Everyone reading this has a brain, but do you LOVE 
your brain? Our brains do so much for us, and have since the very beginning of our time in this life, and they're secured away inside the head and 'invisible to us' -- out of sight, out of mind. So people are often out of touch with our own brains!
So I ask you to ponder this a bit: How much do you know about your brain? How well is your brain? Has it ever been injured? (More than likely it has, many times as there are many ways brains are injured - 'trauma' of 'concussion' (a physics term) is what 'everyone' thinks of probably, but what about chemicals injuring the brain? What about when we were marinating before birth, what toxins made their way into the mix? ... and many things in between those examples). Is it fully recovered from the injuries? Is it currently healing? Healed? What are you doing today that is helping your brain health? And does this have an impact on your 'state of mind' -- what is your understanding of 'brain' and 'mind' and the interrelationship? Lumigrate uses the popularized and simplified 'mind, body, spirit' concept utilized in 'integrative medicine' for much of our material (sometimes I go into a different model with a few more items subdividing a whole person's life).
Ultimately 'functional medicine' is the type of information at Lumigrate as well, where the underlying reasons for illness symptoms (or wellness symptoms) are looked at and that is where you focus attention and only address the outward symptoms as necessary. And it's a rare person in the US who doesn't talk about, complain about, or demonstrate symptoms of brain dysfunction. There are many reasons for this, and an 'injury' to the brain is likely not typically suspected by most people. So I wanted to preface this topic with some extensive setup because this is going to be the starting place for a lot of YOUsers. Kevin Pearse and the film The Crash Reel focused upon acute, traumatic brain injury, but when I watched the film I was seeing many other facets about the brain coming into the picture and story.
Often, people's symptoms that manifest are not even connected in their minds (with the mind doing the thinking) to the actual brain, and they're 'missing the boat' entirely in terms of what is causing their symptoms, with sometimes devastating consequences to the person's life before they're even aware of the brain's invovement in what the body shows as symptoms. So I hope that this topic is 'interesting and appealing' becasue of the outward information and will open the door to much more thinking and understanding by the reader. YOU in this case!
For starters, I want to specify that Lumigrate's target audience is anyone who has the interest in wellness information and finding quality 'outside the box' information coming from an 'integrative approach' -- we have many different experts who have collaborated by providing information from their area of expertise over the years since we launched (2009).
This might be medical providers, who are frequently exhausted and have extensive reading to keep up with their professional life's requirements, but I hope they'll find Lumigrate and enjoy seeing what we provide also. And the public / consumers who are seeking this information who ultimately have more interest in their health issues are more likely to find Lumigrate, but with our YOU model of how to become a proactive 'team leader' of your health team, suggesting Lumigrate to providers is something they might consider and do.
Ultimately there are a lot of people who are inclined to research and learn who have enough symptoms of a variety of 'environmental illnesses' that affect the energy in the tissues (including the brain), that I've created the content to hit that 'sweet spot' as possible. Sometimes people with low energy will see a long video or long topic and say 'pass'.
I edit our content to have more paragraphs that are shorter and have lots of 'visual breaks', this is very important for people who have had brain injury, actually. And our font is rather large. Granted we want people to be able to print things too, so again, it's finding the 'sweet spot'. If this topic seems long, please take a break if you need and come back to it if it's been resonating with you. Set some reminder if necessary. I hope this is of value to those who make their way through it. I also bold things that would be what I'd put in a shorter version if I wanted to use a short format. That way those who are busy and with high energy can scan and pick out the pearls, and it also helps those with limited energy.
While many people's symptoms don't lead them to thinking it has to do with the brain, other times they do. Sometimes people's overall physical/mental symptoms might be so connected to the head that they think 'brain' when it has more to do with things outside the head than inside! Many of my patients in the past who had fibromyalgia had headaches, and many would admit they had thought they had a brain tumor. Many pushed for imaging studies even. When a person learns about what contributes to having fibromyalgia symptoms, some of it IS in the head, as the hormone system does have some key players inside the brain, but it's really a WHOLE system of the body and it's tissues.
Every cell in the body has a receptor for progesterone, we have learned here at Lumigrate from environmental medicine and 'anti-aging' specialist Marc Spurlock, MD. I mention progesterone specifically as it is one of the treatments for ACUTE, TRAUMATIC brain and neurologic injuries in more progressive allopathic programs. It is also one of the hormones that is found to be out of tune in the hormone symphony of the body in people who have a diagnosis of chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, and other disorders under the umbrella of 'environmental illness'.
So when a person hasn't had the opportunity and learned this type of information and they do 'the obvious' related to chronic pain in the head, they often are going down a 'garden path' of thinking that leads them away from the underlying reason for the symptoms. Migraine and headache is a classic example and I know from personal experience! I suffered from headaches, and I mean 'suffered', from my early 20s, which eventually were diagnosed and treated as migraines.
My father was in middle age when I was a child through young adult and he had a headache of some level every day except one. He took the day off from work he felt so good. Growing up within a family that had a medical impairment shaped my life, so I very much appreciate the way The Crash Reel shows this aspect of Kevin's story.
Kevin is the youngest of four brothers, and David is a co-star of the movie, as are other family members. David has Down sydrome and it was apparent to me that the family was 'primed' to help Kevin when there was a sudden change from well and snowboarding to medically impaired from an acute TBI because of the way they had adapted from before Kevin was born to having a person with special needs in the family. As I say, there were so many aspects to this story, that I found myself watching The Crash Reel many more times to study more of the nuances.
There's an odd advantage to someone who has an acute injury compared to someone whose symptoms of a medical impairment come on gradually -- you get put on the front burner of major medical experts. As an example, from the onset of headaches in my early adulthood to when I had them controlled due to a new medication that came out I could function when taking was 20 years, and it was another 10, almost before I went a year or more without "one of THOSE headaches" and had ultimately solved the underlying problem with the help of CAM (complementary AND alternative medicine, and I prefer to use integrative medicine which includes selective use of allopathic medicine's appropriate 'bests').
I had been hindered and affected by headaches for half my lifetime at the point in time when I found the solutions that were successful in turning that around and headed back in the direction of 'wellness'. (And this was only one symptom of environmental illness / fibromyalgia, I had extreme blood sugar problems as well as a blood clotting disorder with thin blood and gynecological issues that are common with FM, as well as thyroid issues which weren't properly tested and treated until I went back to a FM specialist after my massage therapist was concerned about swelling in the area of my thyroid.
Her wisdom to not allow another massage be scheduled until an appointment with the MD was scheduled was a great example of having a good team of providers around you that can help spot things about your wellness on the outside of your body and encourage you in the right directions to end up with improved wellness. I like to share the story of a diabetic who was compliant with going to the doctor whose hair stylist pointed out what she saw as symptoms of hypothyroidism and suggested a visit to the doctor as well. The labwork confirmed it, medication was prescribed and taken, with better wellness the result.
And by the way, these both occurred in a city of about 50,000. I keep hoping the hair aspect of the esthetics world will break out with some speciaists as the skin aspect has with medical skin estheticians. I'd like someone to be looking at the scalp, teaching me while I'm in the chair, and naturally the talk among clients in such a shop would be interesting and informative.
All the symptoms I shared from my history, above, are very common with people who, when it's not addressed as they come on, end up having what can be classified as "fibromyalgia". With so many people in the US having fibromyalgia, you'd think the primary care doctors would know what to do, but they don't, it's not being taught to them and the system of short appointments and simple labwork analysis does not lend itself to allopathic medicine's 'treadmill'.
So the irony is that millions of people can be "off in the ditch" and not on the path of wellness for years or decades with their health because of a common condition like fibromyalgia (and the overlapping conditions that go alongside or with it), while in the time between two winter Olympic seasons someone can have a major brain injury and get back to a higher functional level, personally and professionally.
Having entered the medical profession at the same time as I was a patient with chronic illness trying to figure it out had consequences on most aspects of my life, positive and negative, allowing me or leading me to be a very different kind of occupational therapist, certainly. And when I had the solutions 'in hand and in mind', I rolled up my sleeves to create a website that brought this kind of information to people on the Internet, as presenting in person with patients 1:1 or in weekly groups limited the number of people who could receive the information.
