72
(^) Daily Mail, Wednesday, August 21, 2019
GB hockey star ALEX DANSON banged her head laughing. It was a
I SUDDENLY REALIS
TALK. I WAS START
A
LEX DANSON can
laugh now. She
can also jog a little.
A polite term for
it, she says, but
when she ambles around
the field near her home,
those short, slow strides
feel better than just about
anything in the world.
‘Heavenly,’ she calls it. ‘Freedom.’
And then a smile that is followed
by a sigh because she knows it is
progress and she also knows it is
sad. She knows where she was and
where she is and she can only hope
for where she might one day
return. She knows the Tokyo
Olympics are coming up fast, just
11 months away, and yet the past
11 have been slow and painful.
‘It’s been so, so hard,’ she says.
‘Soul-destroying at times.’ But
now she can jog and that, finally, is
something closer to normal.
For 10 months she couldn’t and
wasn’t. Just as for two months
she needed help getting to the
bathroom. Just as for six months
she couldn’t enter a coffee shop or
watch television, and for seven she
couldn’t look at a screen to check
emails, and for nine she couldn’t
go so long as a minute without a
headache. They would vary
between tolerable and unbearable,
but they were always there, every
minute of every day. Nine months.
Now, there are hours when it
doesn’t hurt. Now she doesn’t have
to wear sunglasses inside or sleep
for 15 hours or pass out on the
bathroom floor or recoil when her
brother laughs. No. That has all
improved. Slowly, awfully slowly,
and there is still so much to do.
But it has started to get better.
And so, with this week having
marked the three-year anniversary
of Britain winning hockey gold at
the Rio Olympics, she can just
about grin at the time she laughed
and bumped her head on a wall.
IT IS the mundanity of it that
makes Danson’s experience so
shocking.
‘It was on September 1 of last
year — the detail is engraved on
my mind, or maybe that should be
the back of my head,’ she says.
Danson, now 34, had just finished
the World Cup where England,
under her captaincy, had lost in
the quarter-finals, so along with
her boyfriend, Alex Bennett, she
escaped to Kenya for a holiday.
They’d been kite-surfing in Watamu
when Danson laughed at her part-
ner’s joke one evening. ‘I threw my
head back and just banged it on a
wall. It was about the height of my
shoulders and so my head hit the
top of it flush. Not a car crash, not
a fall, not unconscious. I just hit my
head on a wall.
‘I kind of laughed it off awkwardly
but knew immediately it wasn’t
right. That night I woke up every
hour. That was the first sign. I had
been concussed three times before
and was thinking, “Come on, not
on my first big holiday in 18 years”.
‘The next morning I made a mis-
take. I suppose it’s a habit of sports
people to shrug off an injury, so Alex
and I went running. I felt good so I
was thinking, “Great, no concus-
sion”. Then the second we got back
to the hotel room everything spun.
And that really was the start.
‘We had five days left and I felt
sick the whole time, massive head-
aches. On the drive to the airport,
I was holding my head in tears.
Any time we hit a bump it was hor-
rendous. When we got to the plane,
a flight attendant asked Alex if I
was even OK to fly. He said I was
which I did. I set myself up for
an almighty crash and I had
one a few weeks after get-
ting back.
‘I had missed a couple of
weeks of hockey and the
England squad was working
towards the Champions
Trophy in November.
I set that as a
target, which was
ludicrous because
I had been in an
awful state since
flying back.
‘I would be
in the
house
wearing
dark
glasses, in bed for 24
hours, sleeping 15
hours. Every second,
my head was aching.
But I pushed to show I
could play, so I went to
see the specialist and did
a Buffalo test as part of
the concussion protocol
— you walk on a treadmill
as its gradient increases
and you report how you feel.
I under-reported and when I
went home I was in bits.
‘The next day, I was crying
and needing help from Alex to
get to the bathroom. It felt
like a chainsaw had gone
through the back of my head.
‘Two days on, there was a
squad away day, doing team-
building stuff, painting egg
EXCLUSIVE
INTERVIEW
by Riath
Al-Samarrai
Chief Sports
Feature Writer
‘I would wear
dark glasses
indoors, be
in bed for
24 hours’
fine, but you wouldn’t believe how
it went once we got back.’
Danson is sitting in a chair that
is deliberately angled away from
direct light in the beautiful home
built by Bennett, a property
developer, near the market
town of Romsey,
Hampshire. Her
Olympic gold and
bronze medals
are wrapped in
socks in a
drawer and no
memorabilia is
on show from a
career that
places her as
England’s
most capped
current
player and
the top scorer
of any nation
at London
2012 and Rio
2016.
That life
has seemed
very distant in the past 11 or so
months and Danson wants
her experiences with what is
termed a mild traumatic
brain injury to be instruc-
tive for others who might
suffer head trauma. It is
why she is doing this
interview, her first with a
daily newspaper.
Resuming her story, she says: ‘I
waited until about the ninth day
post-accident to go to a doctor
despite constant bad headaches.
That was another mistake, as is
under-reporting your symptoms,
All gold: Danson tasted
Olympic glory in 2016
Hockey