Daily headaches common in soldiers after concussion

Let me give you some hope here. If you have TBI you'll find it helps.

Before doctors knew anything about traumatic brain injury, I had one. I was 4. My parents brought my brothers and me to a drive-in movie. There was a playground for little kids like me and another one for older kids. Well, I snuck away from my brothers, climbed the big slide and got scared being up that high alone. A kid behind me wasn't about to wait any longer, so he shoved me. The problem was, I didn't go down. I went over the side. Head first on concrete, my oldest brother thought I was dead. My scull was cracked all the way around and I had a concussion. Making a long story short, no one really connected what came next after that night.

I started to have problems with my speech. They sent me to a therapist. I couldn't remember things as easily as I did before, so I got frustrated with everything and got yelled at a lot by my parents.

That was then. I learned to play with my memory so that I could remember things. Headaches come and go even now, almost 50 years later (yes, I'm that old.) The therapy helped with my speech except when I get excited, I talk too fast. While I can read anything, I have a hard time spelling, but all that is easy to deal with.

The trauma of that night was another story. That was harder to overcome but I'm not afraid of heights anymore.

TBI is not the end of anything except the past. When you think that each day we change a little bit just living a normal life, that isn't so hard to understand. We adapt and change with what happens in our lives. That's the human spirit. Don't give up. Work on getting better with your therapist and have some patience with yourself.

Once all of these experts understand that PTSD and TBI are only connected to the event that caused both, they'll be able to treat each one differently. I don't have PTSD but as my body had to heal from the injury, my mind had to heal from the event itself. Oh, heck, maybe back then I had mild PTSD too but they didn't know anything about that either.

Daily headaches common in soldiers after concussion
By Kerry Grens
NEW YORK | Fri Mar 23, 2012 6:04pm EDT
(Reuters Health) - One in five soldiers who returns from Iraq or Afghanistan having suffered a concussion develops chronic headaches that occur at least half the days of each month, according to a new survey.

Army researchers examined nearly 1,000 soldiers with a history of deployment-related concussion and found 20 percent had suffered the frequent headaches diagnosed as "chronic daily headache" for three months or more. Of those, a quarter literally had the headaches every day.

Concussion is considered a mild traumatic brain injury and is commonly followed by headaches. But little was understood about how many military personnel were experiencing the intense head pain daily -- or close to it -- for months on end.

"In general we know that chronic daily headache is itself one of the most debilitating forms of headache...and can sometimes be difficult to treat," said Major Brett Theeler, the study's lead author.

To gauge how widespread the problem is, Theeler, a doctor with the AMEDD Student Detachment, 187th Medical Battalion, Fort Sam Houston, Texas, and his colleagues surveyed 978 soldiers who had been deployed in Iraq or Afghanistan.
read more here