And when insurance is the basis of the treatment, it's very limited what you're able to provide in the sessions. Patients can pay for other advise out of pocket, but the clinic and building you're in also has expectations of what you provide and that is why I went to the integrative clinic that was opening in early 2008. Lumigrate's videos are a time capsule of the first year when there was almost a true integrative approach and team, but that all dissolved and none of us are affiliated together aside from Dr King sees patients at Dr Schulte-Barclay's integrative wellness clinic now.
It's a pleasure to see it grow all the time, and they have graciously allowed me to utilize their articles they prepare for the local independent paper to also be on Lumigrate. So I encourage people reading this to consider looking into what is available where you live. (Hint: The compounding pharmacies are great places to find out about the progressive providers of human and veterinary services.)
Lumigrate was the result of my seeing these great local providers having good attendance at an education group I co-created in with Dr Young when I was the OT two floors down from his behavioral wellness clinic. I left the conventional therapy practice and allopathic medical building I'd been in since January 2005 on the last day of February 2008, and after a year of startup, filming, and editing, in the spring of 2009 Lumigrate went live on the Internet focusing in the 'chronic illness / wellness' overall information initially (with 'fibromyalgia', 'chronic fatigue', 'chronic pain' being the catch-all word that allows for the most people to identify with.) The YOU! model was, and still is, the cornerstone:
There's an astoundingly complex interplay that occurs that makes people having similar scenarios end up being in very different places related to their symptoms of wellness/ illness and function/ dysfunction, intact-ment / impairment. (Yes, intact-ment is a made-up word, but it's a good word to make the point! This is hard stuff so let's sprinkle in FUN
!)
This has become another 'cornerstone' at Lumigrate, as I like presenting to people the concept of 'load theory'. I appreciate a fun evening in Provo, Utah with Dr Spurlock in the fall of 2012, and we've created information since then that you can find on Lumigrate.
An analogy I like to use is it's like a computer, you put in data, it gets manipulated and things interplay and then what you get out is the result. In the case of people, though, everyone has unique genes. Genes are influenced by things you do that are helpful or harmful to them, and with epigenetics, your genes are actually affected by things your ancestors did, particularly your grandparents, it has been reported. So that hopefully inspires people when it comes to their lifestyle decisions. You are controlling your health with the next breath, sip and bite, potentially.
I hope by the time you've read this topic, once all the components to support this initial topic are added on, you'll have a better understanding about 'functional brain information' that you can apply to YOU or someone else, whether you're a medical consumer or also a medical professional. ... Or perhaps you're in another profession that would benefit by your investing some time / energy resource for learning. There are the obvious and better-known brain injuries from trauma, such as snowboarders and football players sometimes are out there in the public eye about, with 'concussions' being one form that most people have heard of yet ultimately don't typically have much real understainding about.
The majority of injured brains out there are from other things than 'trauma', but ironically, when a patient has an acute traumatic brain injury, those other things come into play related to how much progress they make. And these patients often don't realize these other factors that come into play related to brain function. I saw a focus in The Crash Reel on more injury from trauma if falling again snowboarding, and alcohol. There is new legislation in recent years in Colorado that all students who have a brain injury at a school-related event have to sit out of further stressful work (mental and physical) until they have been tested by a qualified medical provider who determines the brain is to 'baseline'/healed and not healing.
Not only is that a difficult thing to determine, there isn't much information circulating that I think is really helpful related to post brain injury do's and don'ts. Hydration. Water quality (think fluoride that's added to many people's water). Other drinks. Blood sugar and beverages thought to be 'healthy' -- someone recently consulted with thier physician's office when having a stomach virus 'clean them out' and dehydration was a concern and they were told to drink 'Gatorade' specifically. Have you read the ingredients in Gatorade? I can understand someone recommending that product 10-20 years ago, but with the increase in awareness about commercialized products and the traps they've laid for our wellness, I would prefer they suggest keywords to look up on the computer and get ideas rather than recommending one product (of questionable health benefits.)
It's just mind boggling the gap between conventional information 'inside the box' and what is increasingly sought after and used 'outside the box'. I saw one article about Colorado's law where the MD expert on brain injury said that it's just 'time' that heals brain injuries. Time has nothing to do with it, it's what occurs IN TIME, and I believe that what is commonly taught about brain injury and recovery from a functional standpoint is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Obviously this is a big area to cover and so this will be a rather lenghty introduction and overview. If it's too long 'for now', I hope you come back to it, and continue on.
It is my belief that much of what could help people get ideal brain injury recovery is not provided to them unless their team of supporters has helped them dig for leads and pursue them. And when you have a person in a critical situation, there is simply not a lot of time, and you end up relying upon what lands in front of you. There are so many facets to cover that there is simply a limitateion of TIME as well as ENERGY on everyone involved, let along the MONEY element.
So Kevin Pearse's story, portrayed brilliantly in the new film The Crash Reel, is THE BEST thing I have seen related to teaching about brain injury and recovery for the whole system surrounding a person EVER. Gold Medal in my book! 
In 2013, I became a fan of snowboarding, due to the new documentary The Crash Reel, about 2010 Olympic hopeful Kevin Pearse, who had been approaching, and sometimes surpassing, Shaun White in competitions prior to Kevin's crash that resulted in a traumatic brain injury. He had just 'dropped in' to 'do his first trick', a very challenging one, on his first half pipe practice run while "training" on the last day of 2009.
He was practicing with his long-time competitive snowboarding world friends in Utah (USA), with the 2009 winter Olympics in Vancouver less than 50 days away. As the filmmaker conveys in what I've included in the comment below about the making of the film, cameras were always going around these guys and so they gathered up the various sources recorded that day and the days before and after, and created a very interesting and educational film. It has great music too, I might add.
We all watch something in real life or in media through our own lenses of perception, and so I was looking at The Crash Reel's portrayal of the lead-up to his crash and injury with my unique background and 'lenses'. My background includes working within health education at a major US university that had earned a reputation as a 'party school'. And in Colorado, it was not the biggest party school, that honor goes to what we affectionately called 'Wasted State', which is located near some of the best skiing and snowboarding in Colorado. The culture of snowboarding is overall not one of the more 'healthy' ones, and the film shows that when it came to the 21st birthday celebration for one of the snowboarding circle.
Shaun White was in attendance, as was Kevin and his group. It reminded me of parties I have been to and at my housewarming party in my mid 30s we had an injury that required an ER visit, and the majority of the people at the party worked in high tech. That was 21 years ago, closing was on Valentine's Day, coincidentally. The partying in the film is diplomatically edited and leaves it to people's observations mostly in terms of what was going on, but drywall divets were the result of some at the party riding their boards down the stairs inside the home.
Someone is shown hitting the floor as they pass out, presumably from excessive alcohol and /or the combination of all things that were being put into the body. (Water and hydration, food, the overall has much interplay, and what kinds of foods, for instance.) Lumigrate's about functional medicine, getting to the underlying issues often using an integrative medicine model's simplicity in order to show that mind, body spirit -- the whole / holistic -- as an advantageous way of looking at things, rather than segmenting the way allopathic medicine does.
Kevin and Shaun grew up on opposite sides of the US yet became friends through snowboarding and shared a very special connection and actually got together once a year to hang out and do fun stuff since they were basically two peas in the same pod, so to speak (which I imagine their parents had something to do with as they were young). This was a part of the snowboarding story and the Olympics I'd never seen and it was fascinating! As the filmmaker says, below, to paraphrase and use the old saying "you couldn't make this stuff up"/ reality is stranger than fiction. In this case it's not 'strange' so much as fascinating!
I'm always interested in behaviors, that is perhaps in my genes, it's just the way 'I am'. Occupational therapy appealed to me because it basically 'came out of' adapting what physical therapists prescribed for patients to include 'the mind', what was interesting to them. Rather than doing curls with a dumbell to strengthen the upper body, the innovator would suggest getting out of the hospital bed and helping paint the wall of the barracks.
This was after the first world war, and it was actually a nurses aide who had the innovative idea that turned into a whole new discipline that today typically doesn't have many jobs that remotely looks like that, due to the conformity that the payment/reimbursement system has created to things that can be billed. People as well as systems are always changing, staying present with today and realizing the only thing you have control over ultimately is yourself are two of the most important things people can incorporate into their lives.
