I’ve been blogging on closed head injury, the kind of brain injury I sustained in January 2000, since 2009. Recently, I was prodded rather strongly to write a book on the subject, and so I gathered together my blog posts and along with Greg, came up with a structure for such a book. I asked and received feedback from another person with traumatic brain injury to get the perspective of part of my intended audience, made some changes, rewrote the intro, and rewrote it again. Intros are hard!
And now, finally, the book is being edited.
To be published just in time for the conference being supported by the NHL (National Hockey League) called “Keep Your Edge: Hockey Sports Medicine in 2012” to be held in the Toronto Marriott Hotel, Eaton Centre. On Day Two, the Conference will host a concussion symposium, which my certified athletic therapist will be attending (and how I came to know about the conference). Concussions are front and centre in professional hockey’s injury roll this year. The NFL (National Football League) started recognizing and addressing this serious issue years before the NHL and other Canadian hockey organizations did. But now the issue has snowballed into the public consciousness, and the powers that be are taking it seriously.
However, of far more relevance to the general public – aside from losing their favourite hockey player to head shots and concussions – are the usual causes of brain injury: car crashes and slips and falls. Yet that remains unrecognized by the public. I’m hoping though that the attention being paid to hockey players will spread out to recognition of how non-hockey players are injured and that my book will help shine a light on this huge societal issue, for right now brain injuries (which are what concussions are) are where cancer was before Terry Fox ran his daily marathons and galvanized the public into facing that scourge and the medical community to seriously researching diagnostic techniques and effective treatments.
