No More Living In The Dark – A Concussion Case Study

Craig has gone from being so sensitive to lights and sounds that he had to live in his dark basement after his concussion to being able to film the video below with the lights on and no sunglasses. Read on to find out how he was able to resolve his symptoms by working with us.

My name is Craig, and I’m a long-time resident in Calgary.

Back on March 15, 2018, which was a Thursday. I remember because my wife always volunteers at the food bank every Thursday. That day I stay home to walk the dog and work from the home office. About 12:30 in the afternoon, we were rounding the home stretch to my house which was only about a block away. I slipped and hit the ground.

I still can’t believe that I hit a patch of ice. The first thing that hit the ground was the back of my head, so I must’ve looked like a cartoon character flippin’ over. I was out for a little bit. Later, stunned, and I’ll never forget my little dog, an Australian Shepherd named, Chester, was sticking his face in my face like he was saying, “I’m done with this area, you can quit resting now, get up.”

So, I stumbled up, went home and went to the doctor and got myself checked me out.

I wasn’t experiencing violent symptoms of a concussion, but I did have a headache at that point in time. Three weeks later they were still ongoing.

Who did you work with before learning about Neurvana Naturopathic Medicine?

I went to my general practitioner who said, “typically these things resolve themselves.” My symptoms continued along for a number of weeks and got progressively worse in terms of nausea, dizziness, headaches, blurry vision to the left, double vision to the left, inability to handle long conversations, light sensitivity and any noise sensitivity. My wife would put a spoon down, I would come out of my skin. It feels like you’re exploding inside.

My symptoms forced me to have to live in my dark basement. I did that for quite some time.

During this period we started reaching out to see if we could find people who could tell us what the issues were. We learned that 80 to 90% of concussions resolve themselves within one to two months, so the advice to just take it easy is typically the right advice for a lot of people. But not for those with severe concussions like I was experiencing.

Then our dentist reached out, who’s a good friend of mine, Dr. Curtis Westersund, one of the top dentists, not only in Calgary, in the world, and sees a lot of concussions through his work. He told us that he is part of a concussion response team, had heard about my accident from my wife and immediately sent me to see Corey Deacon.

How was Neurvana Naturopathic Medicine different than other places you went to?

It was fascinating, Corey did an assessment with the qEEG. When we looked at the results we could see visually exactly where I hit in the back of my head. You could see, I’ll call them broken pathways, all over my brain. It was fascinating. It was unfortunate that was what my brain looked like, but I knew what I was in for. I was lost, I could not function.

I’m a high energy individual, involved in a number of different businesses. I helped grow small entrepreneurial concerns to larger professional concerns that we’ve sold. We were in the middle of selling one of our companies when this happened and had to pull out of that.

I do a lot of volunteer work with the Stampede, the tax committee with the Chamber of Commerce, and few other things.

I did a lot of private investing for my own account, as well in private companies.

I’m involved with a lot of things and I had to shut all of that down.

Back to Corey, he saw my results from the assessment and said, that he had pinpointed exactly what I was going through and he could see exactly what the issues were even without knowing about my accident. He could see what had transpired and what I was working with.

What major wins have you had working with us?

We worked through, 10 initial sessions of neurofeedback and that was fascinating.

During that time my wife would have to drive me to my neurofeedback appointment and then I would go back to my home and lay in a dark basement literally. And after those 10 sessions, new brain map showed that we had activated a number of pathways. I could see my brain was waking up.

All the massive headaches I was experiencing, sharp eye pain, general headaches 24/7 were cleared up after the 10 sessions. Then we started clearing up other areas, reconnected a lot of broken connections, a lot of pathways and we worked on the specifics for the next 10 sessions. After 20 sessions of neurofeedback, there was an absolute noticeable decrease in my symptoms.

The fact that I’m sitting here with the lights on and no sunglasses is a miracle to me. I never thought I’d see that again.

Plus, my aversion to noise went away. The shaking inside stopped, which was a fight or flight response.

We’re now at the phase where we can concentrate on building onto success and getting back to what my normal is, which is never stopping during the day for most days.

We’re working on that and have also turned our attention to my immune system and digestive system which have cleared up greatly. They were also affected by my concussion as well.

In conclusion to my story, when I first met Corey, during my assessment he told me, “It’s good to get on this early. It’s good we are looking at this and addressing these problems because you’re health is like a bucket and if you don’t empty the water (symptoms), the water starts overflowing. Once it starts to overflow it’s tough to get everything back in the bucket if you wait a year or so to start addressing your symptoms.

So it was wonderful, that my friend Dr. Westersund knew Corey, sent me here. We have managed to contain the overflow of the bucket and we made great, great strides through this time.