The Crash Reel shows these brilliantly in a number of ways, the easiest to identify is when Kevin is determined to get back to snowboarding. You see the family conspire in how to help Kevin along when his brain isn't allowing him to see things accurately yet. (Conspire's not a 'bad word', people and companies/ organizations "conspire" all the time, think about the reality show Survivor or your kindergarten classmates.) They plan out a strategy, which the mother seems to have come up with or at least is the primary communicator of it to 'the team', in trying to try to convince him to not get back on a snowboard, as an injured brain when it's healing is a delicate brain, and it could have devastating consequences if there's another crash. The filmmaker worked in dramatic stories of other athletes who returned to their snow sports after brain injury and recovery who had another crash and and either died or were extremely affected, as is brilliantly shown in the film.
You see Kevin becoming a peer educator to one of his brain injured snowboarding cohorts whose brain was injured in a different location on top of having a different baseline personality, so they're very different. And I don't know that Kevin had he ability for insight to see their differences at that point. I actually got a little uncomfortable in that stretch of the movie, but Pia, Kevin's mother, wanted Kevin to see what could happen with another injury and then it turned into Kevin learning his way into his new 'occupation' as a peer educator and supporter to those with brain injuries. And he did a great job, it takes a while to learn 'new ropes', which comes from experience so it was interesting to have that included.
In looking at what occupies people's time, you look at what motivates them, and motivation and 'volition' are the underlying foundation to occupational therapy. Lumigrate is intended to help all people who come as YOUsers to learn more about how to do things better for their wellness, and increasingly that means people turning to the computer and finding it online. Many people live rurally and don't have access to much medical expertise hands on, and so I've transitioned with Lumigrate to have provider experts in the forum who at least partially if not fully work with people remotely through the Internet or telephone, etc.
That means that some people might learn more about being their own occupational therapist, or nutritionist, or doctor, and then be able to make better connections finding professionals to collaborate with. Again, the YOU! model comes into play. Ultimately, I hope that providers find this as well, and use it as a place to get new ideas and information in a lighter, enjoyable way, and therefore progress what they're doing in their vocation as they apply new things when they see their customers.
Kevin had many occupations as a boy, and 'snowboarding' was one -- they show him at one being a climber of his high chair and kitchen table; once he made money from snowboarding, it became a 'vocation'. We all have many, many "occupations", they include watching television and using the computer and phones, hence OTs work on adapting gadgets, which has become a real specialty area. In today's day and age, computers are a key occupation for YOUsers of Lumigrate certainly.
You're occupying your time, so the computer and learning about wellness issues are occupations you're doing right now. As I write this I'm also drinking a beverage, that's an occupation everyone shares, as is eating. The health forms we fill out at medical offices and other places have lead us to not understand the word 'occupation' as the forms are wrong! I think it's ironic, because the forms themselves then show us that there is just so much to know in the modern world that nobody knows it all.
Millions of people in the US (and beyond) have the occupation of 'snowboarding', and all totalled billions have occupations that include other sports or activities as occupations which put the brain at risk of TBI/ traumatic brain injury, though most have the mild form, mTBI. The 'trauma' comes from there having been a physical force causing the injury, and a physics word that has been intermixed with medical and now is, in my opinion, misused, is 'concussion'. Calling it a "concussion" dismisses the 'brain injury' component, as concussion is really a word about a physical force that has been morphed in definition into a medical word and I disagree with it and therefore try to work it into my conversations about brain injury. There, worked in!
Every time you take a step or bounce in any position, the brain is concussing to some degree or another. I became aware of this because my husband, who came into my life in my mid 20s for about 7 years, loved to walk and hike but he had an injured brain from hydrocephalus (though what caused that was never determined officially), and if he walked longer than a couple of miles, he'd have an exacerbation of symptoms so we'd get immediate feedback 'that was too much concussing from walking'. We're designed to walk and run and our bodies are not going to backfire on us from doing a certain amount of that type of activity, when being fed a proper diet it is critical to mention.
This was when I started wondering about so many of the activities that we put our brains/bodies through -- is this part of the rising chronic illness rate? Have we been encouraged to participate in things by our society or because we just thought it was FUN and today it's there to do in such an extreme way, that we're having chronic (not acute) symptoms as a result, and we don't realize it's from these activities partially? I think so!
Like Kevin, my husband's medical problems occurred when he was a young man and after he'd had a stellar amateur career on the ice, playing hockey. It was written in the Minnesota Star when he was a young teenager that he was likely the next Gordie Howe-level player for the US; that was hockey's celebrity at that time, many people today don't recognize he name. In 50 years people won't recognize Shaun White's name perhaps either. I hope they will recognize Kevin Pearce because of success that will come from movies like
The Crash Reel and his Love Your Brain
program.
In my husband's case, had actually sensed the way coaches were pushing in unforgiving, unethical ways, and he left the ice, his team, and the sport one day in practice. His ambitions had been influenced by then by his girlfriend's father, who was an academic leader in the United States, and his ambitions were to get a PhD in something to do with the outdoors; he never got the PhD because of his medical problems interrupting him, but he did have a marvelous career and his research on visitor values related to air quality was part of what went into the overall research that lead to the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990; I worked on the project for eight years, that is where we met. We divorced over a discrepancy in our enthusiasm for my returning to finish my degree in occupational therapy. Ironically, he met and married a new graduate of the program within a year. Life sometimes is written in such a way you couldn't make it up and have a better story, we say AGAIN, here today!
The project we worked for literally changed history in the US and world, and sometimes had a brutal schedule to it, and we'd essentially funded new space to be built, throught the State, so it was all bid and done very cheaply. Same thing with the furniture and partitiions. Same thing with the equipment, unless we had some specific need that we could identify to go outside of what was being provided in the contracts.
VOCs, or volatile organic compounds, were outgassing, and I was steepign in along with everyone else. I was there sometimes more than 24 hours at a time, nobody else did that 'trick', and in 1989 I had chronic fatigue syndrome hit me pretty hard. At the time I didn't even attribute it to the building, I thought it was just the 'stress' of the 'demands of the job', and hours. Not to mention that I had more than the average woman's stress on me as a person, I was a stepmother as well as the daughter of a father who'd just had my mother die unexpectedly. I was 'sandwiched' in a rather 'Dagwood' style stress sandwich.
It took me many years to 'peel the onion' about my medical and learning problems to uncover that I had apparently had a significant brain injury at some point in time, and chronic stress as a child as well, along with perhaps some genes that aren't the kind of genes that do well with heavy metals, hence I reacted every time I had a vaccine that had the typical elements in it. Many things have damaged my brain, my mother had a lot of dental work (think mercury), smoked (think cadmium and carbon monoxide, etc.), and drank alcohol every day (but not all day, only after 5 pm as that, to her, was what defined an alcoholic or was a way she somewhat controlled her substance use / abuse.)
I had been totally missed diagnosed related to endocrine and thyroid issues as a child and teen, but with enough pushing by my father, I was finally diagnosed with 'prediabetic hypoglycemia'; my blood sugar went to 37 at hour number 5 on the retest; the first test that was given was three hours and I was at 60 which was not hypoglycemia per the HMO-style clinic provided by his company. Two years later I went for the second test outside of 'that system' because it just made sense that if the sugar was dropping at hour 3 and I was right on the line for hypo and normal glycemia then you'd want to re-test longer.
That, age 15, was when I began learning to be a 'take charge', proactive patient. Low blood sugar injures the brain. As does low oxygen, that too was finally, at my initiation, found when I was 50 years old and when we dug around as to the 'why', it's structural in my neck and head, and photos of me as a child show evidence that I was compensating with head position to increase air/oxygen. I went to 80% for 2 minutes on one of the tests when I was in my early 50s, on room air and no gadget in my mouth to open the jaw for more air intake. I've consulted with many really good doctors of various types over the years and had insurance that would cover things and was willing to do testing. Sometimes I'd have the time and energy and be lit up about something to push for testing and yet the right tests and referrals, I now realize, were often not made.
