Playing Hurt: Football captain risked death

BROOKSTON, Ind. —

“I’m cold,” says Cody Lehe, 18, shivering in the warm Indiana sunshine.

“I think your internal sensors are messed up,” his mother, Becky Lehe, tells him.

She smiles as she wraps a blanket around the former high school football captain in his wheelchair.

Almost a year after Cody collapsed on Frontier High School’s football field, his mother is still encouraged by such minor acts of communication.

Cody’s brain essentially shut down the afternoon of Oct. 25, 2006, in what doctors later described as second-impact syndrome – bleeding to the brain triggered by an impact that compounds the effects of a previous concussion. For Cody the first injury came in a game the previous weekend, the result of a hard, helmet-to-helmet hit with an opposing player.

Cody’s parents, coaches and friends still wonder what they could have done to prevent the second-impact injury. Experts say they responded correctly to his initial concussion. A brain scan, in fact, indicated he could return to practice.

Symptoms of head injuries can be subtle, however, even to the medical professionals trained to diagnose them. The danger of these injuries is that much greater when coaches, often the first ones to assess athletes for concussions, do not know how to spot them or what to do when they happen.

Officials at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are so concerned by the potential danger of head injuries – about 300,000 athletes suffer from them each year – they have started an aggressive campaign to teach high school coaches their symptoms.

Those near Cody say only he knew how badly he hurt, and how many symptoms of a concussion he really had. He decided to tough it out and play hurt – a decision that ended his sports career, almost ended his life, and may have life-long effects on his ability to move and communicate.

After his collapse, Cody was rushed to a hospital in nearby Lafayette, then on to Methodist Hospital of Indianapolis. He remained in a coma-like state for three months. Even after he was sent home in February, his family saw little sign of the old Cody.

It wasn’t until he went back to the hospital in March, with a collapsed lung, that doctors changed his medication and Cody finally began interacting with those around him.

Becky remembers the moment: “He looked at me one day and said, ‘What’s wrong?’

“I about fell off my chair. Where do I start?”

Second impacts