Wow, I never thought once in my life that I could manage to get a concussion from a small, yellow ball. I didn’t even get hit in the head with a racket. It was a tennis ball. Volleys are one of the fastest, hardest hits in tennis; it’s basically a serve on steroids, but you slam it while you’re at the net instead of hitting at the baseline. This is what did it for me; this is how I got a head injury in tennis. Imagine a college freshman female tennis player who is playing her second match of the season. She is probably nervous, right? She probably wants to impress the coaches, her new team and hopefully, win a few points. Well, it is sad enough to get your butt kicked in one of your first college tennis matches. Getting a concussion is just humiliating! My opponent just had to volley the ball right into my temporal lobe, didn’t she? The funny thing is that I played through the rest of the match, in denial that I could have actually gotten a concussion in tennis.
I am the only person I know who has managed to do something like this. I should have gotten the hint when my reaction time was about three seconds behind. I would go to hit the ball, and when I would swing, it would be way too late. After losing, I walked off the courts to laugh about getting slammed in the head by my opponent. “What would have really sucked is getting a concussion,” I said jokingly to one of my teammates. Can we say foreshadowing? After my match, I went to eat dinner with a few friends and I kept zoning off, repeating things, my head was throbbing and I was acting like a total airhead. Being my wonderfully worrying self, I went to a friend of mine who has gotten multiple concussions and I had her observe my pupils. “Um, your one pupil is way more dilated than the other,” she quietly said with concern. You are joking, I know you are. Sadly, she wasn't. This is one of the first signs of a concussion.
The next morning, I took a visit to the Athletic Training Room on campus. I told the athletic trainer who works with tennis players that I possibly had a concussion. We did some testing, and he asked me a few questions. Lastly, I took a concussion test, and guess who failed? Me. The college freshman who got hit with what my coach likes to call “a little, fuzzy, tennis ball.” I was told to rest, avoid technology, blah blah blah, then he said to avoid music classes if I had any. WUT?! I was a music major at the time. There goes my grades for my first semester of college. Turns out that studying music wasn’t really my forte, but that’s a different story. A couple of days later, I ended up in the hospital because I am stubborn and I tried going to a music class. Our lesson was demonstrated with piano chords: imagine a knife going through your head while your ears are ringing, then on top of that, your eyes are starting to blur. That was how I felt during class. I ran for my life out of that class and fell asleep for three hours in my room.
Thanks to two lovely friends who were checking on me, I was taken to the emergency room because one of my friends said I was “not OK.” She was right. Dilaudid became my best friend that day. I loved everything about life after my doctor put that in my IV. Life is good, I love everyone and everything.
Lesson learned? Use your head, but get it checked for possible concussion.
