Image: Canva.
It happened on the day of the quarter finals in my first season playing AFL. I was running into the forward fifty with the ball in my hands when my opponent grabbed my arms and locked them against my body. I felt my feet lose contact with the earth as my face drew towards it. With no ability to break my fall, my head hit the ground.
Panic.
Confusion.
Terror.
The pain that came about in that moment has never left me.
At twenty-six, I had thought I was too old to play. I’d never had the chance when I was younger. I’d been told my whole life that football was for boys. Except now, in 2020, I saw women on TV, on my news feed and at my local oval, playing the game I loved. Finally, it seemed that football was very much for me.
That night, I sat in the emergency room of the hospital with my parents. We accepted the doctor’s diagnosis and the medication that promised to keep the vomiting at bay. We listened when they told us an MRI would be unnecessary. And we listened when they repeated the word concussion. The word felt too small. Concussion. From what I knew of it, from what I’d heard, this couldn’t be it.
Concussion. The word felt too small.
In the weeks that followed, I lay in bed unable to tolerate the sights and sounds outside my room. The world had become too bright, too loud. I wore earplugs in bed. I wore sunglasses and a hat as I limped to the kitchen. I cried. I consumed painkillers like they were lollies. I held an icepack to my head as the pain and the feeling of pins and needles took over.
When I asked my doctor why I wasn’t recovering, they told me it would take a couple of weeks. And with that, they’d set a timer.
I held onto it. Checked it daily. Two weeks passed with little change, and then a month. And then several more.
My doctor told me a brain scan was unnecessary, repeating the words from the hospital. They told me the pins and needles were from anxiety. They said too much and too little that I lost any semblance of hope.
Eight months later, I was in as much pain as I’d ever been. I went to see a new doctor and they ordered an MRI—the first I’d ever had. And then, they found it. The thing they’d all missed. I had a concussion, that was true. But there had been a bleed. Sitting on my left temporal lobe. A blemish on my brain, on my life. But against all odds, I had survived it.
The next three years were dedicated to recovery. I was admitted into a rehabilitation program. I left my job. I missed birthdays, weddings, holidays and countless opportunities to dance with my friends. I lost contact with my team. And I lost the last three years of my twenties. No one had told me it would be like this. How one concussion would upend my life. How easily people would dismiss me.
No one had told me it would be like this.
Once I started seeing it, I saw it everywhere. The lack of education and awareness. The medical misogyny. Players circumventing the concussion protocols in my own club. Players forced back onto the field too early. Before it happened to me, I had been willingly indifferent. But not now. Four years later, I am living with post-concussion syndrome. I’m not impartial. And I never could be. I have lived experience others do not. I live with trauma others might never be subjected to. But for the one in forty Australians living with a brain injury, this is personal.
In the months after the injury, as I attempted to piece my life back together, I tried in vain to grasp at the things that once belonged to me. Football had consumed my weeks. Playing. Watching. Obsessing over statistics. But now, I couldn’t bear it. Every collision, every injury, every close call. It felt like it was happening to me. Every tackle that resulted in a concussion felt like my own. Every instance was calling me back to the moment my head was thrown into the ground. And seemingly overnight, the thing that used to bring me joy and connection, had become the thing that caused me heartache.
Later, I’d be formally diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, but at the time I couldn’t rationalise my feelings. When I reached out to my team, my messages went unanswered in the group chat. I was forced to hear seasoned members of our team tell other players the doctors were being ‘conservative’ with the concussion protocol. As if my own experience was an anomaly, something that made me weak. Something that could only happen to me but could never happen to them. Like having my head thrown into the ground was proof I didn’t have what it takes. This sentiment was articulated back to me daily, from colleagues to well-meaning family members. ‘Why did you play football?’ they’d ask, incredulous, the subtext being ‘Well, what did you expect?’
Initially, in the eight months prior to being diagnosed with the bleed on my brain, I blamed myself too. I listened to the doctor who said women recover slower, particularly women with small bodies like my own. Sitting in the doctor’s office, with my body failing me, they picked at my frame, my gender, my sex, then told me nothing could be done. To them, I was just another foolish girl who thought she could play a man’s game. I’d put my career in jeopardy, isolated myself, encountered unendurable pain—and it was all my own doing. Except now I know it wasn’t.
I couldn’t bear it. Every collision, every injury, every close call.
My coach once told me concussions were just part of the game. The concussion protocols were merely a box-ticking exercise. An inconvenience, mostly. He’d grown up among a generation of men who wouldn’t walk off the field until there was blood, until there was the definitive sound of cracking bone. Until you were knocked out cold. And all in the name of bravery. As if there was nothing more heroic than playing through pain. As long as the ball flew through the sticks and the fans got what they came for.
It’s among this generation that the term ‘head knocks’ became so prolific. A term used by commentators in the safety of the commentary box. A term that serves to soften the reaction of spectators who want the game to be rougher, faster. How it used to be. It’s a term that makes grown men feel at ease. To make us all feel like what we’re watching isn’t, and could never be, a matter of life and death. The reporting would have you believe a head knock is a bump, a headache, a bruise. A concussion is a traumatic brain injury, one that some people never recover from. ‘Head knock’ insinuates something lesser, something insignificant. The term insults and frightens me in equal measure.
It’s a certain generation that is suffering the irreversible effects of repeated brain injuries. For years they returned to play at the expense of their health. Now players are retiring early because of the long-term effects of living with a brain injury. Paddy McCartin. Paul Seedsman. Angus Brayshaw. They’ve left the game because they finally know the truth. The likelihood of a life with persistent symptoms. And the frightening and inescapable reality of CTE—chronic traumatic encephalopathy—a disease associated with repeated brain injuries. The money, the fame, the glory—in no world are they worth living inside a body that will never again be your own.
We rarely hear about an injured player’s journey back to health. Often, the player on the offensive side of the concussion is the headline the media craves. What consequences will they face? How will this impact their team? Often injured players are heralded in the media for their ‘courage’ when subbed out with concussion. As if the terms courage and concussion are synonymous. And in many ways, they are. But not in the way the media tells it. There’s no valour in collisions and tackles in the game. The same way there is no bravery in a traffic accident or in a fall down the stairs. But there is courage in recovery. In undergoing years of rehabilitation, returning to work, regaining independence. Of stepping away from the game when your health demands it.
There’s no valour in collisions and tackles in the game.
I don’t know where we go from here. Medical advice is disjointed and inconsistent. Education is lacking, particularly at a grassroots level. The AFL says it has a strong ‘commitment to concussion research and management’ but concedes that ‘Australian [Rules] Football is a contact sport and head impact and concussion events can occur, as they can in all contact sports’. This concession appeals to those who consider concussions to be an inevitable, ever-present component of the game. And it’s a sentiment I refute. We need to do more. Players need protecting. I want to demand people pay attention, to ask them: Do you know what you’re watching?
However, my voice isn’t loud enough. My experience has been rejected as an outlier. My gender and amateur status are used as truths to dismiss me. But no matter the outcome, the game will always be different to me, and I want brain injuries to have no part in it.
Over four years have now passed since that football game. My recovery is ongoing, and I have come to accept there might always be things I can’t do because of the pain. Some things that might always be too hard. But I cling to the hope that change is coming and that my best days are still ahead of me.
