How I Remade My Life After Football Damaged My Brain
This kind of artistic expression has been dubbed "neurographica". I have become obsessed with what I call my "arting"
By Hank Bjorklund
This is the story of how I remade my life after years of tackle football damaged my brain. My new tools are physical and cognitive therapy, journaling, writing poetry, writing and performing songs, and creating neurographic art. They have ignited my improvement by helping me cope, persevere, and heal.
I am an athlete. I have always been an athlete, and I will die an athlete. I played 16 years of tackle football from Pop Warner to Princeton University to the NFL's New York Jets. After I retired voluntarily from football, I graduated from law school and practiced corporate law in New York City. In the years that followed football, I experienced sporadic episodes of intense anxiety, compulsiveness and fatigue. In 1993, I was hospitalized for a week with suspected encephalitis. These symptoms continued and had worsened significantly by 2015. Now I had sudden fatigue, irregular heartrate, blood pressure spikes and drops, vertigo and waves of anxiety that would leave me exhausted.
Through the years, I continued exercising daily with an intensity that bordered on compulsion. On April 18, 2016, I was scheduled to meet a new cardiologist and decided to go to the gym first. I will never forget what happened that day. I decided to extend my pulldowns to one more repetition. On that last repetition, I felt a profound thud throughout my body and collapsed. I was rushed to the hospital by ambulance and have not been the same since. I was again hospitalized for a week with suspected encephalitis and had numerous tests. So many fatal neurodegenerative diseases were hypothesized. I could no longer walk upstairs without my blood pressure skyrocketing and dropping precipitously. When I was standing, I thought I might pass out. My health continued to deteriorate, and a wheelchair, scooter, and mobility van became necessities.
“I vividly remember the summer day in 2017 when I woke up with a sense of urgency. I had a visceral feeling that I was slipping away, and I had an intense desire to document what my life had meant to me. I wanted to express my fears and the grief that was roiling within me.”
After seeing dozens of doctors and enduring dozens of tests over many months, a team of world-famous specialty neurologists told me they had no explanation for my neurological findings other than suspected chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) from my years as a football player. This was the case even though I did not exhibit the significant cognitive decline and behavioral problems typical of CTE. We thought I was dying, and I fell into deep despair.
I vividly remember the summer day in 2017 when I woke up with a sense of urgency. I had a visceral feeling that I was slipping away, and I had an intense desire to document what my life had meant to me. I wanted to express my fears and the grief that was roiling within me. I decided to write about my life and what I was experiencing. I started writing a daily journal of my symptoms, how I was feeling emotionally, and whatever else came into my head. I found the writing process to be cathartic. In a very real way, writing allowed me to drop the burden of despair onto the page. I also found that when I was writing, I became immersed in the process itself and forgot, for a time at least, that the life I had known was gone. Several hours of writing left me feeling exhausted, but also fulfilled, gratified, and perhaps most important, useful.
In addition to my prose, I eventually decided to try poetry. I had not written a line of poetry since high school and was then 68 years old. I discovered that poetry helped me better express and deal with the anger, sorrow, and grief that comes with a life-altering chronic illness. Poetry gave me a deeper appreciation of the present moment and the beauty of ordinary things. It also allowed me to uncover gifts within myself that I never knew were there. Through poetry, I discovered the power of self-encouragement which I needed to promote healthier functioning of my brain.
I am so grateful that my wife signed me up for a poetry class offered at a local public library. I was nervous that my poetry would not be good enough, but I was thrilled by how warmly I was greeted by the accomplished teacher and the other adult students. Eventually, my teacher invited my wife and me to join a private class with some very accomplished poets. We wrote poems in response to weekly prompts and read them aloud for comments from the group. In time, my teacher encouraged me to collect my poems and essays into a book. In late 2022, I published that book, entitled "Head Hits I Remember: My Brain, Dysautonomia, and Football." I have been intensely gratified by the response to my book from people I know and from people I have never met. Some of them have told me how my reflections have helped them cope with their own health challenges. In actuality, poetry helped me to cope and to find my own "new normal".
“I embrace this day with all my being
with open heart and with my face beaming
in this day I will only thrive
I’m just so grateful to be alive”
Poetry also opened a new world of music to me. I hear and feel some of my rhyming poems as songs. As I write the words, sometimes a melody may appear in my mind like a happy surprise. When I need comfort or inspiration, I often sing my poems to myself rather than reciting them. I can neither read nor write musical notation. But with the help of some extraordinary musician friends who I met through poetry class, we have brought a number of my lyrics to musical life. I never would have imagined myself as a songwriter, let alone a singer who performs his own songs before an audience. But I am, and I have done so numerous times. We have recorded eight of those songs at a professional recording studio and hope to do more. (Recordings are available at www.soundcloud.com/3-north-shore-friends.) I have met wonderful new friends through poetry and music that I never would have met had I stayed just a gym rat.
