On a recent episode of The Two Man Power Trip of Wrestling, Chad and JP welcomed former WWE World Champion,"Mr. Monday Night" Rob Van Dam. RVD joined the show to talk all about his BRAND NEW film "HEADSTRONG". This documentary is an intense look into the life and career of RVD exploring his entry into the world of stand up comedy as well his challenging experience dealing with concussions and what he learned about brain injuries that has completely changed his life. The full episode can be downloaded at this link.
How far we've come with concussion awareness:
"Throughout my whole career I had the other view. I thought I am showing how tough I am and I'm showing what a chair shot I can take to my head and I'll recover from it. I knew every night when Balls Mahoney was going to whack me with that chair for instance, I knew my bell was going to get rung. I knew it was going to be something and everything was like slow motion for a few seconds and the sound would go out or sometimes it would just feel like I am sleeping and there were all kinds of different aspects to having your bells rung. What I didn't realize at the time was that was my brain bouncing against my skull knocking my senses loose and that is a concussion. There is minor concussions and there is major concussions and I've really only had one that I would consider a major concussion, maybe two where I couldn't remember anything afterwards and one of them was before I got in the business in a street situation where I was getting in fights and I was stupid and testing myself against guys and highly out numbered. I got knocked out one time and could not remember for the life of me anything about what happened during that day and I've seen that happen so many times since then and a lot of times with people that I am wrestling against. I've caught them with kicks and there have been times where I've had to tell them over and over again what happened because there are different measurements of concussions. I am learning everything I can now and I will be continuing to and would like to be a go-to guy because I am smart and when I am interested in something and do the research it is easy to retain the information and pick up a lot about it.
"I don't think I realized until watching the whole story back, the main thing that I should be taking from it and a lot of people might miss this too but I got a concussion and afterwards I did everything wrong. Your brain needs to rest and you need to go someplace dark and close your eyes, not stimulate your brain. I did the exact opposite. For some reason I really felt like I needed to gas my engine and I felt like my brain was sputtering out and I just stayed on the accelerator and I tried everything to stimulate my brain including going ahead with this comedy tour even though Chris Nowinski told me not to do it and that I wouldn't be able to do it and I think that is what I listened to mostly and that was a bit of a challenge for me, I should have listened more to the part of I shouldn't do it. I think when I'm up there on stage for an hour and talking to the crowd with bright lights in my eyes and I really believe because of these incorrect things to follow up with a concussions I really think because of these things I did that is why my symptoms lasted so long."
For this and every other episode of The Two Man Power Trip of Wrestling please subscribe to them on iTunes, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Podomatic, and Player FM. Follow their shows on Twitter @TwoManPowerTrip, @rasslinpal & @The3ThreatPod. Credit to them for the transcript.
