This is something I do periodically on all my shows as the seasons progress, changes occur in our annual cycle of cultural awareness. It’s football season again and kids are going back to school and so we have a lot of young athletes in a variety of sports becoming injured right now and experiencing, hopefully only soft tissue injuries, but one injury in particular has gained a lot of attention over the last 12 months or so basically because the National Football League, the NFL has been focusing so greatly on the effects of concussions to their players. These guys are hitting each other hard, banging helmets together.
You know, helmets protect your head from getting cracked open but the brain’s still sloshing around in there and so we’re getting what are called coup, contra coup injuries where they slam into someone and the brain slams forward into the front of the skull and then they back up and they stop moving and the brain sloshes up against the back wall of the skull. What happens is that you get bruising of the brain and you get knocked out, you get your bell rung and whatever, you get birdies whistling around flying over your head like you do in the cartoons. Whatever the case may be, whatever you want to call it, and concussions are a serious problem especially when you have multiple concussions, concussion after concussion after concussion. That damage starts to build up over time and starts maybe to cause noticeable deficits in patients. This is a problem the NFL is addressing but it starts earlier than the National football League. It starts at younger age, middle school, elementary school and high school sports where students are banging their heads together even then and there are some pretty strong and pretty big high school players out there where they’re just banging into each other.
If you’re a nurse in a hospital facility, if you’re a nurse in an ER, if you’re a nurse in a physician’s office, this is that time of year where you should be refreshing your knowledge of head injuries and assessments of head injury. Talking to your colleagues about how many of these types of problems they’ve seen, maybe even contacting your local sports authority. It might be a local high school team, maybe a local college team, to talk to some of their trainers. There are specific things that trainers- and these are usually physical therapy or physiology trained trainers on the sidelines that they are trained to do some specific things with regards to head injuries and the face masks on the helmets, removing the helmet, no removing a helmet. You should really take a little bit of time and educate yourself a little about what might happen if you have a high school head injury come in on an ambulance or maybe brought in by family or friends, how you would deal with and be prepared for this and other common injuries we see this time of year as people head back to school as high school and fall sports ramp up.
I would urge you to think about these kinds of things as different times of year progress and everybody’s regions a little different. If you live near a ski resort, you’re getting ready for those types of injuries, if you live in an area where it’s more beach traffic, guess what? It’s over, you can relax a little bit because the beach traffic is going to wind down a little bit at this point. Whatever the case may be, pay attention to the change of the seasons and think ahead about what you might likely see in your patient population based on what’s going on in your area.
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This article has been featured in the news segment of the Nursing Show episode Psychological Assessment Part 2: Defense Mechanisms and Episode 146