I did a project in 2013 to see what would happen outside the box related to referrals -- this lack of problem solving and dissecting a whole case and seeing what more could be looked into and tried is systemically one of the bigger problems in medicine in the US today, in my opinion.
Millions of people suffer from "exhaustion" that has to do with the combination of things that their bodies, minds, and spirits have had to deal with, and they end up sometimes being identified as having CFS. Often they dismiss it, as I did initially, and think it's from their stressful lives and they're not even AWARE of the many stressors 'loading down' their bodies. There are various analogies we use at Lumigrate -- the full barrel syndrome, or the full elevator, the teeter totter, but essentially it can be presented very simply with:
Your genes {+ positives that lift up your body, mind, spirit - (minus) negatives that burden body, mind, spirit}
It wasn't just what I was exposed to at the office though, that's the thing that is so interesting about many injuries that come from people's vocations. I worked in my outpatient business with a lot of upper extremity injuries, some of which were from repetitive motion, and the person could be given different job duties to 'rest' the limb and allow for faster healing but they'd typically not forego activities that antagonized it at home or recreationally. And he employer's insurance had to pay for it. It shocked me that they wouldn't modify things to get well.
When I had chronic fatigue syndrome, my immediate family completely allowed me to do what I needed to get well, my work accommodated as much as was possible, and I actually didn't do ANYTHING social except once in an entire summer, as I was working on getting well. Only 50% of people at that time got back to 80% or more of their previous level of function and I was determined to be one of them! (And I got to more than 100%, thanks to good conventional advise and prescriptions, short term, and then being pushed by a friend to go to a chiropractor.)
In another interesting real life twist, her daughter was born prematurely and had learning disabilities and when learning to drive fifteen years later was a client of the OT that came after I 'formalized' the rehab driving program for a large, innovative driving program in the Front Range. Her mom said they were in the session and she started realizing the connection and said "Did Mardy Ross used to work here?" Small world! Much of what I know about brains that is unique came from my two years in that specialty business niche.
A great example I can share related to how many hidden factors we might not recognize have to do with the health of our brain and things that can damage the brain: I once had a patient with a traumatic brain injury from work recovering really well who went to a movie that overstimulated the senses (sight, sound -- and that includes vibration you 'feel in your body' beyond hearing, these days). Another patient in the same timeframe, also making good progress and was returning to work with adaptations including an assistant, forgot to say 'no, that might set me back' when asked to go hunting. He saw something to shoot at and the combination of the rifle's kick and the noise created a setback.
In the first case, it set the patient back at a critical time and there was not a return to work as we had hoped. AND my patients with brain injury always had me telling them that 'you'll get to a point where you forget to be careful, every single patient has done that so far so please be the first that doesn't forget'. This is why if a patient has a family and other advocates as Kevin is shown to have had in The Crash Reel, there's such a higher likelihood of a good outcome. I LOVED that they included the housemate who was being his patient advocate once he returned to his home in Carlsbad, California (his parents and family are based out of Vermont.
It is shown in the movie that Kevin's brother, Adam, had quit his job and in order to be with Kevin at Craig Rehab and interestingly, and very nicely, said that he had helped the therapists do their jobs as therapists in terms of making what was being asked of Kevin in treatment more of a challenge. That's what it's all about, look at the YOU model, the ideal TEAM is a collaborating team, and that means the patient / advocate making suggestions and feeling empowered to direct things a bit or overall if the experts aren't on the mark at some point. (Or direct the overall care, which is sometimes the case, unfortunately. Kevin definitely didn't have that situation, it appeared his teams were fantastic and I know they're all very highly regarded. I've had several personal / professional connections with Craig Rehabilitation in Denver.)
Those who are "famous" to some degree or another, or who were working in a popular industry and become brain injured or have any kind of medical impairment (or other situation for that matter) have the new opportunity to create a new "vocation" or "occupation" as an activist. (Which word fits depends on if they're making their living from it). Kevin's sponsors stuck by him, he says in the film, and it appeared to me from The Crash Reel that very early on he was going out and doing brain injury prevention via helmet promotion talks to small groups, children in school. He ALSO talked to them about his special 'funny looking glasses'; you might recall having seen Hillary Clinton with similar glasses after she'd had a brain injury. That was very much in the news for the usual 48 hour cycle and so often we learn of things and then don't hear about them again.
A really "complete" brain injury program, in my opinion, will have people VERY early in their recovery wearing glasses or similar that help the brain accommodate. Vision therapy is a major part of recovery, and I wasn't clear if Kevin was shown using a piece of equipment in physical or occupational therapy, or it he was getting vision therapy -- we've all learned to borrow tools from other discipline's toolboxes and the lines are sometimes blurred as to what discipline does what, which is good overlap and dovetailing. It's kind of the way that you see sports shift and overlap yet there has to be categories for the competitions. And for the various types of equipment -- equipment that, combined with what we see others doing, has pushed us beyond what is 'prudent' perhaps. I'd have loved to have had a pair of those skis that they do slopestyle with when I was a teenager! I had a competition with my best friend on our last run of the day for how many 360s, and won with 13. And got a charlie horse -- I didn't know what a charlie horse WAS until that day (and had been a very active girl and teen).
The insurance companies don't 'get it' sometimes, related to which disciplines are doing what services in therapy, so it gets tricky as the provider and business providing the services. Furthermore, insurance not paying for whole types of services in many cases, keeps people with brain injuries from getting 'ultimate' brain function recovery. Hence these services have to be paid for outside of insurance funding. Insurance doesn't deem it relevant and reimbursement-worthy, there's a whole history involved relative to how things get an ICD-9 code that can be used for billing insurance, and the list ends up not having a lot of relevant things on it, in my opinion. I hope there are major changes in these types of things in the US (and beyond) because it is not that expensive and makes such a different in outcomes, and in my opinion is cost-effective.
The 2013 project, which I documented at Lumigrate, showed in a subjective case example what about $10,000 in services from me, a movement therapist, life coach, chiropractor and holistic dentist was able to do in helping a motivated patient who had very minimal funds for health care. By taking the money part out of the equation by donating services for a year (or less for some), a woman who could walk functionally but wasn't ready to return to work ended up climbing 14-ers within six months, and was employable by year's end. (Search on 'Out of a crack into The Groove' if you're interested in reading about it.)
Doing outreach, education, and "real activisim", I would call it, related to brain injury and brain function is very important, and I hope we're doing our part at Lumigrate. Kevin Pearse is doing a marvelous job with that just four years after having the life-changing crash. And having this online to link to and create this topic 'surrounding' at the time of the Olympics -- and starting it off on Valentines Day for
Love Your Brain, I hope will go far.
We're all in this together, after all!
Kevin continues to make a very good recovery, I can see improvements in recent video interview footage compared with the last video of him shown in The Crash Reel. I can only imagine what a great resource this is going to be for ANYONE who knows ANYONE that has a TBI, as they have a real 'model' to learn from. And it's such an interesting set of circumstances that you'll see in the filmmaker's writeup about the process that lead her to being aware of Kevin, meeting him, and getting the idea for the film. "Meant to be" comes to my mind.
I remember learning the allopathic information about brain injury recovery and then seeing progress in the ones I kept in touch with continue for many years. I still see improvements with a former client with developmental disabilities, whose mother was my coworker and friend, Petie, who has written for Lumigrate in past years. As more information gets to people about various things, primariliy diet and supplementation, and they embrace it and 'do it', then improvements occur as they would in any person whether with a known brain injury or not.
I've ended up, ironically, having more of a specialty in neuro and brain injury than I'd thought when I started into occupational therapy school in the mid '90s, and that is why I watched The Crash Reel on HBO when it previewed there. I should say that I became a fan of Kevin Pearse because of the film as well. And of Lucy Walker as a filmmaker. Here's what the film's website's home page offers (With a trailer embedded if you wish to click, please do!):
Home/Main landing page for The Crash Reel (with trailer):
thecrashreel.com/home.php
The dramatic story of one unforgettable athlete, Kevin Pearce; one eye-popping sport, snowboarding; and one explosive issue, Traumatic Brain Injury. A comeback story with a difference.
This eye-popping film seamlessly combines twenty years of stunning action footage with new specially-shot verité footage and interviews as it follows U.S. champion snowboarder Kevin Pearce and exposes the irresistible but potentially fatal appeal of extreme sports.
