helmet collision while playing Stanford. At that time I had recently started working in trauma critical care and had taken care of many high quadriplegics and seen the devastating effects of these injuries. Curtis was a C2 quad and died just 18 months after he was injured, at age 24. Over time I took care of football players while working at Harborview, including a Seahawk who had sustained a career-ending head injury--his third head injury in 3 weeks, actually, which resulted in surgery to evacuate blood from his brain.
And so it continues - so do look it up, above your head.
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Comment by Rosemary
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Some stress is good, keeps you thinking and on the ball (no pun intended there), but surely the nurses and doctors must suffer burn-out after a while, specially when they're doing double shifts etc.
Comment by Fobzy
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Thanks for your views.
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Stronger helmets won't solve that much of the problen until the shock is absorbed other than by the neck; something akin to a helmet that is tied into a exoskeleton pad system, there is little hope of reducing those injuries.
Raven
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