She never knew an injury from soccer could keep her from her normal life – school, sports, activities, friends – for over three months.
Sophie Zaccarine, junior, got a concussion last soccer season on April 15 when she hit her head with an opposing player. She missed the rest of the soccer season and a majority of the rest of the school year.
“It was really scary,” Zaccarine said. “Honestly, it was the worst injury I have ever had by far, but it was also probably one of the worst times of my life because I’ve never really experienced anything like that. The hard part I think was the doctor can’t really predict how long it’s going to last because depending on how hard you got hit or where you got hit, everybody is different. They can’t tell you when you’re going to get better.”
The Center for Disease Control and Prevention website defines a concussion as a traumatic brain injury that can change the way the brain works. In Zaccarine’s case, her vision and balance were affected most. Her concussion prevented Zaccarine from doing anything besides lying on the couch for two weeks, and she took her last final of the previous school year four days before starting this school year, she said.
Zaccarine said it was especially discouraging and scary because she did not show signs of improvement until about two months after she initially got injured.
“My condition just didn’t get better for a really long time,” Zaccarine said. “Two months [after getting the concussion] was when we actually started seeing improvement. Previous to that, my symptoms didn’t change. At times, they got worse, but they didn’t get any better. And then after two months was when I kind of just decided for myself. I said’ its time to get better.’ I mean obviously telling myself that didn’t change anything, but that was kind of the mark where I started showing slow but steady improvement.”
Although it took around two months to show improvement, the first two weeks of the injury were significantly worse than any other time.
“For me, [the concussion] was pretty serious,” Zaccarine said. “And we didn’t even realize how serious until I just didn’t get better, but I couldn’t do anything. I literally mean anything. [My doctor] said physical activity was the absolute last thing to return to, and so basically I couldn’t do any physical activity apart from walking, but at first even that was hard. I couldn’t play my flute at all, I couldn’t do school work because the words didn’t make sense. I don’t know how to explain it, but it didn’t connect to me. I couldn’t listen to loud music. I couldn’t be in loud places in general. If anything was too bright, it hurt my head. For the first few weeks all I literally could do was lay on my couch and try to sleep.”
During those first two weeks, and even the whole two months when Zaccarine was showing no signs of improvement, she said she did not feel like herself.
“[My doctor] was trying to make sure I wasn’t depressed,” Zaccarine said. “He said it’s a good thing I’m not just an athlete because it tends to happen when it’s a person who really cares about sports and that’s really their whole life, and their athletic capabilities are gone, patients become clinically depressed. So he would make sure I wasn’t becoming clinically depressed. And I mean I don’t really know if I was depressed or not. Yeah, it was really depressing, and I was not myself at all for those two months, but I had my doctor saying, ‘you’ll get through it. For now, you just have to make sure you’re taking care of yourself.’”
Zaccarine also had support from friends, family, and her physical therapists.
“My parents obviously were there for me,” Zaccarine said. “I had several of my close friends come and visit me. It was mainly my best friend Kalyn, she was really great. The only time I would be able to see people would be if they came to visit me and I couldn’t do anything extravagant, it would just mainly be talking. I think my physical therapists were the ones that really helped me because they were telling I was not the only girl my age who was a soccer player that got a concussion. But it’s hard because you just feel alone because I never experienced [a concussion], and I wasn’t meeting with other people who were going through the same thing as me. Yes, they were all very supportive, but I still couldn’t help but feel isolated because there’s only so much that they can do, they can’t make you healthy again.”
After the first two weeks of being injured, Zaccarine went to physical therapy, but she said she still struggled for a long time in physical therapy.
“The first month and half or two months were really hard because as an athlete and musician, and since I care about school, not being able to do any of those things was really rough because I didn’t know when I was going to get better,” Zaccarine said. “So I couldn’t really stay positive. I was just doing the same things and still feeling just as bad. [My physical therapists] told me, ‘if you’re doing something and it makes your head hurt or your symptoms worse, you have to stop.’ They had to remind me a lot because you can’t push yourself too hard because that’s not going to make you better, that’s just going to set you back further.”
After those two months of no improvement, Zaccarine began to improve and was given more difficult exercises during physical therapy. She eventually graduated from physical therapy. Even though Zaccarine was recovered from the concussion, the injury directly impacted her whole summer, especially because she had to finish her schoolwork from April through final exams.
“I wouldn’t go so far as to say I didn’t have a summer vacation, because I did, but it was spent doing schoolwork,” Zaccarine said. “I was able to see my friends, but the only time that I felt like it was summer was a two week vacation with my family.”
Zaccarine said she became frustrated with her schoolwork because it was very difficult to be learning over the summer.
“It wasn’t just two and half months that I was really injured, it was everything after that as well. I would get frustrated because I was getting these grades that I know I normally wouldn’t have gotten just given the circumstances where I had to learn it so fast and because I couldn’t learn as well as normal,” Zaccarine said. “Also, coming into this year, some concepts, like in math or Spanish, that were learned last year that I didn’t learn carried in to this year. For my flute, I couldn’t play for three months, so that really set me back, and I’m still trying to catch up to where I was. It’s still kind of still ongoing.”
Although Zaccarine still sees her concussion impacting her life in some ways, she was able to recover and participate in cross country this fall, and she is planning on trying out for soccer again in the spring. She said, although difficult, her experience with such a serious injury made her learn to accept her situation for what it is.
“I really think that I’m a different person coming out of this,” Zaccarine said. “I think the biggest thing I learned was that some things are out of your control – and you have to accept that and make the best of what you can. I think that was really the main thing because I couldn’t control what was happening to me, and it took me a really long time to accept this. I think you just have to remain positive because something good will come of it. I’m not sure what good came from [my concussion] yet, but that’s what I would say. Also, [concussions] are more serious than you think, but life does go on.”