Did I Play Football? I Can’t Remember….

This morning in an interview on Today, Brett Favre spoke to Matt Lauer about some of the symptoms he’s experienced that may be a result of the head trauma received during his time as a football player, both as a professional as well as in his earlier years.  A couple of the symptoms he mentioned were the loss of memory, the inability to finish a sentence or to locate a word in his mind while speaking.  These are all very vexing symptoms, and I certainly don’t mean to make light of his condition or that of scores of other former professional football players.  Head injuries are nothing to joke about, but hearing these symptoms, it makes me wonder about my own brain.

I have never been sacked.  In fact, I’ve only ever played football about a handful of times. That was more like goofing around in the yard with my brother and some other neighborhood boys in my tween years. Then it was fun to be tackled, but I don’t remember any head injuries, just tumbling and giggling.  In fact, the only real head injury I can recall was when I ran into the clothesline pole head-on during a game of tag resulting in an impressive “goose egg” on my forehead.  Nevertheless, I too have experienced gaps in my memory, the inability to finish sentences and the frequent grope for the right word in conversation.  Writing comes much easier to me.

Word groping is not new for me.  In high school I was tasked with introducing a state official to a school assembly who was an advocate of lowering the voting age from 21 to 18 (yes, believe it or not, back in the day you had to be 21 in order to vote).  Unfortunately, as I stood at the podium, the word “advocate” fled my brain and the only replacement I could come up with was “pusher”.  Consequently, I introduced the poor man as a pusher.  Believe me, in the ’70s, no respectable person wanted to be referred to as a pusher.  He joked about it and got a laugh, but I disappeared off stage with a very red face.

My daughter, Maggie can attest to the fact that I sometimes drift of mid-though and mid-sentence.  Usually it’s because my ADD has kicked in and I’ve been distracted; the needle playing the record in my brain has skipped a couple of tracks.  Although it is a part of who I am, I find the whole thing irritating.

The lost memories are the worse.  Occasionally one of the kids will tell a story from their childhood about something I said or did and I draw a complete blank.  I hate it when that happens because I worry that I wasn’t fully present to them.  I’d like to think I was fully aware of my life as a young mother, but I honestly can’t remember much except I was very busy and slept really well – when everyone was healthy.

I suppose my real question is what has caused my symptoms?  Did my collision with the clothesline pole alter my brain in such a way that I suffer a similar brain condition as pro football players?  Probably not.  In fact, if you were to gather a group of women my age; give or take a few years, you’d most like hear the same complaints.  Many of us drift, we forget and none of us can find the right word.

So, if this is the case, are these repeated head injuries turning these big, burly men into middle-aged women?  Maybe that’s where the expression “knocking sense” into someone came from.   Now that’s something to ponder!