That, he argued, was the difference between Jamie Carey and Steve Young, whose careers both succumbed to concussions the same year. Young had continually exacerbated his problem by returning to the football field week after week before his brain healed. In contrast, Chassay pointed out, Carey had allowed her brain to rest during her forced hiatus, suffered no concussions in the two years since the one that sidelined her at Stanford, and reported no symptoms for a full year. “That’s a major decision point: if she had symptoms, she wouldn’t play,” Chassay said. “Once those things are resolved, these people are not at risk. If I evaluated her and she were playing football, I would clear her to play.”
Before she could take the court for the Texas Longhorns, though, Carey had to agree to several conditions. She had to wear a customized mouthguard designed for greater shock absorption and she had to regularly undergo neuropsychological testing. On her own, she resolved to try throttling back in practices and to think twice before diving for loose balls in games.
The payoff for all those precautions was obvious to anyone watching Carey play for Texas. The newcomer nicknamed Grandma by all her younger teammates picked up right where she’d left off two years earlier, leading the longshot Longhorns all the way to the 2003 NCAA Final Four. That was only the beginning of a stunning comeback. Through three seasons at Texas, she forged a rugged reputation as one of the nation’s best and boldest college players.
Graduating to the Women’s National Basketball Association, Carey would need every bit of her trademark intensity against bigger and tougher pro stars notorious for pushing around even college All-Americans like her. Carey knew she’d be putting her brain at greater risk playing in a league where the women were three times more likely to have concussions than their male counterparts in the NBA. But at least she could take comfort in the knowledge that she had suffered no concussions since Stanford despite having absorbed hard hits to the head.
Through four WNBA seasons as backup point guard for the Connecticut Sun, Carey felt lucky to be living her dream. But it came at a cost. She had to learn to cope with headaches that were more severe than ever. She had to compensate for the mild dyslexia that developed out of her concussions. And she had to deal with odd symptoms like being unable to make out the numbers on the scoreboard or opposing players’ jerseys.
By the time Jamie Carey had quietly retired from basketball for a new career in sports management at age twenty-eight in 2009, Americans could not ignore the growing menace of concussions. No longer could concussions be dismissed as the natural fallout from collision sports like football and ice hockey, where head blows were as much a part of the game as tackles and bodychecks. They weren’t even limited to partial-contact sports like soccer and basketball. They were everywhere: wrestling, baseball, softball, lacrosse, gymnastics, volleyball, even cheerleading. No sport was immune, no player safe, from the impact of concussions.
• • •
Ten years after second-impact syndrome derailed his life, Brandon Schultz appeared in a 2003 CDC video designed to educate the public about the dangers of head injuries in sports. After several minutes of footage showing his continuing problems with coordination and cognitive tasks, Schultz looked directly into the camera and told viewers about his life now. His speech was halting and labored, as if each sentence took intense concentration to form.
“Before I was injured, I imagined that at twenty-six—the age I am now—I would be a college graduate and living on my own,” he said. “But my life is very different today. I am finally in college, but each day is a challenge for me. I use aids to help me with simple everyday activities—things most people do without thinking, like remembering what to do next and getting to class on time. And I currently don’t drive a car because I have vision problems and slow reaction times. My injury didn’t end my life, but it changed the choices I have today.”
Schultz then explained why he was making the CDC video: he hoped it would help prevent future catastrophic injuries like his. “I wish now that my school, family, and I could have had more information on concussion injury and some guidelines about when to return to play,” he told viewers. “With proper precautions, many concussions can be prevented and permanent injuries can be minimized.”
Unfortunately, his message didn’t travel far. Just a hundred miles south of his hometown and fully three years after his CDC warning, another Washington State schoolboy’s life was derailed by second-impact syndrome.
In the case of Zack Lystedt, a thirteen-year-old junior high school student in suburban Seattle, all the damage was done in a single game. Playing linebacker late in the first half, he chased down and tackled a ballcarrier streaking toward the end zone. When the two crashed to the turf, the back of Lystedt’s head was slammed into the ground. As he lay on the grass writhing in pain and gripping the sides of his helmet with both hands, the team’s coaches ran onto the field to check on their fallen player. After a few minutes, though, Lystedt pulled himself up and walked back to the bench, where he sat out the final three plays of the first half.
Because there was no athletic trainer or other healthcare professional at the game, it fell to the coaches to decide whether Lystedt was OK to return to play. They figured that the injury couldn’t have been serious since he had not lost consciousness, so they decided to send him back out for the very first play of the third quarter—just fifteen minutes after he had clearly sustained a concussion. From the way he was performing on the field, it initially looked as if the coaches had made the right choice. Lystedt played the entire second half, making tackles on defense and running the ball and blocking as a fullback on offense—getting jolted on almost every down. Late in the fourth quarter, with the opposing team driving for what would have been a game-winning touchdown, he forced a fumble at the goal line and clinched the victory for his team.
