Keep Your Head in the Game: Dealing with Concussions

07/07/2023

Keep Your Head in the Game: Dealing with Concussions

There’s room for all of you, and for everything you experience—the grim and the glorious, the wounded, wounding, healing and healed.
Hiro Boga, writer, teacher, business strategist

Summer often brings shifts in programming, enrollment, and staffing. Ensuring you’re up to speed on health and safety issues helps you make an informed and rapid response. The Exchange Essentials "Health and Safety First Aid Kit" covers a range of topics, from concussions to head lice. I’ve honestly scratched my head three times since writing this, so we’ll skip the lice and focus on concussions instead:

According to the Centers for Disease Control, “a concussion is a type of traumatic brain injury, or TBI, caused by a bump, blow, or jolt to the head or by a hit to the body that causes the head and brain to move rapidly back and forth. This sudden movement can cause the brain to bounce around or twist in the skull, stretching and damaging the brain cells and creating chemical changes in the brain.”

This can and will occur without any visible signs of injury. The article notes, “Symptoms aid in the diagnosis of a concussion and since infants and toddlers cannot describe their symptoms, it makes it difficult to know that something is wrong. Thus, it is imperative that caregivers and parents be as descriptive as possible with explaining [to a doctor] the activity that resulted in the injury, as well as describing any behaviors exhibited by the child that are atypical for that child.”

Following a concussion, children’s brains especially need both cognitive and physical rest. The article continues, “The key to returning to daily activities is that any time an activity causes a recurrence of symptoms of the concussion (headache, fatigue, irritability, and so on) the activities need to stop to allow more time for healing.”

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