Journal from fall quarter Freshman year:

Observation #1- 2:30-4:30

I went to Nelsonville High School today and observed football with Erin.  It was a slow day and not much went on.  The only things I got to see were one of the players getting his shoulder iced, another player had to be stretched because he had inflammation around his knee, and another player had to have his leg stretched because there was tightness in his quadriceps.  One of the trainers pulled the players leg up and help it there to do this stretch.  She then repeated the stretch on the other leg.  It seems to me that there is a lot of down time in this profession, but if a lot is happening it keeps you on your feet and that is something I want in a job.

 

Journal from Fall Quarter Senior year:  Shows much improvement

Wrestling practice was pretty intense this week.  On Wednesday one of the guys was wrestling the coach.  He took a hard hit right to the head and fell straight to the floor.  Hanna and I rushed over to him to find he was very out of it.  He started laughing uncontrollably then immediatly started to cry.  We knew he had suffered trauma to the head but we were unsure of just how serious it was.  We continued to evaluate him for a concussion by asking him retrograde and anterograde questions.

In the middle of the evaluation he was getting noticably worse so we sat him over by the wall and he passed out.  Knowing something was seriously wrong we got him to the hospital where they did a brain scan.  He had suffered a bad concussion and would be out for quite a while.  After all of this happened we checked his medical records and found that he had suffered 2-3 concussions previously.  When he saw the team doctor it was concluded that the symptoms from his concussion in July had not completely gone away and he should not have been practicing. 

One thing I learned from this event is to never mess around with a head injury.  If you suspect an athlete is suffering a serious concussion get them to a hospital.  In this case, the athlete had suffered concussions previous to this one.  We should have done a better job making notes of the teams previous injuries. 

On Thursday right before practice was over we had another little incident.  One of the wrestlers suffered a pretty bad dislocation of the 5th phalange of the hand.  The distal portion of the finger was literally pointing out.  I had never seen anything like this before so I found it really interesting.  Matt was helping us out that day and he immediatly took the athlete to the athletic training room to avoid an audience.  He distracted the athlete by asking him questions then placed traction on the finger until it moved back into place.  We then placed him in a finger splint and sent him to see the team doctor.