An escalating rivalry between Kevin and his nemesis Shaun White in the run-up to the 2010 Olympics leaves Shaun on top of the Olympic podium and Kevin in a coma following a training accident in Park City, Utah. Kevin's tight-knit Vermont family flies to his side and helps him rebuild his life as a brain injury survivor. But when he insists he wants to return to the sport he still loves, his family intervenes with his eloquent brother David speaking for all of them when he says, “I just don’t want you to die.” Kevin’s doctors caution him that even a small blow to the head could be enough to kill him. Will Kevin defy them and insist on pursuing his passion? With his now impaired skills, what other options does he have? How much risk is too much?
Directed by twice Oscar®-nominated filmmaker Lucy Walker (Devil’s Playground, Blindsight, Countdown to Zero, Waste Land, The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom).
Therefore, I was more eager than ever for the 2014 Winter Olympics from Sochi, Russia -- I have been more concerned than ever about the brains of anyone with ambitions in these types of winter sports. In honor of Kevin and all people who have had diagnosed brain injuries, and all athletes who have injured their brains in order to excel at their sport whether it has entertainment value to spectators or not, I dedicate this topic. And I mostly dedicate it to those who do not know their brain has been injured. I hope that they can become aware and educated about things which might help them improve their level of function. That means after learning something one has to 'do it', as the old Nike marketing slogan goes. (Nike is a part of the Kevin/Crash Reel story, you'll see.)
I was curious if and how Kevin would be shown at Sochi, as I presumed he was going to attend. You'll see in the director's writeup, below, and I saw Shawn say in a recent interview that he was going to be attending the Olympics in Sochi. But I haven't seen any mention of him on NBC's coverage so far. A couple of days ago there was nothing doing a Google search that I found about his being there, just the recent interview where he says he's going to go and is looking forward to watching other sports now while at a competition like the Olympics. Per the filmmaker, there are many agreements and expectations surrounding injured athletes in these types of sports in order to suppress this from the public's collective mind.
I'm posting this for Valentine's Day because Kevin's brain injury and the love from and for family, friends and fans have lead to their creating a nonprofit "Love Your Brain". In previous years at Lumigrate we've focused for Valentine's Day on the more obvious heart, or the congruence between the brain and the heart, such as is offered via "Heart Math". But in 2014 I am getting back to my 'old love', neuro and brain injury. But I hope to bring a unique twist to the many CONTRIBUTING FACTORS to healing a brain and keeping it well, or to injuring it.
Here's the link to go to the Love Your Brain portion of The Crash Reel dot com website for information about the organization as well as easy to produce/print education 'posters'/handouts (they're very well done):
I actually started studying new information (for me) last may, related to 'chemical brain injury', which was inspired by someone I loved very much who died in April, and since I was her human guardian, I felt the responsibility and guilt that comes when you have perhaps done something that contributed to the problem. My beloved SpoildeyCat, who wasn't even four years old, who I'd 'therapized' and helped reverse hyperactivity (I called her MonkeyCat for the first year or so) and turned my home into a sensory integration gym and my car into a rolling catmobile as she loved to travel with me, had a severe case of the rare disorder 'hyperesthesia'.
Or at least that is what I believe after talking with many experts, though that was not specified by the veterinarian who we finally connected with, who knew that the symptom I noted and communicated of completely dilated pupils and seizure-like activity was something she'd seen, but rarely in a long career in conventional and holistic veterinary medicine and that euthanasia was the only option. She was normally a very well behaved, happy, fun, active and playful cat with no bad habits, but would have episodes where she lost reality and went into attack mode but while also having a seizure and was 'out of her mind'.
I'd thought about the similarities between the human medical conditions that I've put so much information about on Lumigrate, the 'overlapping chronic illnesses', and the feline hyperesthesia as I made my way learning about it. The holistic experts I spoke with in the US were actually working collaboratively with education even, veterinary and medical, and it was really a breakthrough for me. In working hard to find foods she would eat that were healthier, I spent a lot of time in the locally owned pet supply store and saw the number of people with challenging pets, like me, struggling to find solutions to pet health problems.
So, in a very different way, and certainly a different significance to my life compared to Kevin Pearce and his family's, these challenges propel us in new and exciting ways and create growth. The hard way. But ultimately, it's 'real growth'.
I will extend and modify this topic after Valentine's Day, so perhaps check back to this thread and see how it grows.
For now, I'm going to focus on
- The Crash Reel and it's director's story about the film, in comment box immediately below.
- Kevin Pearse, and
- "Love Your Brain".
As the Olympics continue and wrap up, I will add on more about brain / neuro / mind / behavior issues in athletes, and my concerns about what is being shown on television for the youth of today to emulate. As I have said above related to Filmmaker Lucy's story about the making of this film, there is a concerning censorship about injured athletes.
I will also share how I believe much of the chronic illness in the US (and beyond) has more to do with 'brain injury' than we typically know. I frankly think that much of what we have done for recreation, including amusement park rides perhaps, has exceeded the forces that our brains can typically handle. The climate of everything having to be bigger and faster and better and more, more, more -- has not come without consequences.
It has long been compiled in statistics that more women are diagnosed with fibromyalgia than men, and it was thought that perhaps men are just getting missed by the doctors doing the diagnosing more than women. Or they're not going to the doctor as readily. And I think it is likely both of those things and more -- women have different structure and mass and therefore are affected differently.
Did you know the 'crash test dummies' only last year, 2013, were redesigned to ALSO represent the average woman's size? All the crash testing up to this point was based on the average man. What changed that? There are now more women with licenses to drive than men, for the first time, they alleged.
I'll also share more about my personal and professional background, which become intermixed relative to brain injury and neurological issues. And since we all love or hate cats, and she had a good story to tell, I'll bring SpoildeyCat into things as well. Interestingly enough, she had either jumped or fallen off a 2nd story balcony when she was three months old.
One expert believed that she likely had damaged brain and nervous system tissue from the force of landing, which was then 'open' when she was vaccinated at five months, which is when I adopted her as a foster as she'd been rescued out of a dysfunctional sitution which perhaps included inhalation of secondhand pot smoke. (Though this is theory and 'profiling' based on the situation, which I did get a good history of.)
I was suprised to find out that pot smoke was particularly harmful to cats, per a veterinary expert I spoke with about her situation and history. But she'd been, since a wee kitten, very nervous and timid and then became a 'monkeycat' that was simultaneously a thrillseeker as long as she was in an environment she felt safe in. If she could snowboard, I think she would have! I remember seeing her get scared by something she didn't recognize, and she'd retreat but not far nor for long, she'd be right there looking from a safer place.
I will also, in the future, weave in about the NFL players' situation related to brain deterioration due to trauma. I've received some papers from Dr Amen's head of research. It appears there are multiple factors to be further studied related what the player's lifestyle was, and the same is true for snowboarders. And pets. And all people.
Interestingly, I was in communication with Dr Amen's clinic staff about 'chemical brain injury' and chemicals affecting the brain at the time that I saw The Crash Reel; after intensive hospital care and rehabilitation at Denver's Craig Rehab, Kevin and his mother who was advocating with him as a patient advocate/helper, are shown consulting with Dr Amen in his office. I actually enjoyed seeing him in his office because I'd only seen him on television studio sets and became a fan of his work after finding him on PBS.
The Crash Reel alludes to the lifestyle of Olympic athletes 'in training' who were clearly having a raging party with substances that at least some of them were using. It was overall an out of control and unsafe party, with dangerous behaviors and destruction to the interior of the home, though the video was edited in such a way it's not identifying specific people and substance use. Though I presume it was the 'birthday boy' who appears to hit the floor having overdrugged (alcohol being a drug) to the point of loss of consciousness.
Kevin's crash the day after the party was over, and being morning, coincided in a timeframe that his system might not have completely processed and cleared whatever he'd taken in. And maybe he'd not overindulged with any kind of drug, but there had been poor nutrition. Or he'd not had restorative sleep due to all the people in town. Shaun White was in attendance, it appeared that the whole snowboarding world had descended on this party in Utah between Christmas and New Years.
