Impact to Insight: Wrestling With Life After a Concussion
“You are replaceable to everyone but yourself.”
-Helen Maroulis, Olympic Gold Medalist
After winning a gold medal in the 2016 Rio Olympics, Helen Maroulis suffered a series of concussions that challenged her ability to return to wrestling. She went from being at the top of her sport to nearly quitting the sport entirely. I started to research and learn more about Helen's experience after sustaining my own concussion. Her struggle with concussion symptoms and feeling unlike herself helped me realize how much her experience paralleled my own. Her story's vulnerability validated my experience and gave me the confidence to share my story. Even being worlds apart–Helen, a world-class athlete, and I, a college student–she changed my life.
The Injury
In September of 2024, I moved to Boston and started at Northeastern University. I was ready to dive headfirst into my college experience. I was taking mechanical engineering classes, working as a tutor, and returning to wrestling after taking a year off studying abroad. However, this bullet train that was my life would come to a screeching halt. Two weeks into the semester, on a peaceful fall evening at wrestling practice, I suffered a concussion that would upend my life.
I remember the blow to the side of my head, but it registered with nothing more than “Oh, that kind of hurt.” I didn’t get knocked out, and I was able to finish practice, but I felt slightly off on the bus ride home. I kept zoning out, and I felt a fuzziness in my head. I figured I was just out of shape. Once I got home, I noticed the bruises blooming across my face, but I brushed it off and went to bed.
At 3 am, I woke up paralyzed by terror, convinced I was going to die. I was so terrified I couldn't move, and any noise from the building around me sent shockwaves through my body. I didn’t fall back asleep and stayed curled in a ball. Somehow, I made myself get up for class. By noon, I knew something was wrong, so I canceled my shift at the tutoring center and went home. The light was bothering me, so I closed the curtains and sobbed in the dark for hours.
The following day, I was acting strangely, and my fellow engineers told me I needed to see a doctor. I insisted I was just tired. They said I was acting drunk and walked me to Student Health. There, I was diagnosed with a concussion and advised by the doctor to “stop everything.” So, for two weeks, that’s what I did. I didn’t go to classes or work or practice. I barely left my room because I was too dizzy most days to get out of bed or have a coherent conversation.
My anxieties started to grow, and I wasn’t getting any better. Every test and homework assignment I postponed was another boulder added to the pile.
The Effect On School
Despite my situation, I wasn’t in a position where I could miss any more school; engineers don’t miss class, concussed or not. Most days, I would wear sunglasses inside under the harsh fluorescent light, even in the windowless, basement-level classrooms. Everything that I had been able to do before the concussion felt a thousand times harder. Walking to and from class felt like running a marathon, and after school, I would collapse into bed and lie down for hours. Lectures felt seven hours long, and going to cacophonous dining halls was out of the question. Unsurprisingly, this is not a good way to learn about electron drift speeds and internal forces on beams. My academic advisor bluntly advised me to drop all my classes and go home to Colorado. I felt too invested in the school year to give up. Instead, I only dropped Calculus 3 and chose to stay in Boston.
I chose to drop the class the day before the midterm. I was sitting in class with a practice test in front of me. Halfway through class, another student leaned over to ask if I could figure out question five, only to find me nearly in tears because I had been trying and failing to read the first question for thirty minutes.
Because I was having difficulty doing math, reading, and writing, I had to take some unconventional approaches to finishing the school year. When I didn’t feel like I could look at the board anymore, I would put my head down on the desk and just listen to my professor like a podcast. Writing made me so tired that I would work for fifteen minutes on days I needed to do lab reports and then lie down for an hour. I had to recalibrate the expectations I had for myself. The victory was no longer about winning the match (making the Dean’s list) but wrestling all three periods (passing my remaining classes).
Recovery
After four weeks of blackout curtains and overwhelming nausea, I started physical therapy. At my first session, I struggled to simply recount my injury and symptoms. We began with monitored walking on a treadmill, and I struggled to walk for more than a couple of minutes without the room starting to sway like a boat on rough water. These mundane and yet merciless PT sessions were the turning point of my injury for one simple reason. The ER doctors had prescribed silence, stillness, and retreat. My therapist prescribed motion. In PT, however, I learned that my brain is a muscle. Just like any other muscle, it needs rest, but it also needs to be pushed. Atrophy is the real enemy.