My introduction to "neurographica" came courtesy of Evelyn Kandel, a former poet laureate of Nassau County, NY, an artist and our poetry teacher of many years. One of Evelyn’s prompts in 2023 was to put your pen on the page and draw without lifting the pen from the paper. You were then to write a poem in and around your free-form drawing. This kind of artistic expression has been dubbed "neurographica". I have become obsessed with what I call my "arting". I have expanded the original concept to include color and more deliberate design. The process is a form of meditation that, for me, is absorbing, satisfying and pleasurable--especially when I get to admire my finished product.
The last stanza of a poem I wrote precisely describes how I feel when drawing: "When I draw neurograghically, my clamorous mind rests quietly. I flow like a leaf on a winding stream, free from time in a peaceful dream." I have completed so many neurographic drawings, with and without poetry, that I was invited to have a showing of my work at Positive Exposure Gallery in New York City. Positive Exposure Gallery's mission is to celebrate the beauty of human diversity. The show opened on September 14, 2024 and was titled, "Neurographica: My Brain, Dysautonomia, and Football". That was something I never could have imagined. I am so grateful to Director Rick Guidotti and the Positive Exposure team and also to Dr. Vincent Siasoco who introduced us.
Physical therapy has been, perhaps, the most important element of my improvement over the past eight years. I have been blessed to have the avatar of neuroplasticity as my physical therapist and friend. When I first met Dr. Naseem Chatiwala, I needed a wheelchair to cover any distance beyond a few yards. My autonomic nervous system simply would not allow me to walk. Even standing to help with the dishes was beyond my capability. I remember one of my first sessions with Naseem. She took me to the facility's indoor track. We started to walk together, but she immediately asked me to start counting backwards from one hundred by threes. I was so focused on the challenge of counting that I forgot about the walking. This and other distraction challenges allowed me to walk several laps. It was a glorious beginning to recovering a good deal of my walking ability.
I now can walk on the treadmill and hike several miles with my trusty hiking poles, and my strength and balance continue to improve. Although Naseem is located in Concord, MA, and I am in Long Island, I am able to work with her weekly by zoom. She always seems to find that point where exercise is challenging, but not too much. I am so grateful to have gotten so much of my life back through years of physical therapy. I like to say, "I am not what I was, but I am much better than I was in 2017." I am so grateful to know Naseem and to work under her guidance. I do give myself credit too because I do the work everyday and perseverance makes all the difference.
I am also blessed to have a brilliant neurobehavioral clinical psychologist. Dr. Madeline Gittleman has incredible empathy and insight into the human soul. She also has the ability to offer concrete tools to deal with the psychological impact of illness and loss. Without her expert help I might still be wandering in a wilderness of anger and grief. She has been incredibly helpful in enhancing my ability to self-encourage, self-soothe and calm the beast that can threaten the peace within. I find one exercise she gave me particularly helpful in refocusing my thoughts and stopping the record spinning in my head. I call it "3x5" because I name five things I see, five things I touch and five things I hear. Why five? Because less or more has been found to be less effective. I may do this exercise more than once, but it's a sound way to break the cycle of compulsive thoughts. I see Dr. Gittleman every two weeks now and that is enough to help me stay positive and balanced. I am so grateful to be working with such a gifted therapist.
In closing, I offer one of my favorite poems. It is called "This Day" and I wrote it early in my poetry efforts. I have always found a windy day to be thrilling. I wrote this poem as an expression of gratitude at still being alive and able to enjoy the power of nature even when my brain condition is acute. I was invited to read this poem on National Public Radio's "Morning Edition" show in 2021 and was invited back to read it again in 2024. I turn to this poem when things get tough and hope that these words might inspire others as they do for me:
This Day
Cool and windy is this day
white caps break across the bay
sun sparkles on shimmering leaves
the air is fresh on sea-blown breeze
It's early fall and summer heat's over
old field-crops have turned to stover
scent of change is in the air
life is dying without despair
I want to feel my feet in earth
and run so hard my lungs could burst
I want to leap and jump so high
I believe that I can fly
I embrace this day with all my being
with open heart and with my face beaming
in this day I will only thrive
I'm just so grateful to be alive
About the Author
Hank Bjorklund is a former NFL football player who turned to poetry and singing as a way of coping with a chronic brain condition. He wrote the book "Head Hits I Remember: My Brain, Dysautonomia and Football" to encourage others who may also be dealing with debilitating conditions. He is a retired business lawyer, educator, and actor and lives in Sea Cliff, NY, with his wife of 53 years, Victoria, and their three rescue cats.