I feel for these young people who have had so much come their way at an early age, and even those who aren't in the limelight, there are unbelievable pressures today. I can't even imagine having social media when a teen, to mention just one thing on their plates. On one hand the snowboarding 'pack' were acting the norm for their age, for snowboarders, when someone in a group turns 21.
I remember my group of gal pals who lived in a dormitory with a co-ed floor of really 'good guys' had come up with the idea that for 21sts birthdays we should all pick a type of alcohol and do 21 shots of it. The first to turn 21 was not one of our more robust drinkers, and she got to 15 and thankfully had chosen something relatively low in proof. We're friends to this day and she is now raising a family and I hope they hear us laugh about what knuckleheads we were.
We were at "CSU" when it was one of the top 'party schools' in the United States. And the campus officials had facilitated that; on Fridays the floors had kegs of 3.2 beer (legal in Colorado in 1978/79 when we started there), here and there so it encouraged us to 'mix'.
And we'd not been 'partiers' in high school or junior high (or elementary), as many of our classmates. But it was even baffling to those who did party in high school how it was allowed; we had a full time undercover cop who never ventured immediately off campus to the 'hill' where a great number of my schoolmates lives were forever changed because they became impaired cognitively during the day from the drugs they were taking in.
So I ask whether Kevin and those shown in The Crash Reel were "under the influence" of proper education and educated trainers and handlers to help these gifted, celebrated young people navigate life safely? They were adults, they weren't the responsibility of parents, though clearly our elders are always influences in our lives, for better or worse.
My background includes formal training in overall health education and additional focus in drug and alcohol education, and I was certified as a 'peer health educator' when a student at Colorado State University.
My project for the semester class was brain injury, and I utilized in-line skating and involved Rollerblade in the final project, as well as the University's new 'alternative program' for activities that wouldn't involve alcohol on campus. I put on a free evening with Rollerblade providing 50 free pairs of skates one Saturday evening, with the education focusing on safe skating and helmet use for brain injury prevention. If they listened to the education about brain and brain injury and the prevention of injury with helmets, they could borrow equipment and skate, we even had a hockey game to join in with.
Here's the link to the pledge about helmet use that you can catch as well from The Crash Reel website:
That was in the fall of 1992, 21 years ago, and 17 years before Kevin's life was rolling out as is shown in The Crash Reel. Basically, a 'generation' has gone by since then. I'm pleased to say that the administration reversed their course which was heading to banning in-line skating and skateboarding on campus, and they created spaces to encourage the activities to be done that wouldn't injure bystanders or bywalkers or the statues, railings, or other structures being used by skateboarders and skaters.
On the news in my community this week, with another Colorado university with the same number of students as Colorado State University had in 1992, there is no alcohol education program on campus! I was shocked to learn this! Are we making progress or digressing? Treading water, not going anywhere? I've seen 'good kids' who I would not have suspected were going to go the route in middle or high school of drugs (including alcohol) going that direction, and did some digging on that, and will be weaving that in from where it resides on Lumigrate.
And it's important to add that I had the pleasure of being put in touch with group of fluoride activists in my community who are University students, though not via an official student organization. They meet on weekend evenings regularly, and they don't drink alcohol. I bring water and fluoride into this conversation because, I believe, there is a lot of information for people to consider related to the effects of fluoride, whether from water or topical tooth products that end up being ingested, which involves the brain and it's wellness.
It is established by many sources that fluoride calcifies the pineal gland, and when you look at what the pineal gland does within the 'symphony of the systems of the brain and mind' , particularly when using a holistic, integrative medicine approach of body, mind, spirit, there's more to the mental wellness of people than how much alcohol they're consuming, it might have to do with other beverages including the most simple 'water'.
So when we look at young adults and their overall brain wellness, their insights about things might be impaired from when they're young due to drinking fluoridated water. The irony of millions of parents focusing on alcohol consumption as their child becomes a teenager and young adult, while their tapwater from day 1 was potentially affecting their kid's brain! Perhaps I'm not putting the dots together well, but I see at least a potential interplay that I think is worth mentioning here.
Generally, I see a lot of misinformation about brain injury: "time is the key factor" for example. Time doesn't do a thing, it's what the BODY is doing IN TIME, that is the factor. And what the person is providing the body, again, thinking "mind, body, spirit", has everything to do with the person's outcome. Breathing and oxygen. Water quality and quantity. Nutrition.
Even blood sugar levels are important, low blood sugar is shown to cause injury to the brain. There's a correlation between alcohol and blood sugar that is very interesting and many people haven't been presented with it before. So this story about Kevin, The Crash Reel, the filmaker's interpretation and story about the movie, and ultimately "Love Your Brain" is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg on this subject. I hope this is a good introduction and beginning.
So without further ado, I will provide the information to get us started.
I was really taken by The Crash Reel and how it showed Kevin's family and all the history presented. The long friendship with Shawn White, which had hit a rough patch when Kevin's achievements in competition started to challenge his position. It did a beautiful job of showing a key difference between the two: Kevin took his friends with him on the rise up the fame 'pole', and Shawn went solo. I ended up leaving off from the film wondering and really 'caring' what happened to Kevin socially after the film left off.
Without being too much of a 'spoiler' for those who watch the film, it left off with his again winning an award, but in a new field he had gotten into becasue of his brain injury. Therefore I was tremendously interested in the entire story presented at The Crash Reel's website, in the about/story by the filmmaker.
However, I kept wanting to block and copy the words and and read it after I'd broken it into smaller paragraphs and put in the type of punctuation that I've found works best for people reading Lumigrate. Myself included. This is because I've had a brain injury (at birth, totally undiagnosed, not even as 'learning disabilities' by public schools k-college, I had to drop out to 'find myself and work for a while' in order to come upon the threads that turned into a rope and pulled me to academic success and on to becoming an occupational therapist at age 36, in 1996.)
My knowledge about how to make things easier for tired brains or injured brains (or both) is based on some information from my OT education in university but mostly from my having known the author of BrainLash, Gail Denton, PhD, long ago when she had just published the book. I had gone to work for an innovative, established and 'taking off' driving school where many people had brain injury or neurological differences from medical impairments.
I met Gail twice, once in her previous capacity officiating a wedding of a close friend, and then she happened to be at vision therapy when I went to do a marketing meeting with a special type of optometrist in her home town of Boulder, Colorado. Lumigrate has that form of optometry represented with Lynn Hellerstein, PhD, author of "See it. Say it. Do it!", as she was who a manager had suggested I consult with in 1997 when I was first an OTR and struggling with the paperwork for Medicare as required by my large, corporate therapy provider employer).
SO, what I am going to do is encourage everyone to visit the website for The Crash Reel, but also, as I typically do at Lumigrate, provide you with the entire topic at one tab so you can see why I am encouraging the trip off from Lumigrate and to the website I'm recommending. They can certainly then cut and paste and use the modified version if they wish.
The Crash Reel is firmly on my list of favorite movies of all time, and I very much hope you are inspired to watch.
And naturally, I hope that you will go and learn and be inspired at Kevin's charitable organization's website for
Love Your Brain. And mostly, I hope our YOUsers are reading this and wanting to learn more about loving your brain every day!
__________________
Live and Learn. Learn and Live Better! is my motto. I'm Mardy Ross, and I founded Lumigrate in 2008 after a career as an occupational therapist with a background in health education and environmental research program administration. Today I function as the desk clerk for short questions people have, as well as 'concierge' services offered for those who want a thorough exploration of their health history and direction to resources likely to progress their health according to their goals. Contact Us comes to me, so please do if you have questions or comments. Lumigrate is "Lighting the Path to Health and Well-Being" for increasing numbers of people. Follow us on social networking sites such as:
Twitter: http://twitter.com/lumigrate and Facebook. (There is my personal page and several Lumigrate pages. For those interested in "groovy" local education and networking for those uniquely talented LumiGRATE experts located in my own back yard, "LumiGRATE Groove of the Grand Valley" is a Facebook page to join. (Many who have joined are beyond our area but like to see the Groovy information! We not only have FUN, we are learning about other providers we can be referring patients to and 'wearing a groove' to each other's doors -- or websites/home offices!) By covering some of the things we do, including case examples, it reinforces the concepts at Lumigrate.com as well as making YOU feel that you're part of a community. Which you ARE at Lumigrate!
