
I WAS asked to talk about my battle with concussion in this column and when thinking back to how bad things got at one point, it caused me to develop such bad anxiety to the point where just going out to have a beer with my mates was a real struggle.
It was just the fact that everything that I did brought on the symptoms I'd suffer from the concussion. I was just scared to do anything to trigger it. It got to the point where I had to quit my job. I was working in my trade as a boilermaker but I just couldn’t function to do that anymore. When I had to stop working in my trade and then went to study personal training, even just to try and read books and study, and get through a day as a student was really hard as well.
It was just such a slow, long grind to get through every day. I'd liken it to when you'd walk outside and you would know it's a nice day with the sun shining and everything, but for me that would all be blanketed by this fog which would dull all my senses. It dulled my smell, I had really bad hypersensitivity to light so couldn’t stay in the sun or it would hurt my eyes and I'd get bad headaches which turned into migraines.