- Jack DiCola
Coming back from a significant injury is always difficult and, sometimes, it can even feel impossible. Physically, the rehab for any significant injury is a struggle that can push a person to their mental limits. For student-athletes, such as myself, physically healing is the easy part. Especially in a school as academically rigorous as Fieldston, catching up and keeping up with the work is more of a challenge.
This fall, I played on the Junior Varsity soccer team. During the fifth game of the season, I cut my head open when I went for a header and collided with another player. I shook it off and played the rest of the game, which in hindsight, was a bad decision. After the game, when the adrenaline wore off, I realized that something was wrong. My head was pounding, I felt nauseous, and I couldn’t concentrate. I went to the doctor and he told me I had a concussion.
For the first two weeks of my recovery, I was restricted from doing schoolwork, using computer screens, reading, or doing anything mentally taxing. Concussion protocol focuses on resting and getting healthy. The downside of this was that I was struggling to participate in my classes. I reached out to my teachers and tried to make a plan for catching up in each class, but it proved to be far more difficult than I expected. After two weeks of rest, I was able to start working again, but chipping away felt like a never-ending amount of work.
If I only had to make up the work that I had originally missed then this task would’ve been much more achievable. Yet, that was not the case as I also had to keep up with the current assignments of the class. As a result, I have been working myself into the ground for the last two months. During this period of time, I have sacrificed all non-academic activities such as hanging out with friends, spending time with my family, practicing lacrosse, and working out.
The hardest part to deal with was that when I finally caught up, I was severely sleep - deprived and mentally exhausted. I desperately needed a break, but instead, I was hit with a new wave of assignments and I fell behind again. The irony in this cycle, is that catching up academically from a concussion is in many ways more challenging and taxing than the medical recovery from the concussion itself. Although it has not fully solved my problems, communicating with my teachers and setting up meetings with them has made this process much easier and smoother.
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