Comments
My lightly edited version of Lucy Walker's writeup at The Crash Reel website about this film from her perspective, for easier reading (shorter paragraphs and more punctuation) by those with brains that benefit from simplification and more structure: (I took the time to do this to encourage as many to read it as possible, she says some very interesting things and many were thoughts I'd had and she quite simply says it brilliantly!)
Up at Sundance in January 2010, I noticed that many locals were wearing stickers that said "I Ride For Kevin", and I connected it with the sad news story of an Olympic hopeful that had crashed in the half-pipe there. Then that summer, 2010, I was invited to be a mentor and to show my film Waste Land at a retreat for Nike's top sponsored action-sports athletes -- it's worth noting that what we call "extreme sports", the sponsors call "action sports".
At the back of my mind when I accepted the invitation was a sense that the world of extreme sports might be a good one to make a documentary. I love to explore fascinating, inaccessible worlds in my films, and I like to offer the audience a ticket to ride inside a world they can't normally access (Amish teenagers, blind Tibetans, Everest climbers, Rio's garbage pickers, Japanese tsunami survivors). But mostly I was happy to help out a friend who wanted to inspire young sports stars to use their platform for social change.
At the retreat I met Kevin and his brother Adam. It was early days after his accident and Kevin's head was shorn, his eyes were looking different directions, he couldn't read or stay awake for long, he kept re-introducing himself to me because his memory was so impaired he couldn't remember that we'd just been talking -- and yet he still had a star quality, I found him completely charming and compelling and was drawn to talk to him and Adam as much as possible. It seemed like a tragic story, but it seemed like the story was short, sad, and finished, so I didn't instantly think that it would make a good film.
I didn't want to make a two-act film about a hopeful who had crashed. Or a sappy rehab story that didn't really earn its keep. But then I started to notice that Kevin was desperate to keep up with the other athletes around him. His brother told me that if he hit his head again he would die, and that he wasn't allowed to snowboard again, but everything he wanted to do was active and dangerous, and he lit up when he talked about his passion to return to the sport. I wondered what he would do next, and I realized that the story wasn't over, it was about to get interesting.
In Ovid's Metamorphoses we have stories of the shield that never fails and the sword that never misses, and this seemed like this. Kevin's life was snowboarding, but it would kill him if he returned to it. Suddenly I saw a dramatic three-act film. I didn't know what was going to happen, but I wanted to film him to find out.
I also heard that Kevin's crash had been filmed by a passer-by, even though he hadn't been competing when he crashed, it was just an early-morning practice session. I realized that even though I hadn't been able to film with Kevin pre-accident, that there would be lots of footage to license in order to tell the story with verité immediacy.
I looked around at the retreat and noticed that the athletes were being filmed by Nike and also filming themselves nonstop, and it occurred to me that there would be a great deal of this footage. Since extreme sports stars are filmed both on and off the slopes more than perhaps anyone except reality TV stars, so we would be able to have a lot of choices in the editing room. Adam also told me that he'd filmed some very early post-accident hospital scenes, and so we could find footage to tell that part of the story as well.
The more that I started to think about making a documentary about Kevin, the more interested I got. Sometimes I have an idea for a film which initially seems very promising, but the more you turn it over in your mind, the less interesting it gets (maybe there's already been a film in the same space, or it's hard to get access or footage, or you start to realise that the answers are pretty simple and obvious, or the people aren't as open or interesting as you first hoped). But no matter how much I thought about Kevin, I got more interested.
I heard Kevin talk about his brother David, who has Down syndrome, and his remarkably supportive family, I wondered what it must be like for parents to have two sons with intellectual disabilities, and how the crash would have changed the relationship between the brothers. I knew that this would be a very strong part of the film.
I also thought it was fascinating that the world of extreme sports posed questions that I couldn't answer. When I watch big-wave surfing or mega-ramp skating or half-pipe snowboarding, my eyes are so glued to the screen that my eyeballs might as well be sucked out of my head. But half of the reason I'm mesmerized is because it's clear that the stakes are life and death. There's no room for error. I find myself thinking that mistakes are inevitable, and any mistake could be fatal. And Kevin's story dramatizes just how dramatic the stakes are. Kevin's story is an exemplary study of risk and reward.
Snowboarding is a breathtakingly beautiful sport, and those who excel at it are modern-day demi-gods, bringing humans closer to the art of flight and garnering praise, adulation, and fortunes in lucrative sponsorships wherever they go. And yet their lives are fraught with danger. The risks they take to get to the top are truly extreme.
And I was horrified to learn that the crashes become viral hits on YouTube. What innate response do extreme trigger in us? What's happened to moderation in our lives, why this push to the extremes? What sort of society of spectacle have we become that kids are competing gladiator-style, where the X Games resembles nothing so much as the Hunger Games?
Another fascinating angle is the controversy about head injuries in sports. TBI in mountain sports has an obvious relationship with CTE (cognitive traumatic encelopathy from repeat small hits) in the NFL which was making major news headlines. The question of how much health danger is too much in sports was clearly a pressing one with no clear answers but very high stakes, which again made Kevin's story potentially very dramatic, important and zeitgeist.
So there were many, many reasons I wanted to make the film. And one big one. Which is to simply make a great film. I am a filmmaker sort of a documetnary-maker. I don't want to make films that are "just another documentary", that are simply adequate. I don't want to use film to make a story that just as well could be a book or a news item. I want to elevate the genre, push the boundaries, find material that will yield the most dramatic richness when you start to work it. It's hard to get excited about making a talking heads movie, with pedestrian interviews with people telling you what happened.
I want to make the most cinematic documentaries possible, films that take you on the emotional ride that the subjects are taking, and deliver as much visual excitement, emotional intensity, cinematic power and narrative payoff as a classic fiction film. I trained as a fiction filmmaker and choose to work in nonfiction to tell stories that are more compelling than fiction and not less. I saw the potential to do that here, so I started talking to Kevin and his family about making a film of his story.
Fortunately, they were as keen for me to do it as I was. Kevin's doctors felt that it would give him a sense of purpose, something to do since he wasn't allowed to snowboard, and that it would be helpful for him to see himself on screen to see his progress. So we began to shoot.
Being a documentary filmmaker is a tremendous responsibility, and never more so than when you're working with a sensitive subject like traumatic brain injury and people who are suffering hugely. It's even harder when you fervently admire the people you're documenting, as I do Kevin Pearce and his family. But what makes it easy is when the people you are filming have the courage to be completely honest about what they are going through. That vulnerability and openness is what the audience can connect with, and it's what electrifies the emotion of the story.
The Pearce family is no stranger to disability, with Kevin's brothers and father all being dyslexic as well as David having Down syndrome. And their philosophy is not to be ashamed of any disability or struggle, but instead to share it honestly and bravely, and this was critical to the success of the film.
Of course I'm proud of the intimacy of the film, and I have many tricks and experiences that I've learned (this is my fifth film) in order to help achieve that, but the best trick of all is to work with people who have the rare courage to be emotionally honest. The same courage it took to pursue an Olympic dream was now manifest in Kevin’s willingness to talk about his injury and share his story, and his determination to be all that he could be with his brain injury.
I saw a wonderful opportunity to take people on a journey through Kevin's life -- the vertiginous heights of his snowboarding fame, and the devastating lows of his brain injury. In so doing, we’d reveal the psychological make-up of a champion athlete as well as the day-to-day reality of being a brain injury survivor. And we get to glimpse this remarkable family reveal itself through their actions.
We spent two and a half years filming Kevin and the Pearce family. I wanted to collaborate with cinematographer Nick Higgins because of his gift of knowing where to point the camera during verité shooting, and his understated shooting style meant we were able to capture all the emotions and drama inside the family without being obtrusive.
I like to work with a very small shoot crew to preserve the intimacy, so our basic crew configuration was just myself recording sound with Nick shooting, and sometimes our producer Julian recording sound also. Some of my favorite scenes in the film are those around the Pearce dinner table in Vermont, as Nick's sensitive, observant cinematography captures the Pearce family’s pain and struggle to support and guide Kevin through his recovery.
