Just going to come in here to make a plug for concussion testing—not just going to the ER to have them tell you if you have a concussion or not, but finding a sports medicine clinic or something of that nature in your area which offers ImPACT testing (especially if you’re able to go get a baseline before something happens to your head).
I had a headfirst fall when I was thirteen (freak accident, my horse’s front end pretty much collapsed) that I have absolutely no recollection of to this day. My trainer was with me in under thirty seconds, so if I blacked out it was only for a moment. I ended up going for concussion testing at the sports medicine concussion clinic here (which is one of the top clinics in the US, if not the world—they treat all our NHL/NFL guys too) a few weeks after I fell on the recommendation of the ER doctor who had diagnosed my concussion, initially thinking that they would clear me, only to be told after the testing that the fall had impacted my short-term visual memory. They told me I shouldn’t ride yet and that I should come back in a month to see if it had improved.
One month turned into four months, and when I went back to be tested again, there was absolutely no change to my results. I was told that the damage might be permanent, because if it wasn’t improving after that period of time with the brain plasticity of an adolescent, there was a decent chance that it was going to stay that way (and, while I haven’t been tested since, I’m fairly sure it’s the exact same way that it was then—I’ve found a lot of workarounds like saying things out loud, but I can’t just read something in my head and remember it easily anymore). At the end of that appointment, the doctor said (paraphrased) “I want to tell you that you should never ride again, but I know you won’t listen, so please wear a helmet, don’t jump anything for a while, and try not to fall off.”
Unfortunately I never had a baseline test so they couldn’t use that as a comparison, but they knew enough about normal score distributions to infer that mine pointed to a head injury, not my baseline state. My parents absolutely never would have let me ride again had the doctors not given me the okay (even if it was a conditional one), and even now as an adult, if I ever come anywhere near hitting my head, I will be marching into that concussion clinic for an assessment before I get back on a horse, not just subscribing to the “wait two weeks and you’ll be fine” adage that people throw around.
In some ways I’d say I’m lucky that that is the worst injury I’ve ever had from a fall, but… not something to mess around with in the slightest and I’d take my bruised ribs from getting lawn-darted over that any day. The ER said I had a “mild” concussion but the memory effects in combination with the psychological ones have very much shifted the trajectory of my life and it pains me to see people be cavalier about head injuries (though I will acknowledge that I’m spoiled by our concussion clinic and wish everyone had access to it).
