C T E Brain Injury page

What has happened is that the science is slowly catching up to brain trauma and it is clear that there is no really safe level of trauma to be tolerated at all.  If your sport includes head traquma, you are surely sacrificing brain integrity in a very serious manner and it will impair you life long before death.

The hard part is accepting that we must eliminate all such trauma as much as possible and certainly to a level in which only accidental trauma occurs.

That means no head shots in all martial arts including boxing and bo body checking in hockey and no protection football that perhaps allows shoulder to shoulder pushing more like rugby and censure of all head fouls.  Helmets become accident protection and shoulder pads go.  Those are leverage weapons.

We know how rough rugby and lacrosse can be but head protection is good enough there i think..

My point is that we must reduce the injury level to the accidental and simply unlucky and not  have it continue as a universal cost of all participants.  I do think it can be done however unwelcome. Tastes will change..

C T E Brain Injury page.

Richard Anthony Piet

July 8, 2016 · 

 https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=oa.271951523166099&type=1

I started this C T E Brain Injury page to help all my fellow athletes and friends who are just finding out that we are suffering from CTE and there is very little we can do about it. 

I have lost so many personal friends including Alex Karras and Mel Farr of the Detroit Lions, Bob Probert of The Detroit Red Wings, professional boxer Johnny Kubinec and many professional wrestlers. 

My friends and myself have lost their families, their businesses and friends because of the ravages of CTE. 

 

A lot of us have CTE through car accidents as well as just simply hitting our head in vehicle, home and work accidents in our daily lives. 

I played amateur and professional sports from grade 1 to University and a couple years of CFL starting with training camp for The Toronto Argonauts and Detroit Lions as well as four years of amateur wrestling. I won the Ontario 18 and under Amateur Wrestling championship in Toronto at the age of 15 and I started working out with a number of professional wrestlers at the Central YMCA at College and Yonge Streets as well as in Maple Leaf Gardens.

I was a doorman at numerous nightclubs from The Imperial Hotel in Grand Bend, my own Nightclubs including Arthur's Discos to my  clubs in St. Thomas, London and Toronto where I encountered a lot of head trauma. I was never afraid of any situation no matter how outnumbered we were in different situations and the doctors tell me this is one of the signs of CTE. You have no fear because the memories that disappeared include the memories of all the pain. 

A lot of us look to our family and friends for support but that help just is not there because they have no understanding that we are suffering from CTE and we are not the same. This is similar to the effect Bi-polar effects sufferers of this other debilitating disease. 

This situation really hit me when my buddy Alex Karras of The Detroit Lions and several tv series he starred in, talked to me on one of our visits a few years before CTE took his life. 

Our memories and minds had been going through similar situations from our early teens all the way through life and seemed to be more visible after each incident of head trauma. Most of his friends and family abandoned him because they did not know he had CTE or did not understand the effects it had on his memory and judgement. 

My uncle Stan Lis told me of an incident I had forgotten about. When I was about seven years old, I fell down the stairs at out home at 111 Pearl Street in Brantford and I went through a few days of unconscious episodes. This happened a year later when a bunch of older bullies pushed me off a fourteen foot high slide onto the asphalt at Victoria Public School in Brantford. I managed to walk home in a daze and my dad took me to the hospital for x-rays after more blackouts and unconscious episodes. Nobody had any experience with C T E or brain trauma. The doctor recommended they keep an eye on me in the hospital. The next day, the let me go home. 

Thank you Chastain for your support and kind words as we realized we are going through our battle together.

The symptoms of CTE include memory loss, confusion, impaired judgment, impulse control problems, aggression, depression, anxiety, suicidality, parkinsonism, and, eventually, progressive dementia. These symptoms often begin years or even decades after the last brain trauma or end of active athletic involvement.

Not only Professional Athletes but High school, University and college athletes as well as car accident and bicycle accident victims are exhibiting symptoms of C.T.E. 

 

NFL CFL NHL MSL NSL WWW MLB CSL NBA CBL Football players, soccer, wrestling, hockey, from childhood to college to adulthood.

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Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) is a progressive degenerative disease of the brain found in athletes (and others) with a history of repetitive brain trauma, including symptomatic concussions as well as asymptomatic subconcussive hits to the head. CTE has been known to affect boxers since the 1920s. However, recent reports have been published of neuropathologically confirmed CTE in retired professional football players and other athletes who have a history of repetitive brain trauma. This trauma triggers progressive degeneration of the brain tissue, including the build-up of an abnormal protein called tau. These changes in the brain can begin months, years, or even decades after the last brain trauma or end of active athletic involvement. The brain degeneration is associated with memory loss, confusion, impaired judgment, impulse control problems, aggression, depression, and, eventually, progressive dementia.

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