CONCUSSION KILLED MY SON
Read a mother's harrowing story in sport's most urgent issue
CAE TRAYHERN was famous in the rugbyobsessed south Wales colliery village where he grew up. Handsome, outgoing and a gifted rugby player renowned for his bravery on the field, Garndiffaith’s favourite son fulfilled his childhood dream when he moved down the valley in 1997 to pull on Pontypool’s red, white and black hooped shirt for the first time.
He was just 19. Fourteen years, 178 games — 54 as captain — and ‘at least’ 11 concussions later, Trayhern hung up his boots for the last time, a legend at a club that 30 years earlier produced the famous Wales and Lions front-row trio of Faulkner, Price and Windsor. Cae Trayhern was Ponty through and through.
On June 10 this year, on a warm summer’s afternoon, Trayhern took his own life. His distraught mum Althea and her husband Paul found him, alone, in his house in Blackwood. He was just 37.
A young man with seemingly everything to live for, Trayhern’s life spiralled helplessly out of control in just four years after retiring from rugby. He had become devoutly religious, was unable to sleep, suffered severe memory loss and saw visions of Jesus. The once bubbly leader of men had become a recluse in his own home.
‘Cae’s personality changed completely after he stopped playing,’ his mother Althea tells The Mail on Sunday. ‘He began to lose control, his workload got on top of him and things started unravelling. He was losing control and afraid.
‘Cae had always done OK at school without excelling. Then, all of a sudden, he started reading the Bible and was able to quote from every part of it. I was shocked. It was as if one part of his brain was compensating for what was going or gone. It was really strange.
‘He knew something was going on in his head. He said to me, “Mum, there’s something going on”. He’d come to my house crying and saying, “I can’t cope”.
‘He became more and more isolated. Cae was changing and I knew he’d had all those concussions. If we weren’t watching and he got a concussion, he wouldn’t tell us. It was just part of the game for him.’
A fitness fanatic who did not smoke, take drugs or drink to excess, Trayhern was an organised, diligent and compassionate young man who bought his first house at the age of 21 and worked as a gas fitter before suffering a radical personality change in what turned out to be the final years of his life.
Althea has no doubt his brain was irreparably damaged by the head injuries sustained during a career where he put his body on the line every week as an openside flanker who played once for elite Welsh franchise Newport-Gwent Dragons.
‘We used to go to watch him play whenever we could,’ says Althea. ‘When he was concussed, even at the time, I would think, “Oh my God, how can he come out all right after this? Is that natural for people to be unconscious one day and then all right the next day?”
‘It always bothered me. It was terrible watching sometimes. One time when he was playing for Birmingham he needed to be airlifted to hospital after being knocked clean out. I wanted to get on the field but my husband held me back. To see them with the ambulance around him... oh my God, it was terrible.
‘People ask me, “How much of a role do you think concussion played in Cae’s death?” And I have to say I think it played the most significant role. I’m not saying it was 100 per cent the cause but it was definitely a contributing factor. There’s no doubt the concussions he suffered when he was playing were the biggest factor in his death. I will bang on about that until the day I die.
‘That answers everything for me: why he was the way he was, how he was getting worse, how he realised there was a problem, everything.’
Today, Trayhern’s family are convinced he suffered from the degenerative disease Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) found in the brains of dozens of deceased American football players and former football players, including former England international Jeff Astle, who died suffering from early onset dementia linked to repetitive head injuries.
But, unlike in the United States, where advances in medical science have seen more than 100 former NFL stars — including Mike Webster, Frank Gifford and Ken Stabler — posthumously diagnosed with CTE, there remains very little understanding in the UK of a disease once referred to as punch-drunk syndrome.
‘I’m not looking for blame, I’m looking for a reason for what happened to my son,’ says Althea. ‘CTE explains it. I understand mental illness can be sparked by any number of things, but it wasn’t like that with Cae. There didn’t seem to be any reason for his decline.
‘Two weeks before Cae died he was assessed by a team of mental health experts. I raised my concerns with one of the ward nurses at the unit that Cae had had all these concussions when he was younger. I raised them with the coroner later on. But no-one listened. Anyhow, how could they find something [CTE] when they don’t even know what they’re looking for?’
With only two neuropathologists in the United Kingdom trained to identify CTE, and no test currently available for people while alive, they found themselves unable to prove their suspicions as the coroner last week found the cause of death to be ‘asphyxia’.
No autopsy was carried out to examine Cae’s brain for signs of damage. His mother adds: ‘It’s a shocking state of affairs when you have people suffering in this way and yet no-one is taking it seriously enough to even formulate a test that can be done to check for CTE in players playing today.
‘There are scans for every part of your body, but when it comes to the most important part of your body
— your brain — there is nothing at all. It’s scandalous really. I firmly believe Cae could just be the tip of the iceberg.’ Althea has no intention of following in the footsteps of other affected families such as the Astles, who set up the Jeff Astle Foundation in memory of their late dad.
Having lost her first son Shane aged 26 in a car accident 20 years ago, Althea has now lost her youngest, Cae.
But she does have a clear message for sport’s core of highly paid doctors who continue to deny a link between head injuries and CTE.
‘The only reason I’m talking now is because I am so convinced there is a link there and a link between Cae’s concussions and his suicide,’ she says.
‘I don’t think concussion is like rebooting your computer. I think it’s like killing part of the information you’ve got in that computer. I’ve lost my best friend as well as my son.’