“I’ve often idly wondered why people make some of the smallest decisions: Does it matter which cookie I pick up from the plate or which stall I choose in a public bathroom? Will my choice change the course of my life?
“On November 27, 2003, at 3:30 p.m., I make one of those random choices. I work at my desk until about 2:00 p.m. At around 2:45, I run a brush through my hair and swish a dollop of toothpaste around my mouth. By 3:00, I’m picking up my younger daughter from her elementary school. At 3:15, we’re rushing into her big sister’s high school, unaware that by 4:30 I’ll be signing in at the emergency department of the local hospital….
“The door opens at precisely 3:30. The teacher says goodbye to the previous parents and hello to me. I follow her across the room, where she seats herself on one side of a table and motions to two chairs on the other side.
“I choose the nearest, and that choice changes my life.”
All too often, this is exactly the way a brain injury starts—not specifically with a parent-teacher meeting or a chair, but with a random action at a random time. Contrary to common belief, most concussions—the lay term for mild traumatic brain injury—do not happen to professional athletes or occur in motor vehicle accidents. Most mTBIs happen to random people doing random things at random moments in their lives.
I can’t review my own book, but I can give you a sample of what you’ll learn if you read it:
In Canada, 400,000 people aged twelve and older sustained at least one mTBI in 2019.
While 70–85% of mTBI sufferers recover within days or weeks, at least 15% and as many as 50% have symptoms for months or years.
It is not necessary to lose consciousness or have amnesia to have had an mTBI. In fact, only about 10% of mTBIs include loss of consciousness.
It is not necessary to have taken a hit to the head to have had a concussion. The problem is not what happens externally, but what happens when the brain is bounced around inside the skull, and that can easily happen during any rapid acceleration-deceleration (whiplash-type) event.
Despite facts like these, people who suffer so-called mild traumatic brain injury are often treated dismissively, even by their own physicians.
Facts like these—and many more—gave rise to my book’s title. As concussion experts who are far more learned than I have noted, there’s no such thing as a “mild” traumatic brain injury. I support this contention with research on mTBI that I updated roughly annually and on the challenges of taking such an injury through a personal injury lawsuit, which are even greater now than they were when I was doing so.
No Such Thing is a must-read for anyone who might one day make a random choice in the middle of an unremarkable meeting. Which is to say all of us.
Stephen Kimber
I believe my book is well written and compelling, but rather than taking my word for it, read these words from Stephen Kimber, the award-winning journalist and author who co-founded and formerly directed the Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Nonfiction Writing at University of King’s College in Halifax, from which I graduated in 2015:
“One day in the middle of an ordinary life, Lynne Melcombe went to what should have been an unremarkable meeting and made a random choice. No Such Thing: A True Story of “Mild” Traumatic Brain Injury and My Twenty-Year (so far) Recovery is her account of what followed that random choice—from the gaslighting, indifference, and ignorance of healthcare professionals to the gotcha tactics of shareholder-driven insurance company lawyers. No Such Thing is a painfully personal but powerful memoir of Melcombe’s struggle to heal from a so-called “mild” brain injury, but it is also a well-researched indictment of medical, legal, and political failure. It’s a must-read for anyone who might one day make a random choice in the middle of an unremarkable meeting. Which is to say all of us.”
No Such Thing will be published by Iguana Books imminently. Check back with this page or contact me directly at lynne at lynnemelcombe dot com to get your copy as soon as it’s released.
This week’s post is not about a book—well it is, sort of; and it’s not about a UKing’s grad, although it is about someone who attended the MFA in Creative Nonfiction program.
Julia Nunes, who has cowritten two books on mental health with Scott Simmie, was in the class of 2016. We hit it off while we were in New York for the publishing residency. My book (which will be released in the spring) is about a concussion I suffered over twenty years ago now. She, too, was writing about concussion, focusing on her son, who was at that time lying in bed with, if memory serves, his second hockey concussion—crushing headaches, severe photophobia, disorienting dizziness, ongoing vomiting, the whole nine yards.
The first night we were in New York, I was out to dinner with Deirdre Macdonald (a peer in the class of 2015 who’s just released her MFA book project, Her Hat in the Ring: Toronto Milliner El Jamon and Her Circle). As we got up to leave, I slipped on a piece of tomato on the floor and fell backward, striking the back of my head on the corner of a table in almost exactly the same spot I had struck in 2003, when I sustained the concussion I was writing about.
I went by ambulance to the hospital (with Deirdre, bless her) and yes, I had another concussion. It nearly ruined my time in New York—headaches, dizziness, thankfully not vomiting—so I only attended a few of the lectures (couldn’t focus for long) and none of the social events (way too loud). By the last day, I was feeling a bit better, so Julia and I explored The Highline and walked around Strand Books.
I finished my degree that year; Julia didn’t get to finish the year because a short while later she fell and had a severe concussion. It took her months to recover. I think she’d hoped to return the following year, but then she suffered another concussion, and another (having one concussion increases the risk of having another).
So, she never finished her degree (or, as far as I know, the book about the inadequate way children’s sports teams were dealing with concussion in players). However, I recently read an excellent book called Impact: Women Writing After Concussion, edited by ED Morin and Jane Cawthorne (University of Alberta Press, 2021). Toward the end of this wonderful and vindicating anthology of essays is an essay by Julia Nunes called “The Next Hit.”
This excerpt hit home for me:
I attended a speech recently by a woman who lived first with post-concussion syndrome (PCS) and then with breast cancer. She shared a PowerPoint graph called “Sympathy by Casserole.” The comparison was stark: friends and family delivered more than sixty meals as she underwent chemotherapy versus zero meals post-concussion. Yet breast cancer, she said, was a breeze compared to PCS. The pain was less intense and the brain fog of chemotherapy had nothing on the confused, muddy state of the concussed mind.
I had something like this happen to me not long after my concussion. A friend who no longer lives on the Pacific Coast came into town with her husband for three months. In all that time, she found forty-five minutes for me but visited a friend who was dealing with breast cancer numerous times. When I expressed my hurt, she responded with something like, “Lynne, she has cancer. You bumped your head.”
No one really understands concussion until and unless they live through it; no one understands that while seventy to eighty-five percent of concussions heal within days, weeks, or months, the other fifteen to thirty percent can continue causing symptoms for years, even lifetimes.
Sadly, I know Julia understands—sadly because as much I’d like people to understand better, I wouldn’t wish a single concussion on anyone, much less multiple concussions.
If you’ve never had a concussion and would like to understand it better, read Impact, starting with Julia Nunes’ excellent essay, “The Next Hit.”
And if you’ve had a concussion and would like to see your experiences reflected accurately on a page, read Impact, starting with Julia Nunes’ excellent essay, “The Next Hit.”
Here are other books from the prolific graduating class of 2016:
Sit Still and Prosper: How a Former Money Manager Discovered the Path to Investing with Greater Clarity, Calmness, and Confidence, by Stephanie Griffiths. Review coming soon.
A Distorted Revolution: How Eric’s Trip Changed Music, Moncton and Me, by Jason Murray. Review coming soon.