As everyone celebrated the win on the field, Lystedt’s father looked around for his son and then spotted him standing alone, shaking his head. Victor Lystedt hurried over and asked what was wrong. Zack moaned, “Dad, my head hurts really bad. My head hurts really bad.” Seconds later, the teen collapsed to the ground unconscious. As Victor sat next to his son waiting for the medevac helicopter to arrive, Zack came to briefly and said the last words he would utter for nine months: “Dad, I can’t see.”
Zack was airlifted to the very same Seattle trauma center where Brandon Schultz had been treated thirteen years earlier. Over the next ten hours, Lystedt had two surgeries to relieve the growing pressure on his brain. He spent a week on life support, three months in a coma, then a year at a specialized rehab facility in Dallas. It took nine months before he could utter a single word, thirteen months before he could move any part of his body, and twenty months before he could swallow food again. After he was finally well enough to return home to Washington, he still required round-the-clock care, grueling daily therapy, and a motorized wheelchair. Though he learned to stand up and sit down on his own, he could not take a single step or even move his right arm.
On February 13, 2009, twenty-eight months after his catastrophic injury, Zack Lystedt was in Washington’s state capital, Olympia, with his family to testify in support of a concussion-safety bill that would bear his name. With his curly dark hair cropped short, it was easy to see the long, jagged scars reaching from the top of his head to the backs of his ears. Victor Lystedt pushed Zack’s wheelchair down to the front of the hearing room and positioned it at the end of a rectangular table facing the legislators. After taking a seat between his wife and his sixteen-year-old son, Victor began his testimony.
“Twenty-one years ago today, my wife and I started our relationship as a married couple. We waited five years to have our child. We weren’t able to have any other children.
“Twenty-eight months and one day ago, Zackery was perfect. He was able to perform on the football field; he was able to perform academically, socially. He was everything a child should be to a parent.”
As Victor Lystedt spoke, his wi
fe, Mercedes, periodically dabbed tears from her eyes.
“Zackery was hurt and it was a preventable injury,” Victor continued, fighting to keep the emotion from his voice. “We didn’t know that when it happened. We know that now. We know that if Zackery had been taken out of the game, we wouldn’t be living the life we’re living.”
The Lystedts were lobbying for a law that would mandate the strictest concussion-safety measures in the nation: it would require that any youth athlete suspected of sustaining a concussion be immediately removed from play and then prohibited from returning without written clearance from a licensed healthcare provider trained in concussion management.
Zack Lystedt gave a human face to the hard facts presented that day by a parade of sports injury experts. One of them, Dr. Stan Herring, a rehab specialist who had treated both Zack Lystedt and Brandon Schultz, told the lawmakers that young brains are particularly vulnerable and need extra time to heal. “The same concussion I see in a middle school athlete can take four times longer to get better than it does in an adult or a professional athlete,” said Herring, a team physician for the NFL’s Seattle Seahawks and co-director of the University of Washington’s sports concussion program. Making matters worse, he explained, the young brain is especially vulnerable while it’s healing, and a second injury while it’s still recovering can lead to the type of catastrophic consequences that befell Zack Lystedt.
If the experts’ persuasive testimony and Lystedt’s heart-wrenching story weren’t convincing enough, there was a new study to hammer home the need for a law mandating proper recovery periods. The study found that a stunning 41 percent of concussed high school athletes were returned to action before their brains had time to recover. The new statistic underscored an unfortunate reality: coaches in every sport were ignoring published guidelines that defined when it was safe for a concussed athlete to return to play. What’s more, the study found that 16 percent of high school football players who lost consciousness were returned to the very game in which they were injured. That figure became even more alarming when the experts pointed out that only 10 percent of all concussions result in loss of consciousness. If coaches weren’t sidelining players who’d been knocked out, how could they be trusted to act on the subtler symptoms that characterize the vast majority of concussions?
A big part of the problem, the experts said, was that coaches have conflicting interests: pressure to win, pressure from kids to play, pressure from parents living vicariously through their kids—all of which compete with the pressure to protect the players in their charge. The proposed legislation was designed to take the responsibility out of the coaches’ hands.
In the end, the most compelling argument was made by Zack Lystedt himself. His words came haltingly and sounded as if they were emanating from a tape recorder slowed to quarter-speed. Laboring to form each and every syllable, he began by slowly raising his left hand in a wave and introducing himself to the legislators.
“I, for one, had my life change drastically,” he said, rhythmically tapping his left hand over his heart. “I flew back behind, and hit the back of my head. And it . . . it . . .”
Struggling to find the next word, he turned to his father for help. Victor Lystedt looked at his son and whispered the missing word. Zack nodded and turned back to the microphone to finish his sentence: “. . . gave me a concussion.” He paused, took a breath, and told the legislators why they had to pass the bill.
“I just wanna make sure this doesn’t happen to anyone else.”
