‘I can POWER THROUGH this’
Headaches, nausea and fogginess persist for former moguls skier forced to quit at 18
CALGARY • A mother’s intuition told Kelley Korbin her daughter was hiding the truth about the concussions she suffered as an up-andcoming skier on the B.C. moguls team.
But with her eyes trained on the next competition, Sophie McGregor refused to consider hanging up her boots to protect her brain.
“She was making light of it,” Korbin says from West Vancouver. “She didn’t have any big falls. She just had a few little hits of her head on the snow. By that point, it didn’t take much.”
Despite incapacitating headaches and persistent nausea, McGregor kept skiing over bumpy mogul fields. All the while, her mother gently probed and incessantly worried about a bright, bubbly girl who suddenly seemed anything but.
“I said I was fine, but I was forgetting entire days, and living with serious headaches,” says McGregor, who admits to self-medicating with up to eight extrastrength Tylenol a day to manage the pain. “I definitely shouldn’t have been skiing, in retrospect. But at the time, I was like, ‘I can just power through this.’ My coach was being supercautious and kept asking me how I was doing. But I just kept on lying.”
The predicament in the McGregor-Korbin household is hardly rare, according to Toronto neurosurgeon Dr. Charles Tator. Young athletes often try to hide their symptoms from parents, coaches and teachers for fear of having to sit out.
Some, like McGregor, have designs on representing their country, perhaps one day qualifying for the Olympics. Others are chasing lucrative university scholarships. Some just can’t imagine life without the sport that has served as the backbone to their social life, their self-esteem — their everything.
“It plays out in my office almost every week,” Tator says. “There’s a real incentive to keep playing and not remove yourself from the game to allow your brain to recover.”
The cumulative damage of repeated concussions finally forced McGregor to retire from mogul skiing at age 18. All along, her parents and coaches insisted on her seeing doctors and specialists for her symptoms. All along, she minimized the situation — even to the professionals.
But she finally reached the point where she’d had enough.
“What do you want to do when you grow up?” her neurologist asked after what she believes was her fifth concussion.
“I think I might want to be a doctor,” she replied.
“Then you’ll need your brain for that.” Case closed. Now 19, McGregor attends Quest University in Squamish, B.C. Headaches, nausea and a general fogginess continue to be part of her daily reality without regular Botox treatments and other medication.
“It’s totally my fault for how I handled my concussions and recovery. I’m embarrassed to talk about it now. I’m embarrassed about how I handled everything.”
Korbin understands why her daughter chose to conceal the severity of the problem. She only hopes McGregor one day reaches a point where her concussion symptoms are a thing of the past.
“With a brain injury, it’s the unknown,” Korbin says. “As a parent, it’s very scary — very frightening that you don’t know the future for her.”