Earlier this season, Boston Celtics‘ center Al Horford suffered a concussion after hitting his head against a teammate during one of their practices. He was placed under the league's concussion protocol and had to go through a number of tests with increasing difficulty before getting cleared to return to action.
The 30-year-old Florida product eventually missed three weeks and a total of nine games before playing once again. He recently talked about the struggles he had to go through as he was not allowed to do any strenuous activities, including using his cellphone or even watch TV during his recovery.
“It was all a very weird time for me, because, like, what do you do when you can’t do anything?”
“As the days kept going by, I started to feel worse. Just a lot of things that wouldn’t go away. It was a lot of stuff I didn’t really understand, because it’s never happened to me before.”
“Then I noticed that just being in the arena, these lights, would kill me. They would bring my symptoms back. I felt like I was close to fainting. The noise and the lights would bring everything back to square one.”
Horford now has a better understanding of a concussion and knows how difficult it is dealing with a head injury.
“Concussions, you have to be really honest with yourself, and sometimes that’s hard to do,” he said. “As athletes, we’re always trained to play through stuff. And I’ve played through all types of injuries — ankle sprains, shoulder, whatever — and with the brain it’s just different. That was the hard part for me to understand.”
The Boston faithful can now breathe a sigh of relief as Horford has come back strong and has contributed to the Celtics who have won seven of their last 11 games. Most importantly, he has not shown any signs of the injury lingering on him.
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