The culture of brain injuries in sports has taken massive leaps forward in the last decade, and this month is being used to take the progress further.
June has been named National Brain Injury Awareness month by the Saskatchewan Brain Injury Association and the Brain Injury Association of Canada.
Brain injuries can happen in a variety of day-to-day activities, but sports remains one of the biggest causes.
According to the Saskatchewan association's website, there are approximately 6,000 concussions or mild brain injuries in the province each year, which is about 16 every day.
Katie Miyazaki works with the Take Brain Injury Out of Play program at the Saskatchewan Brain Injury Association, she wants to see people better educated about the proper ways to handle a concussion and know how it's different than a typical injury.
"Concussions is just the one [injury] that I would tell people to never play through because it's not worth it," she said. "You can survive the rest of your life with bad ankles or bad knees, but you only get one brain and it can affect everything you do."
Miyazaki knows first hand how devastating brain injuries can be. She's suffered five that she had examined, but thinks there were more she ignored. She had to give up playing football because of it.
"The last one I got was last July, July 8. And for months after, until even just like a couple months ago, I was still getting symptoms. I still couldn't do everything that I wanted," Miyazaki said. "I'm still a little cautious about body contact. I don't want to get hit because I still find if I'm not well rested, or I do get hit a little bit, then I'm kind of feeling concussed again."
Quitting football was one thing, but her experience with brain injuries runs far deeper, and the effect on her life outside of sports is perhaps the scariest and most troublesome.
"I struggled through first semester of school starting in September because I'd sit there and just felt like I was in a fog, and I couldn't really take down notes because my short term memory was really bad. So, I'd be listening and I'd try to write down [notes] but as soon as I'd try to write down I'd kind of forget what I was supposed to say and then I'd miss what she was saying."
Miyazaki would also get told she wasn't speaking coherently.
"I would be talking to people and I'd have a thought in my head and then all of the sudden midway, I'd completely forget it," she said.
The effects are almost gone now, and she's turned her focus to fixing the stigma that still surrounds brain injury in sports.
"It's going to be a really long, slow process because it's trying to change a culture that rewards being tough," Miyazaki said.
While more needs to be done, steps have been taken in multiple levels of sports. The NHL, as of 2011, created a rule penalizing blindside checks to the head. While many feel it's barely a solution to the problem of concussions, it was a big step for the league.
The Canadian Hockey League has been cracking down hard on all hits to the head for years, targeting the problem before players make it to the NHL.
And most recently, Hockey Canada banned all body contact in peewee hockey across the country.
Miyazaki has a simple saying worth remembering for brain safety, "sit it out rather than tough it out."
