This article originally appeared on HaltonHillsToday July 17.
Paulina Turczynska put her hands together to receive a serve just as she had thousands of times before. But when the ball defected off her arm, nowhere near its intended target, she looked down and was surprised to see her hands were not together.
Somewhere between her brain and her hands, the message was lost. It was the first sign that something was wrong.
Minutes earlier, Turczynska had been struck in the face by a volleyball.
The then-16-year-old would spend the next two months bedridden, struggling with post-concussion syndrome.
“You feel this heaviness and fatigue,” she said. “You feel like you have a dinosaur on your chest and you can’t get out of bed.”
Turczynska said she received great support from her family, friends and doctors. But it was difficult for her to explain her symptoms and what she was feeling. Even dizziness didn’t seem to fully describe how she felt.
“It’s an internal struggle. It’s a constant battle dealing with the symptoms,” she said. “Unless you have experienced it, nobody understands what you’re going through.”
She would slowly start walking again, at first not even being able to make it to the end of her street. Five minutes a day was all she could handle.
Reading was also a struggle. Turczynska missed an entire year of school while recovering and began having doubts.
“I’m naturally very ambitious,” she said. “But I was thinking, will I ever be able to go back to school? There was a lot of uncertainty.”
As a way of kickstarting her recovery, she began writing down her experiences. The more she did, the more she thought what she was going through could help someone else.
“It was always a dream of mine to write a book,” she said.
It wasn’t easy though. She would work for 30 minutes, take two hours off, then work for another 30 minutes.
“I had to pace myself or I’d get dizzy," the 18-year-old said. “My body was fighting against me as I was trying to do this, but being able to write helped me build up my endurance, to work on my recovery.”
The result of Turczynska’s efforts is Letters from a Concussed Girl. Though the book tells the story of a girl, Vivienne, dealing with the effects of a concussion, the character’s story weaves through the story of another girl, Sylvie, who has suffered a life-altering injury.
“It is very personal, but that was the luxury of making it fiction,” the Christ the King Catholic Secondary School graduate said. “I felt that by making it fiction, I could tell more than just my story, and that could appeal to more people. I wanted it to appeal to someone who was suffering from an illness or any other life-changing experience.”
The two characters attend the same school, but are not friends due to Sylvie’s poor treatment of Vivienne over the years. As the two deal with the drastic changes to their lives, they are unknowingly linked through an anonymous letter-writing program for sick and injured teenagers.
Turczynska, despite still having some lingering symptoms, graduated from Christ the King with the top marks in her class. Her experience not only led to the book, but has also shaped her future. She said she learned first-hand that treatment of concussions is still an experimental field.
She will be attending the University of Toronto in September to study neuroscience, with the goal of becoming a neurologist.
“The best doctors are the ones who have had some personal experience,” she said. “They have the ability to see what the patient is experiencing. That’s what I want to do for someone else.”
Letters from a Concussed Girl is available in paperback from Turczynska’s website or as an ebook from Indigo, Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes and Noble and Rakuten Books.
