My Experience with Health Services – Aaron

03/09/2020 1:21 AM

How’s your Wednesday? I’ve got a story for you today. For some background, I am a member of the Bradley Fellows program, and for my continual, I am a volunteer Firefighter/EMT with West Peoria Fire Department. It is a small fire station about half a mile away from campus. I’ll be writing more about my involvement there in the future, be sure to look out for it.

So, I was training at the Illinois Fire Service Institute in Champaign, Illinois. It had been a long grueling day, but also provided an educational experience for me to learn more about firefighting. You can never stop learning about anything medical or emergency-related.

It was towards the end of the day while I was doing a search of a small two-story house. I had just found the baby and I was working on bringing it out of the home. Having just finished searching on the top floor, I start making my way down the stairs, baby in one hand and a sledgehammer in the other. I was scooting my way down the stairs on my butt, everything was going just dandy. Since I was making my way back down to where the fire was, the air was getting hazier with smoke and becoming harder to see. I had been scooting downstairs for a while now so I figured I was at the bottom. I knew I needed to start crawling to get out of the building with this baby. I started to lean forward and not being at the bottom of the stairs, down I went. I fell down about half a flight of stairs head first, smashing my helmet onto a concrete floor.

After getting back to Bradley I didn’t think that I had a concussion until I tried to study. I took myself to OSF’s Emergency Room because everything had to go through workers’ compensation. They told me I had a concussion so I headed over to Bradley’s health services to figure out what to do. I walked in and was able to meet with a nurse right away to work out accommodations. Health services took a copy of the note and emailed all of my professors letting them know that I will not be in class until I am cleared, preventing me from having to take my quizzes and tests that week. They then gave me instructions on the best ways to get better, additional concussion reading, and an after-hours phone number if I had any more questions. I also sent a follow-up email to my professors so they knew that I was communicating with them, as well as explaining the situation in a little more detail than health services provided. They were all super understanding and held everything off for me until I was cleared by health services.

This past Monday I finally got cleared by health services to go back to classes. I am working through all of the homework that I have to make up. All of my professors are extremely understanding, aren’t imposing a deadline, and are giving time to study since I was not able to study during the time I was healing.

Throughout the entire experience at health services, everyone was amazing and just wanted me to do what I had to do to get better. I was encouraged to forget about school for a while, which was the hardest part for me. But everyone from health services and my professors were very encouraging for me to do whatever it took for me to get better. If you have any health issues at all, I highly encourage you to head to health services. The best part is, it’s all free for you as a Bradley Student.