On May 14, 2009, the Zackery Lystedt Law was signed by the governor of Washington. It was a landmark law, designed to help prevent a preventable injury. While head injuries can’t be completely removed from sports, brain damage can be minimized if players are prevented from having a concussion too quickly on the heels of a previous one.
The law was a good first step, but unfortunately it didn’t do much to change people’s attitudes. Americans liked their sports, especially football, the way they were. People who dared suggest safety reforms were often met with scorn and ridicule. Hard knocks were looked at as a rite of passage, a code of honor passed down from generation to generation. It was how kids learned to be tough. The macho culture permeating the country insisted that the way to deal with a bump on the head was just to dust yourself off and keep going as if nothing had happened.
Chapter 3
Head Games
Sometimes when he’s driving alone late at night, Whitey Baun will start to wonder how differently things might have turned out if he’d been less of a coach and more of a dad.
He replays the weeks leading up to that awful day seven years ago when his son’s life changed forever. Was the coach in him too anxious to get Willie back to play? Could he have inadvertently pushed his twelve-year-old son to ignore the lingering headaches from a concussion five weeks earlier? Did Willie mistake the daily questions about his headaches as badgering rather than fatherly concern?
Second-guessing every choice he made, Whitey thinks back to the concussion that started it all and reproaches himself for not taking the injury more seriously.
It happened during a peewee football game. Willie dove for the ball after an onside kick and collided helmet against helmet with an opposing player—directly in front of his dad. Whitey winced when he heard the loud crack. As he watched Willie stagger up off the ground and dizzily make his way to the sideline, Whitey thought, “Oh, that’s not good.” The EMT on the sideline checked Willie out and told Whitey, “He seems OK, but let’s sit him out for a while.” A few plays later, Willie seemed fine, so Whitey put him back in the game and forgot about the whole episode.
That afternoon, after the two had returned home and were playing catch in the backyard, Willie started to complain about a stabbing pain in the back of his head. Whitey was worried and took his son to the family doctor the next day. After examining Willie, the doctor diagnosed a mild concussion and then recommended that the boy take at least three weeks off and not even think of returning to play until the headaches had completely resolved. Whitey stiffened and thought, “You’ve got to be kidding me. He just got his bell rung.”
Even though he believed the doctor was being overly cautious, Whitey agreed to sideline Willie until the headaches went away. Over the next few weeks, Whitey regularly checked his son’s progress, asking simply, “How’s your head doing?” Whitey was surprised at how tenaciously the headaches hung on. He couldn’t believe that the lingering pain could be tied to a routine collision weeks earlier. Maybe, he thought, the headaches were caused by something else, like the stress of starting junior high school.
Four weeks after the concussion, Willie told his dad that the headaches had gone away. Just to be on the safe side, Whitey waited another week and then cleared his son to go back to practice. Willie seemed his normal self throughout his first week back—until the last drill of the last practice for Saturday’s game when he tackled a teammate. The hit didn’t seem particularly hard to Whitey, but then he heard his son scream, “Oh! Oh! My neck hurts! My head! My neck!” At first Whitey dismissed it, assuming that Willie had just experienced his first “stinger.” Whitey could remember the first time he’d experienced that excruciating, burning sensation from a pinched nerve in his neck. He’d thought, “Oh God, did I just break my neck? What the hell just happened to me?” The sensation had passed quickly and Whitey had gone right back to play. Now, as he made his way across the field, he wondered why Willie wasn’t bouncing back up. By the time Willie finally hauled himself off the ground and staggered back toward the sideline, Whitey’s stomach started to churn. He thought, “Oh my God, it’s another concussion.” At the hospital, doctors did a CAT scan and then reassured Whitey that there was no serious damage to his son’s brain. They suggested Willie rest and sent him home. Whitey breathed a sigh of relief.
The next morning when Willie came downstairs to breakfast, he was greeted by the family’s two schipperkes. “Those are cute dogs,” Willie said as the furry bl
ack balls of energy swirled around and between his legs. “Whose are they?”
Whitey and his wife, Becky, were stunned. “They’re our dogs, Willie,” Becky exclaimed.
Whenever Whitey thinks back to that morning, his stomach gets sick all over again. As he drives on through the darkness, he can’t stop himself from reliving other heart-wrenching moments from the days, weeks, and months that followed the second concussion.
Whitey remembers seeing Willie walk up to Becky and put his hands up to her face, his fingers running over her eyes, nose, and mouth. It made Whitey think of a blind boy trying to get a sense of the person in front of him. He knew then that Willie hadn’t just forgotten who the dogs were. Willie didn’t recognize his parents, either.
Whitey remembers how he and his wife took photos of Willie’s teachers and friends and then pasted them in a book. Without the book, Willie couldn’t keep track of anyone at school. He would arrive in the morning, learn everyone’s names, and then forget them by the next morning. Each day would be a replay of the previous. In a misguided attempt at humor, one of his teachers joked that it was as if Willie were living the film Groundhog Day.
The Concussion Crisis Page 5