We began small. Walking on a treadmill for fifteen minutes felt like walking on a cloud I could fall off of at any time. Doing eye movement exercises with a pen built an uncomfortable pressure in my head. But I was learning not to shy away from the discomfort but embrace it as if my brain was doing push-ups so that, eventually, it could do a bench press again. Besides the physical aspect, I was able to apply this way of thinking to the rest of my life; I started activating my brain, body, and mood. I began with vestibular exercises (for balance) to activate my ocular senses and help my brain retrain and recover.
Traditional concussion advice did not work for me. There is a limited amount of concrete information on how to treat head injuries. And concussion literature focusing on women is almost non-existent. Most sports and medical research is centered primarily on men, and while women have made momentous strides in athletics, we still stand at a disadvantage.
Women’s pain is often rationalized away, diminished, or ignored. Furthermore, with a concussion, unlike most other injuries, the pain is invisible but no less present. Light and sound became grating and painful, emotional instability, vertigo, and fatigue crippled my ability to function normally. But leaning into the challenge, even with small tasks such as tracking a pen with my eyes, helped me take an active role in my recovery. I had been completely consumed by everything I couldn’t do and it was driving me crazy. I still had difficulty reading, writing, and conversing, and so I disengaged from school and social life. Partly out of desperation and partly out of an overwhelming sense of ennui, I started to try things I’d never been interested in. I spent hours practicing makeup and hair techniques in the bathroom. Taking care of my appearance and working with my hands again sharpened the reflection I saw in the mirror to someone I recognized. I was becoming myself again.
A powerful lesson I learned is that progress is not linear. While I noticed improvements in my health on some days, other days, it felt like the sky was falling. I couldn’t eat because nothing would taste right, and I couldn’t listen to music because it felt like nothing was playing. Some days, I felt like a ghost, like somehow I had died and been left to haunt my dorm room while everyone else continued living. While friends laughed in dining halls, I couldn't enter for fear of a head-splitting migraine. Light seared my eyes; Sentences slipped through my fingers like smoke. I was told to shut down and retreat even further into the shell of myself.
My last session at PT was an important milestone; I got cleared to run. I was in the wrestling room the next day. Even though I sat and watched most of the practice, I felt a strong sense of accomplishment. I could be in a loud gym again. I could do a cartwheel. Being back on the mat was difficult. I could feel myself losing balance during stance in motion, and I was frustrated that my body wasn't responding to me the way it had before my concussion. But it felt so right to be doing the movements I had practiced countless times.
A week after my first practice, I got out of bed, and it felt like I had woken up for the first time in eight weeks and someone else had been in my body. I looked around and thought, “Who has been living in my house??” I spent the rest of the day purging the chaos – tossing wrappers, purging clothes, making my bed. I reached out to friends again, and every time, they would say, “This is the first time I feel like I’ve been talking to you.”
Lessons to Take Away
The concussion didn’t teach me resilience. It taught me that resilience isn’t grand moments of strength and power. It’s building back a little bit stronger every day. Dropping Calculus three felt like a failure until it became freedom. Sitting on the wrestling mat, dizzy but determined, wasn’t a victory. It was a vow: I will move, even clumsily. I will take up space.
Recovering from my concussion was exhausting and occasionally terrifying—part marathon, part tightrope walk. But there is an opportunity in every situation. Because a wrecking ball had leveled my life, I had the chance to build something better. Now, I architect my life differently, building breaks into my day to rest and avoid getting overwhelmed. I have returned to wrestling because I love the sport, and it makes me happy.
I take pride in knowing that everything I am doing right now in my life is something I have chosen. I am taking challenging classes in a new semester, but I look forward to stepping outside my comfort zone and growing as a student-athlete. I am back to wrestling and working on engineering design projects. Every time I show up, I know I’m there because I want to be there. Kindness and self-care can also mean rest and forgiving my body and mind when I know I’ve hit a limit.
Four months after my concussion, I am still trying to get to where I was before the injury. I get tired much more easily, and lights, sounds, and car rides still make me dizzy. However, I am filled with gratitude. Grateful for my family, who always stood by me. Grateful for my body that can still walk and wrestle. Grateful that I still have the opportunity to learn and pursue an education. Most of all, I will never take feeling normal for granted again. I may not be an Olympic champion like Helen Maroulis, but I did go three rounds against a hammer and didn’t get pinned. I know I have myself back, and I can tackle any remaining challenges with a clear head and a mind that is my own because I am not replaceable.
