Helpless, Ineffective And Proud: A Concussion At Worlds

Aussie mixed rep, Gus Macdonald, details his experience dealing with a concussion injury at the recent U24 World Championships in Perth

It’s the 12th of January and we’re losing to Japan. Past half and trailing by enough for heads to drop and mine to spin, I’m standing on the line for only the second time this game. I don’t feel too flash. The pull is slung towards us, and within the first few steps I know I shouldn’t be here. The game feels heavy and surreal. My heart and mind are still racing from the point I played half an hour ago. I feel so slow and worthless; it’s selfish of me to even be on the field. But I’m playing. I have to. This is Worlds, the culmination of a campaign’s worth of suffering, of exhaustive physical and mental exercise, of money earned and immediately spent on “cheap” flights and tournament fees. I’m standing at the summit of a mountain that has taken a calendar year to climb; I’d rather fall off than be slowly escorted down the slopes by concerned looking physios and my omnipresent mum.



I smother a rolling disc and centre it to a gold shirt – I could not, for the life of me, tell you who was in it. It’s important to make this a quick point; I get the feeling that I’m going to struggle otherwise. I let my legs look after themselves while I run through the rules of a sport I’ve been playing for six years in my head, searching for some forgotten by-law that entitles you to a goal if you really, really want it. I’d do anything to have a tangible influence on the scoreboard. I’d do anything to catch a goal, to help my team and end this heavy, surreal torture of running after plastic. I sprint to the endzone.



I’m legging it, hard and fast, from my annoyingly close defender and from all my other problems. I’m running from the impending failure of yet another concussion test, from disappointing myself, my friends and my coat of arms, from a lack of meaningful contribution to any Perth scoreboard, from my depleted bank account and from the excruciating, wall-punching futility of this whole venture. If I can just catch this goal, every one of these problems will go away. In my mind it’s the fastest I’ve ever run.



But a sad and swollen head is not a good judge of speed.



I can’t shake my defender, nor can I shake the feeling that if the throw goes up I won’t be able to catch it - I’ve forgotten how. I’m too far away from the disc now anyway. So, I do what any handler with dreams of deep-receivership does when hucks are inevitably holstered; I reluctantly turn under. And I guess it was the turn that did me.



You can’t really run away from a concussion. It’s been right behind me all along. It smacks me in the face when I turn and I realise, immediately, terrifyingly, that this is not an injury I can grit through. I can’t overcome it with strapping tape and heart. What was I thinking, playing at all? I need to get off. I begin formulating a plan to scream or wave my arms about to get the sideline’s attention. But I can barely breathe, how am I going to scream or wave my arms about? And what the fuck was I thinking, playing at all?



Suddenly, I have the disc. The 175-gram root cause of all this trauma is nestled, indifferently, in my own shaking hands. I’ll need witnesses to tell me how that happened – a quirk of muscle memory maybe. With relief, I sit. I look up at my defender and see terror in his eyes, or maybe it was guilt. He had shamelessly counted to two before realising I wasn’t getting back up. Cheeky boy.



I’m escorted from the field. Pulses are taken, heads are shaken and vaguely comforting platitudes are thrown at me from short and long range. My brain is ringing. I would prefer fainting to this ringing in my brain. And I would prefer death to both. Lefty, my physio, turns to my mum.



“Well, we tried.”

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You know, I’m actually a pretty upbeat dude. Pretty light-hearted, rarely talking about the downsides of head injuries, and generally some combination of sunburnt and stoked. What you just read is not a good indication of my froth/bant levels; it’s a recount of my worst moment at Worlds. I’ll try to keep it chipper from here on.