Case studies: Rugby and concussion

JOHN FOGARTY: “I admitted to myself after the Toulouse game last season [Heineken Cup semi-final of 2010], that there was something seriously wrong. There had been one scrum in that match where I passed out… I was bleeding out of my nose. I remember Shane Jennings [Leinster’s openside flanker] talking to me that evening. ‘Fogs, you were f****** spaced out for a couple of seconds’.

“In Stadio Monigo in Treviso in September [Magners League, 2010], I got one bang on the head too many. I call them bangs. Others would call them concussions… After the game I was a bit like a zombie… I started to get panicky. I started to get more symptoms than I had previously: very sensitive to noise and light… I read a story in this newspaper about concussion, and the questions raised worried me at the time. I looked up a few things afterwards. Then put them away. I remember thinking it was something I might talk about when I was finished. Well, I’m finished now.

“Am I worried now? Yeah, a little bit. I don’t want to be symptomatic. I’m not a nice person when I’m like that. I can be sharp with Katie-May, our little girl. I can be cross with Sinéad, my wife. I can be sensitive to light and sound. I don’t want to go out. I don’t want to do anything. You almost slip into a bit of depression. You can be quite sad and upset. It’s horrible. It affects every facet of your life. If you did your cruciate ligament, you mightn’t be able to kick a ball but this really affects every little thing about your being, about you as a person. It takes from you. I’m a different person when I’m bad.

“The worst is when you get up after a day of sleep, you’ve already got a headache. And you’re tired. And you’re emotional. And you’re narky. And you’re frightened because you’re like this. I remember maybe a year ago and I was three weeks into a bout of this and I was getting panic attacks. I sat on the bed after a day of sleeping and I was freaking out going: ‘There’s something f****** wrong with me. I’m after doing something to myself’

“I’m sure there are others gone before me who we just don’t know about. And there will be others to follow. This isn’t going away. At least not quietly.”

BERNARD JACKMAN: “I’ve read where the effects of concussion are cumulative, and how one leaves you more vulnerable for a second and so on. I am living evidence of this. In rugby, when a player is examined in the days after suspected concussion it is done through a cognitive test a simple yes/no memory test which is compared to a baseline score taken in the off- or pre-season.

“There’s no incentive to get a high score in the off-season because it could count against you down the line. If I’d had a knock I’d try to put it off until the Thursday before taking the cog test. You don’t want someone else to take your place, so players will find any loopholes they can. By the end of my career, I’d say I could have been knocked out in a pillow fight. I got dizzy just hitting a tackle bag.

“Instead of getting concussed once a month I was getting concussed twice in a week. I bullshitted the doctor, didn’t come clean, and they rely on the players to be honest. You wouldn’t dare say, ‘I’m not playing this week, I feel concussed’. You stayed quiet. You didn’t want to lose your place.

“I remember looking back on a Saturday game on a Monday and not having a recollection of 20 minutes or half an hour. This is what we do. You can do it on auto pilot, you get through it. Short-term memory loss. It didn’t happen every week but there’d be occasions when I’d get a bang in the second half and go home and watch it on Monday and you wouldn’t have any idea how you played.

“I was retired seven months and was coaching St Michael’s [a school in Dublin] and doing scrummaging and the hooker wasn’t getting in the position I wanted him in so I jumped in myself and hit the machine and my head started spinning and I wobbled. It frightened me a bit that seven months after retiring I was still susceptible to it.”