Neurons Loading

In my 20s, I hiked a few “14ers” — 14,000 foot peaks in Colorado. If you’ve hiked big summits like these, you know that they are hard work. Not only are your legs burning from the incline, but as you ascend above 12,000 feet or so, the air becomes quite thin. You mentally drag yourself… Continue reading

An optimistic mindset can boost recovery for a variety of conditions. In fact, a growing body of evidence suggests that believing a treatment will help you can have several positive effects on your physiology and healing. But as the popular refrain goes, recovery is non-linear. What they mean to say is that recovery can feel… Continue reading

Whether you’ve thought of it this way before or not, skydiving is a contact sport. And as the scuff marks on our helmets show, we get hit in the head — a lot. From striking the door to freefall collisions to hard openings, there are countless ways to end up with a head injury in… Continue reading

Last Wednesday, I had a (long-awaited!) appointment with a neurologist at the Mayo Clinic who specializes in autonomic nervous system function. “Autonomic” refers to the involuntary or automatic part of the nervous system. The autonomic nervous system controls body functions such as your blood pressure and heart rate. Based on my recent labs and ongoing symptoms,… Continue reading

The prednisone gave me a few good days. Unfortunately, it hasn’t had the lasting effects like we hoped. Although my initial injury was a sudden one, the journey has felt like a slow glide toward a chronic condition. From the beginning, it has been nearly impossible to predict whether each symptom will be short-term or… Continue reading

This past week felt like one of the most productive clinical weeks of the last 3 months. We learned a lot from the infusions, and the whole care team & I now seem to be operating from a similar set of assumptions: We also completed a lot of labs this week that so far show… Continue reading

Successes In the last three months, I’ve made a lot of improvements: And I’ve been utilizing the following treatments to help with this… Setbacks At the beginning of January, I had a checkup; my care team and I were optimistic about the trajectory of my recovery and the improvements I was making. I think we… Continue reading

I went to the ER, got a CT scan, and confirmed that I didn’t have a skull fracture or brain bleed (yay!). But, that’s about all that you get in the ER for a concussion. Concussions generally don’t show up on imaging tests. One explanation for a concussion is that the brain tissues stretch and… Continue reading

At the end of October, I was flying 8-way in the tunnel with my teammates. On one of the block moves (21, if you’re curious), I mistimed my move and was struck in the head with one of my teammates’ knees. I felt dazed, but continued flying; another teammate later told me that my eyes… Continue reading