We also put in a huge amount of work in sourcing and scouring through archival sources. It was not as if we were handed a bag with all the archival material. On the contrary, it was the hugest excavation project trying to figure out who had been filming and how we could get ahold of the footage.
In what I am guessing might be a record, we looked through 18 terrabytes of material comprising 11,000 clips from 232 archival sources. We wanted to track down every last piece of footage that was needed to tell the story. Some were traditional archival sources, like the Olympics or news reports, but most were informal sources such as friends, family, sponsors, snowboarding context, sports magazines, or Kevin's fans. We had different people named Florian in three different countries who contributed footage.
Hundreds of different people around the world who didn't even know one another held pieces of this jigsaw puzzle, and it was a Herculean job to figure out who they were, and persuade them to let us see and license the footage. For example the scene of Kevin's life-saving crash was pieced together from footage from five separate people who each held a different crucial angle. Kevin's actual life-changing accident was caught on tape by a passer-by, who out of sensitivity to the family chose not to put it onto YouTube.
And we show that footage exclusively in the film. But it was a different tape shot by a different person that shows Kevin at the bottom of the halfpipe where he lay unconscious. And it was a different camera again that captured him being loaded into the life-plane. And another which caught his friends reacting. Etc. I was inspired by films like Senna which were built out of competition footage, and Capturing the Freidmans, which was constructed from home movies.
The Crash Reel is built from competition footage and home movies and more. I think the future as we are filmed more and more frequently there might be more films like this that have the dimensionality of many different kinds of sources that are retroactively combined to tell a story that hadn't originally been filmed by a single crew.
Editor Pedro Kos (who also cut Waste Land and my short film Crooked Lines) was my top pick for the job. We had a tight 7 months before Sundance, where we knew we wanted to premiere, but despite the pressure, every day was a true creative pleasure as we worked the vast array of material to figure out the story and how to tell it. It was also an extensive research and writing project.
It wasn't immediately obvious how much the friendship-turned-rivalry with Shaun White had been fueling the two athletes in the build-up to the Olympics, but as I unearthed more footage I started to see how the two had been pushing one another. And as I called up more footage and dug around a bit more, the material revealed a to-the-death sports rivalry that needed to be told.
It was while I was at Sundance 2012 (with my film The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom) that the tragic news hit of Sarah Burke's crash, in exactly the same spot of the half pipe where Kevin had crashed on December 31st, 2009. Then she died, and the media connected the two stories, and it was clear that she was part of the film too. I wanted to pay tribute to her, and dramatically underscore how easily Kevin's story could have gone the other way. Our heart went out to her widower Rory Bushfield and to her family, we were sickened that they were confronted with medical bills, and we were horrified that so many athletes go uninsured.
We have launched an advocacy and awareness campaign called #LoveYourBrain, inspired by Kevin's words in the film to Trevor Rhoda, the young man who can't find his own elbow and ran over his brother with a golf cart after suffering two traumatic brain injuries. There are many initiatives on several fronts surrounding veterans (estimated 400,000 veterans are returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with TBI), incentivizing helmet use, concussion awareness and training, and encouraging and mandating that athletes have medical insurance. In January we were invited to screen at the X Games as the very first official movie there.
A couple of days later a snowmobiler named Caleb Moore suffered a horrible crash, although initially he seemed to be doing okay, and everyone was more worried about his brother who broke his back and separated his pelvis in a separate accident that same day. Caleb's crash went viral and everyone thought he'd be fine. But then a couple of days later he died from the injuries, and we were left to circulate the same pleas for financial help for his family, sickened and saddened.
I chose to call the film "The Crash Reel" to confront "head on" this culture of the spectacle of glamorous crashes. Every athlete and actions sports films company will have their own "crash reel" or goriest crashes that prove enormously popular on YouTube. It was hard for us to work on the scene with all the crashes, but I wanted to include in the film what exactly these sports can result in, and how popular these crashes are. But instead of showing a quick clip of a glamorous crash, I wanted to show the whole entire story of a crash; Kevin's crash. Kevin's goal in making the movie was to raise awareness of what risks his friends are running.
He loves the sport and wouldn't want to change it, but he does think people should know, and when sponsorship contracts forbid athletes from talking about their injuries, and injured athletes are exiled from the community and not given screen time, there's a distorted sense that accidents are rarer than they are. I didn't want Caleb to die. I was horrified to find that our film was grotesquely prescient and apropos. I was relieved that the X Games have suspended the snowmobiling event pending a thorough review of its safety, and I hope that they will do that with all their events.
I am a huge music fan, and another reason I love to collaborate with editor Pedro Kos is that we share a passion for, and common taste in, great contemporary music. The emotionality and adrenaline-fuelled drama of our story is supplemented with a lyrical yet energetic contemporary soundtrack which we had tremendous creative fun in creating
My last two films were both scored by Moby, but this time we went for a more eclectic soundtrack. We would try to find the tracks that worked optimally for each scene. Luckily for us, all the amazingly gifted artists whose haunting, memorable music we desperately wanted to accompany our images agreed to license their tracks for our exceedingly modest budget (great credit to Matt Biffa who managed to secure the clearances to the songs that Pedro and I chose).
A special note about David Pearce. I have never seen anyone who is as eloquent about having Down syndrome as David is. The family is full of scene-stealers, but for me David steals the show. It was shocking when I interviewed him that he could talk so candidly and clearly about his struggle to accept his disability.
His eloquence is a true testament to how he has been raised by his remarkable family, as well as to his intelligence and thoughtfulness and courage. His ability to articulate and say out loud what everyone else is thinking is the most brilliant dramatic device, as well as a true communication gift.
The final scene in which Kevin and David challenge one another to accept their disability was the most profoundly moving and inspiring scenes I have ever filmed.
It's also an example of how nonfiction can out-write fiction: I wonder if any genius screenwriter, if I'd shown them the cut of the movie up to that point and asked them to write a final scene, would have been able to write something that so powerfully tied up the movie.
I almost didn't film that final scene as we'd already cut a perfectly workmanlike ending and we'd already gotten into the film festival. But a note from Executive Producer Dan Cogan proved key. He mentioned that the ending wasn't as strong as the rest of the movie. And of course I had to take up the challenge.
So two days before Thanksgiving, while my fellow producer Julian Cautherly was in the neonatal intensive care unit as his wife had just had a baby prematurely, and my regular DP was unavailable as he was spending the holiday with his family after missing it the previous year for our first Thanksgiving shoot, I scrambled to find a DP and plane tickets. And as soon as that scene happened, I knew that we had the most powerful ending to any documentary I could remember, and I couldn't wait to get back to the editing room and start editing it.
When we had our World Premiere as the Opening Night Film at Sundance 2013, David was in the audience and he loudly sobbed, howled and whimpered during the screening, which I found completely harrowing. But when he got up on stage for the Q&A and was asked how it was going, whether he was able to accept his Down syndrome, he answered that now he had seen the movie he could accept his Down syndrome. And I was moved to tears, thinking that there was no higher vindication than that, of all of our wonderful team's immensely hard work.
Live and Learn. Learn and Live Better! is my motto. I'm Mardy Ross, and I founded Lumigrate in 2008 after a career as an occupational therapist with a background in health education and environmental research program administration. Today I function as the desk clerk for short questions people have, as well as 'concierge' services offered for those who want a thorough exploration of their health history and direction to resources likely to progress their health according to their goals. Contact Us comes to me, so please do if you have questions or comments. Lumigrate is "Lighting the Path to Health and Well-Being" for increasing numbers of people. Follow us on social networking sites such as: Twitter: http://twitter.com/lumigrate [4] and Facebook. (There is my personal page and several Lumigrate pages. For those interested in "groovy" local education and networking for those uniquely talented LumiGRATE experts located in my own back yard, "LumiGRATE Groove of the Grand Valley" is a Facebook page to join. (Many who have joined are beyond our area but like to see the Groovy information! We not only have FUN, we are learning about other providers we can be referring patients to and 'wearing a groove' to each other's doors -- or websites/home offices!) By covering some of the things we do, including case examples, it reinforces the concepts at Lumigrate.com as well as making YOU feel that you're part of a community. Which you ARE at Lumigrate!