Sports

Although her daughter Heidi had suffered multiple concussions in the past (one in second grade during recreational skating, the second more serious concussion in a collision with a softball teammate in ninth grade), and despite thinking she was "concussion savvy," Dorothy Bedford says that, three to four weeks after Heidi suffered a third concussion warming up for an ice hockey game during her junior year in high school, she was unprepared for the "mysterious journey" that lay ahead for both of them.

After sustaining a series of hits to her head during the previous week's training, Heidi Taggart asked her ice hockey coach to be excused from goaltending during a game in February 2010 when she began experiencing "flu-like" symptoms.  He told her to "suck it up" and take the ice. During pre-game warm-ups, a teammate's stick hit Heidi in the head during the follow-through from a wrist shot.  She immediately began experiencing concussion symptoms (headache, disorientation, drowsiness), but the injury was not initially thought to be too serious.   It was anything but. As her mom, Dorothy Bedford, now recalls, the road Heidi travelled from that Friday night on the way to recovery from post-concussion syndrome would be marked by a long series of "unmarked detours" taking fourteen months and requiring treatment from more than 10 different medical specialists.

For helmets with visors or face shields, contact lenses are better than protective eyewear because they don't fog up when an athlete sweats or plays in humid conditions, but it is important to ask your child's eye doctor if they are old enough for contacts, says optometrist Noah Shriber.