How a Union County teen overcame multiple concussions with bodybuilding and high tech
Brendan Little got his first concussion when he was four.
He fell off a bar stool, reaching back for a fork. The back of his head landed flush on his family’s hardwood floor.
After that, Little — who lives in Marvin, a small, affluent town just outside of Charlotte — continued suffering concussions.
In third grade, he got one playing tackle football, followed by another just a few weeks later. A classmate, trying to play a prank, pulled his chair out as he was trying to sit down in the library.
Little ended up smacking his head on the end of a chair.
A year later, in fourth grade, he caught a foot to the face while playing goalie in PE class.
Two years after that, Little was playing with his sister in the front yard. She threw a tennis ball toward him as he was sitting on a box and the family’s 100-pound dog chased the ball and knocked Little backward. He fell, back-of-head-first, directly onto the concrete driveway.
Little, now 17, didn’t have another concussion for years, but the effects of them never went away. With blurred vision, he had trouble looking at the chalkboard in school.
But the headaches were the worst.
Oftentimes, they would come on in the morning, and they would come on so badly that Little would crawl into a bathroom with no windows, turn out the light and lay on the floor in the pitch black begging for the pain to stop.
Eventually, there became a tell-tale sign that the migraines were coming: He’d start seeing spots.
“I was getting four migraines a week,” he said. “When you have four a week, you miss school and it was affecting me every way possible. When you’re a kid, school is your life. It’s where you meet friends, get your education, and you’re setting yourself up for the rest of your life. I barely could go.”
The family tried all kinds of options, including enrolling in online classes which provided some flexibility from Little missing so many days from the classroom. But last year, when he was a sophomore, things got worse.
“I started feeling a little weird,” Little said. “My vision was off. I started forgetting a lot and it started to worry me a little bit, and I was like maybe something is going on. Maybe I’m not 100 percent there.”
Lauren Little, Brendan’s mother, had seen her son miss out on so many things. He couldn’t play football like his friends. She said he earned a black belt in karate but had to stop. He became a fairly accomplished competitive swimmer in eighth grade, but like in school, the headaches kept getting in the way.
Finally, after years of trying to help, she found out about the five-year-old Plasticity Center in Orlando, which specializes in neurological disorders. The week before Christmas in 2018, she and her son went to Orlando. They stayed a week.
“It was amazing,” Brendan Little said. “We’ve tried all sorts of things since I was little — reflexology, acupuncture — never found any progress. So many years of trying so many things, I’d lost almost all hope, but going there was a life-changing experience.”
Little met a 6-year-old girl batting a severe case of cerebral palsy. He saw people who couldn’t walk forward without turning their head sideways.
“I was like, ‘I keep getting migraines and my life sucks,’” Little said. “All the people there had such good attitudes and I’m like, ‘I’m getting upset about what I have and these people have it worse and they’re so positive.’ They gave me motivation to have faith, that this can be fixed.”
In Orlando, doctors used a machine called a GyroStim — a computer-controlled, interactive, multi-axis rotating chair — to help Little gain control over his symptoms. They would put him in a dark room with a TV on, and flashed lights. He had to stare at dots on the wall and turn his head at certain angles.
“It’s very tiring,” he said. “You leave there and you feel like, ‘I need a nap.’ But nothing ever worked as much as that has.”
After his time in Orlando, Little began working with doctors at Charlotte’s Better Brain and Body, which offers similar techniques as the Florida center. His mother also enrolled him in a new school, Fusion Academy, that offers 1-to-1 learning and allows Little to start school later and not have homework.
Today, Little gets migraines about once a week but his new schedule allows him to manage them much better. He also has continued with bodybuilding, a sport he got into as an eighth grader, a physical outlet for a boy who couldn’t play football and lacrosse like his friends.
“His path has been changed due to his concussions,” Lauren Little said. “It’s changed him as a person.”
Little has two sisters who played lacrosse and field hockey. One sister, Kelsea Little, is a sophomore at North Carolina. According to her mother, Kelsea has been accepted into an honors program in London, where she will work for a health technology company this summer. The essay that got her into the program was about her brother and the protective headgear that she and her father, Douglas, are trying to patent to prevent head injuries in sports like soccer.
Brendan Little said his journey, if anything, has taught him to never quit.
“When I was younger, it was harder to see how everything was going to turn out,” he said. “My friends would say, ‘You’ll have dementia when you’re 30.’ You laugh it off. I didn’t really know where my health was going and knowing now I am getting better and feel myself getting better, I’m really confident and blessed to be in the position I am today. It could’ve been a lot worse.”
