Concussion alert for footballers
ELEVEN days of the worst hangover imaginable, then eight weeks of chronic headaches.
That was self-described weekend battler Andrew McGoff’s lot when dealing with a serious concussion this winter, and after that experience he wants all weekend football battlers to take head injuries seriously.
It started when playing for his North Wellington Rampage team in Capital Football’s ninth division in the middle of the year.
The 39-year-old headed the ball a lot that day, as centre backs tend to do in social football, and wore a strongly-struck freekick on the head.
But the real issues started late in the game.
It was 1-1 with about 10 minutes to go when he copped an elbow to the side of the head as he went up for a corner. Then, as he retreated to his centre back position, he tripped when attempting a header and was accidentally kicked in the back of the head as he landed on the ground.
‘‘I went to sit up and had blurred vision, dizzy as and just laid back down and tried to gather my senses,’’ McGoff recalled this week.
The two blows in a short space of time were particularly dangerous because of second-impact syndrome. That occurs when a person receives a second concussion when the first concussion has not yet fully healed. It can be fatal.
McGoff avoided the worst outcome, but still played the final five minutes up front despite the double head knock because his team didn’t have any subs.
He went home and felt ‘‘atrocious’’. Even knowing he had taken blows to the head, he was still unsure about what might be wrong with him.
It was a hot day and he didn’t normally play 90 minutes, but the lack of subs had forced his hand, so maybe it was dehydration and exhaustion.
But the headaches got worse by 3am on Sunday morning, and by Monday he was in a doctor’s surgery fairly certain he had a concussion.
‘‘She refused to call it concussion. She said to me at the time ‘it’s not concussion because you weren’t knocked unconscious’. I ended up having an argument with her because I had done the research on it, saying ‘you don’t need to be knocked out to be concussed’.
‘‘I was pretty annoyed about that, for the fact there was a real lack of education and quite an old-school approach.’’
After 11 days of nausea, dizziness and KEVIN STENT/STUFF headaches, his self-diagnosis of concussion seemed pretty spot on. The worst part of the eight weeks of headaches was not knowing when they would end.
He also regretted not telling people how much he was struggling, especially in those early days.
‘‘Probably the worst thing I could have done was hidden how bad it was from my wife because in hindsight, and it sounds like I’m being over-dramatic, but you don’t know what’s going to happen. I could have collapsed in front of the kids and then what?’’
What McGoff wanted to see was people, even the weekend warriors, taking head injuries seriously, although he acknowledged they would be hard to get through to.
‘‘It’s a really tough crowd, because there are a lot of guys who will just be like ‘walk it off, stop milking it’. For me, now that I’ve gone through it, I’m more likely to look out for it. That’s leaving it up to one guy to do it.
‘‘If they tell my team’s manager at a club meeting this kind of stuff, the chances he’s going to filter that down are minimal because he doesn’t probably see it as that much of a priority because he hasn’t suffered it himself.
‘‘That’s the million dollar question: how do you filter that down to Joe Bloggs playing in Masters 4 or whatever?’’