In article
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" wrote:

On Mar 20, 9:26*am, Bret wrote:

I once fell on my face while skiing at Aspen with enough violence that
my plastic sunglasses broke. I thought I was ok at first but on the
next chairlift ride I started developing vertigo and became nauseous.
It was all I could do to side-slip down from the top of Ajax mountain
and walk to our rented condo where I went straight to bed. The guy I
had been skiing with kept skiing, but eventually he told some other
people in our party (large company ski trip) what had happened and
after a couple of hours they woke me up saying it was dangerous to
sleep after a head injury. One of them was a nurse and she shined a
flashlight in my eyes and said my pupils were dilated indicating a
concussion. Since someone else in our party had already died that day
of pneumonia in a different condo, they were really worried that the
company ski trip's death rate would climb to an embarrassing level. So
they wouldn't let me sleep and they wouldn't let me drink. I had to
sit there with the worst headache of my life and listen to them talk.
At one point one of them said that we should go out drinking because
that's what Steve (the dead guy) would want them to do. We didn't. I
was allowed to sleep for brief intervals overnight and only had a bad
headache the next morning and so I went skiing. I don't remember why I
didn't go to the hospital.

I think the sleeping danger is not that sleeping will
make it worse, but that it could mask a more serious
loss of consciousness. If you'd gone to the hospital
they would also have shined lights in your eyes and
might have let you sleep at some point, but
probably would wake you up every couple of hours
to make sure they could still wake you up.

When I whacked the side of my head in a CX race
I also got a bunch of gravel cuts (actually it was the
second time I'd fallen on this short loose descent).
We had a friend who was an EMT at the race and
she cleaned up my cuts while making a lot of small
talk with me, which later I realized was also a subtle
way of doing a mental/head-injury evaluation.

I had a bad headache and sat around at the scorer's tent
with my friends who were running the race, occasionally
helping a little, until all the races were done and we
cleaned up, by which time I was just kinda sore and
fine to drive home. In retrospect it seems like an obvious
concussion, but the word or thought never crossed
my mind at the time. This seems like a common
reaction, much like the impulse to get back on your
bike w/o realizing that you're dripping blood.

It is the nature of a concussion to impair thinking.
A concussed person is the last to know.
Send me in, Coach!

--
Michael Press