Yeah, just watching the video.

What a crazy turn of events.

1.) Damn, he can't find luck.
2.) I've never found anyone else who more accurately describes the speech recall issue that I have post-TBI. Where you just suddenly stop and can't find the next word and it's a God damned mess.

Fingers crossed the rest of Joe's tests come back clean.

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Editor-in-Chief, Slowtwitch.com | Twitter

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October last year, I woke up in hospital one morning not knowing how I got there. I was apparently King Hit walking to my hotel after leaving a farewell party for a couple of workmates and when I regained consciousness in Emergency the following day could not speak properly. No matter how hard I tried I couldn't get the words out and it was hours before I was able to talk properly. Still don't know what happened to me that night and it only added to the damage that multiple concussions over the years have left.

Just as well it happened before he got on the plane. Poor bugger.

It is downright fucking terrifying when you are trapped in your head, desperately wanting to speak...and you can't.

I can deal with the vestibular function stuff. I've got prescription glasses that help with the vision. But when I stop mid-sentence, it's panic inducing.

I've gotten *really* good at hiding it in most scenarios. Most people have no idea.

But I do. And that makes all the difference.

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Editor-in-Chief, Slowtwitch.com | Twitter

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Yep scary stuff.

So many scary side affects with brain injuries or conditions. Just have to keep fighting the good fight and keep the confusion under control. Just hope for Joe that it is something he can confirm and deal with successfully.

All the best to you.

TLDR version of the video?

And to you!

Always a DM/email away if you ever need to chat.

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Editor-in-Chief, Slowtwitch.com | Twitter

IG post has pretty much all of it

https://www.instagram.com/...rce=ig_web_copy_link

Really disappointed for him. But he's got his head in the right place though, which must be tough this sub after bad news. I'm really rooting for him to do well in the IM Pro series. And I hope he's back to 100% health soon.

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Too old to go pro but doing it anyway
http://instagram.com/tgarvey4

Man what a lousy season for Joe. Hope all his tests come back clean and he can get back to training.

Guy made a serious smart choice for his future. 2024 will be a huge year for Joe

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E-DUB
Chief Janitor @Slowtwitch
Life is short. Dont be mad all the time.

Crazy how many people I know and "know" deal with this stuff. Unfortunately, medical science understands so little about the brain there is only so much they can do.

Hope you, Joe, rheisler and everyone dealing with stuff manages well.

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Thank you.

What a scary situation, feel for Joe & hope he gets answers & gets back to training safely. It's so relatable to hear him say that he just wanted to go out for the ride & it sounds like that came pretty close to happening. Who knows where things are at then. Glad he didn't ride & got the initial tests done. Glad he's not racing Florida or something after that. It sucks but it's right to take it easy & figure out what's going on. He'll be back.

Makes me wonder about the few stories of Joe missing turns, biking too long in the national time trial, etc. I wonder if those things are related to his brain checking out for a bit and he hadn't made that connection.

I hope he gets some good testing to find out what it is. Google always says it's a brain tumor I think...

yeah, god! listening to his story i thought, "classic triathlete! slow down and take the day off, mate!" glad that it ended relatively well as these things go, and not blanking out and crashing his bike or something.

the epidemiologist in me thinks it might, sadly, be some sort of cerebral infarction. but i also wonder about the long tail of covid. not sure if skipper ever had it, but all the talk of neuro complications has me curious about whether these sort of 'transitory/vague neuro events' will be getting more common in the future.

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https://lshtm.academia.edu/MikeCallaghan

http://howtobeswiss.blogspot.ch/

A bit off topic, and hopefully not illegal to post this here, but if you have a TBI, or know someone suffering from one, perhaps you would consider supporting the Small Monsters Project https://www.thesmallmonstersproject.com/. Ben Frederick talks openly and honestly about this TBI and the impact it had on his life and career, and started the project to try to help other folks impacted.

Ryan, maybe I'll see you at Treehouse CX in Deerfield this weekend? Ben is racing there.

--Meg

He did get COVID right before the St. George IMWC if I remember correctly. I was trying to recall if he had crashed or something recently that could have caused a TBI, but couldn't think of anything. COVID being a root cause seems scarier.

It sounds to me like he might have had a petit mal seizure.

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Next races on the schedule: none at the moment

Wouldn't that have shown in the CT scan or MRI? i.e. portion of the brain damaged

I had similar symptoms and it was put down to covid. Slowly seems to be going away and the second time I had covid I didn’t get the brain fog, bouts of migraines after, word finding problems or balance issues.
I do wonder if it was really the covid or was more stress related for me, and whether Joe with a new kid, patchy results this year compared to expectations and one of his big sponsors wiggle going bust might be under more stress than he realised?

1.) Thanks for the link.
2.) I very much would love to be in Deerfield, seeing as it is a hop and a skip from Tundra Division HQ. Alas, Ivy has a swim meet up in White River Junction so if I'm going to be anywhere, it'll be on deck at UVAC.

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Editor-in-Chief, Slowtwitch.com | Twitter

Yeah, this is super not fun stuff. It's been part of my long COVID panoply of symptoms, and even when you learn to hide it... you know it's happening.

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Tech writer/support on this here site. FIST school instructor and certified bike fitter. Formerly at Diamondback Bikes, LeMond Fitness, FSA, TiCycles, etc.
Coaching and bike fit - http://source-e.net/ Cyclocross blog - https://crosssports.net/ BJJ instruction - https://ballardbjj.com/

Well darn! Good luck to the swim team!

Reading the YouTube comments etc it seems that the current working diagnosis is hemiplegic migraine, which is pretty scary but also a lot better in terms of what it could have been compared to the various other things.
I know his wife Laura is a GP and she would have been super concerned when he presented like he did. Hence why she was wanting to call an ambulance to get him to the nearest stroke unit. Clearly, (as is always the case in medicine retrospectively) his decision to still head out on a ride was not going to be the best decision and he is lucky in many ways that it never eventuated.
I don't think this has any relevance to things like him missing the turns in races in recent times, he doesn't describe any cerebral issues when those things happened (although there is always that possibility but it would be slim).
Good luck to him from here.

My bout with Covid messed my brain up so bad… I couldn’t remember employee names or a name of a small town next to mine. It was messed up.

Has gotten considerably better though - thank god - but never back to 100%

Would you be able to write down what you want to say or type it out? Just curious about how this works for you.

No -- it's like I've completely lost the ability to find the word or phrase, so I have to invent a way around it.

More often than not, when I'm in that dead end, I'll attempt to back out by changing course, and then find a new way to describe what it was I was trying to say in the first place.

I get straight writer's block now. For someone who usually operated best on the tightest of deadlines, that can be disastrous.

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