A playground injury messed with my head

Friday, 11 September 2020

After a lifetime of sports injuries, concussion wasn’t what Brannavan Gnanalingam expected from a playground visit with his daughter.

Exactly one year ago, I got concussion. I’d like to say it was from doing something noble, like foiling a robbery, but no, I hit my head at a playground. If my brain hadn't been scrambled at the time, I'd have thought of a better excuse. But now I’ve told too many people to come up with an elaborate lie for print. I was following my daughter up a rope, and I didn’t duck, enough.

I wasn’t knocked out at the time. However, the next day I was in a foul mood. I put my mood down to a bizarre incident that day at the Botanical Gardens. We went for a family picnic. My child and a bunch of other kids were playing with some ducklings. One father galumphed his way over, pushing kids out of the way so he could show his kid the ducklings. He then stood on one. Luckily my child didn't see, but we left the other kids crying by the skip where the squashed duckling had been unceremoniously tossed.

Brannavan Gnanalingam is the author of six novels, including Sprigs, about toxic masculinity in high school, published this year.

* Dealing with running injuries: We can do this the easy way, or the hard way

Toby Morris, Brannavan Gnanlingam and Emily Writes at Wellington’s LitCrawl in 2016.

At work on the Monday though, I was a mess. Headaches, nausea, and an inability to concentrate. I’m bad at going to the doctor and I know I should be better at it, but doctor’s visits are so expensive when they end up being for nothing. I thought it probably best to get checked out though, and the doctor immediately diagnosed concussion. I had assumed concussion occurred in car crashes or sickening head clashes in rugby – not from simple head knocks.

It was chastening. Growing up, I was obsessed with sports, and in particular the Olympics. I tried my hand at many sports. I did gymnastics, until I broke my jaw. The Five Star gym didn’t include safety mats. I broke my nose, finger, and tore ligaments in my ankle playing cricket. Not at the same time, luckily. Although the injuries didn’t help, I wasn’t good enough, and cricket isn’t an Olympic sport. I was good at football – and have only dislocated my finger playing it – but being good, doesn’t mean great, and there were so many other, better players in the Hutt Valley, let alone somewhere actually good at football like Brazil.

As a last-gasp attempt, I did taekwondo at university, only realising that I’d chosen the North Korean variant, not the Olympic South Korean variant. I ended up in hospital only once from taekwondo, and that was from a bruise on my bone from my ankle to my knee. I was destined merely to be competent at a variety of sports and nearly completing my 10-trip card for A&E visits.

Here I was, though, with a potentially life-changing physical injury from thinking I was more nimble than I was. It wasn’t even a proper sport. It was, instead, the misplaced confidence of a (soon-to-be) middle-aged man.

The thing with concussion is it’s hard to know what it’s really like, unless you’ve had it. People don’t understand why your moods shift without warning. How you can wake up in the middle of the night with thoughts jumping like a Michael Bay film. How even minor head-knocks (putting kids in the car seat became a new hazard) set things off.

I was lucky. I used a variety of tactics to help the brain rest – staring at the sea, drinking rosemary or kawakawa tea, walking, and avoiding screens where possible became part of my daily routine. But none of those are guaranteed to help. My headaches stopped after a few months, and I think my personality hasn’t been too altered. My sleep though – something that I used to be smug about – remains a mess. I’d heard about other people – always friends of friends – who hadn’t been quite the same. Fellow-concussees grimly smiled in solidarity and we shared brain-repair tips.

As a writer and a lawyer, and I guess as a human being, I ought to protect my brain. When you’ve had an injury or an illness, it’s hard to remember what it was like before. But it’s also a reminder of how otherwise complacent I’d been beforehand. The kind of bulletproof-ness that comes from assuming one’s physical standing.

Above all, it was a reminder of how fragile everything can be, and how life-changing events can happen from small moments. It felt strangely prophetic that I’d enter 2020 with a grim reminder of how fraught our existence can be, how everything we hoped for or assumed could be upended by our body’s frailty.

This is the first of a new fortnightly column for Wellington lawyer and novelist Brannavan Gnanalingam.