Blackouts, migraines and amnesia: why a rugby player gave up the game he loved

Humphrey Bodington doesn’t remember the collision that led him to give up rugby. He can recall the moments before it, how, playing for Newcastle University, he came hot off the back of the first scrum because he wanted to put in an early shot on the opposition. And he can recall the moments after, the way he woke flat on his back, saw the team’s physio standing over him, and how he thought to himself in that split-second “never again” but nothing in between. He didn’t listen to himself. Two weeks later he played again and suffered another concussion. After that the blackouts and migraines started.

Bodington found he could not concentrate in his lectures and that he was especially sensitive to loud noises. He had also injured his anterior cruciate ligament and had to take nine months out of the game to recover. His doctor told him it was a blessing in disguise because it would give his brain time to heal. With his ACL he could see the swelling go down and feel the pain start to go away, but the concussion wasn’t like that.

“One of the difficult things is that you always think you have recovered, I always used to think: ‘I’m fine’ and then two weeks later I’d wake up with a headache again and I’d look back and ask: ‘How did I ever think I that?’ The symptoms go on for so long they start to become normalised.”

He was doing cognition tests online and for those nine months his scores put him in the bottom 1% of the population. But rugby was everything to him. Bodington started playing when he was seven, went to university on a playing scholarship and planned to go play for a club in the English National League 1 after graduation.

So he tried playing again, in the end-of-summer rugby sevens. And he suffered another concussion.