Wisconsin man struggles with effects of football injuries

WAUSAU, Wis. (AP) - Drew Bouche loves to play catch with his son, Abram.

The two often can be seen on in downtown Wausau, tossing a football, smiles on their faces.

Football is deeply rooted in both of their lives. Abram, who is 11 years old, can’t wait to play just like his father did before him. At Wausau East High School, Bouche was a running back, a fixture in local sports coverage and someone recognized throughout the community. Bouche’s dad, Abram’s grandfather, was the East football coach.

Bouche went to South Dakota State University to further his career, but he never got the chance to shine. He left the sport in his freshman year after a blow to the head left him unable to walk off the field.

He lives the consequences of those brain injuries every day. He struggles with extreme and sometimes violent mood swings, migraines, days when depression makes it hard to get out of bed and forgetfulness can cause him to lose track of conversations or what task he’s supposed to accomplish. He thinks his struggles with alcohol stem from the injuries, too.

Bouche is experiencing what doctors say is typical of chronic traumatic encephalopathy. CTE is a degenerative brain disease, believed to be caused by repetitive hits to the head. And it’s a disease that has been traced by researchers to the hard hits that athletes take on the field, including collisions that never result in a concussion diagnosis.

Most of the national media attention around CTE has focused on former NFL players, who’ve won a $1 billion settlement against the league. But Bouche is among countless football players who believe they suffered brain damage without ever playing beyond high school or college.

Doctors say the disease has long-term effects on health and quality of life. But CTE is mysterious because most research can occur only after the person has died and the brain can be examined.

Football leagues at all levels have made changes in response to heated discussion around CTE. The Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association now mandates that high school players sit out if they appear to have suffered a concussion, with rigid rules for returning to play. There are new rules on how players should tackle, with their heads off to the side instead of into another player’s chest. Equipment manufacturers have created helmets intended to limit head trauma.

But there’s no way to take hits out of football, and top researchers say large and small collisions alike will inevitably cause damage in at least some of those who play. More than two decades after Bouche’s football playing came to an end, it’s not clear that any of the new policies, new guidelines or new equipment would have prevented the damage to his brain.

Bouche’s own feelings about football are complicated - he worries about Abram playing, but also said that the game teaches so many lessons that can’t be learned another way.

The first time Drew Bouche saw stars after a hit to the head was when he was in sixth grade. He was 12; it was his first year of tackle football. The sport was ingrained in his family because his dad, Jim Bouche, was the coach of Wausau East High School.

“(My brother and I) grew up around East athletics. Football was a part of life,” he told USA Today Network-Wisconsin . “He would take us to practice as babies.”

The pain and discomfort of taking a hard hit and becoming disoriented - something doctors now say is a sign of a sub-concussive hit - didn’t faze Bouche. He continued on with the sport, into high school. That’s when the real problems started.

The first time he was told he had a major concussion was in his freshman year of high school. It was the first time a hit had ever left him physically reeling on the field.

“I hit someone and I couldn’t remember where I was,” he said. “But I kept playing. I chose to keep playing.”

In his sophomore season, he experienced his second serious head injury. This time, he could barely walk to the bench and the field spun around him. Before the end of that year, he would take a few more serious hits, causing him to sit out practices for some of the season, but he resumed play as quickly as possible each time.

It wasn’t until his junior year that an injury gave Bouche pause.

“I was knocked out for 20 minutes,” he said. “I don’t remember anything until I was in the ambulance.”

Jim Bouche, a high school and college football player himself in the 1960s and ’70s, got into the ambulance that day with his son, who didn’t regain consciousness until they were halfway to the hospital. It was the school’s homecoming game, played on a Saturday, against Stevens Point Area Senior High. Jim Bouche acknowledged that if that hit were to happen today, Drew’s career in football would have been over. But at that point, Jim said, he thought time would heal the injury.

Drew Bouche sat out the rest of the season but returned in time for senior year and the college football recruitment process. There was hardly a game or practice at that point, he said, where he didn’t lose his bearings after a hit. His senior year was when the headaches began, too.

In 1999, he started at South Dakota State University.

His time as a college ball player didn’t last long. At a practice one day, he took a knee to the head, an accidental hit. He thought he lost consciousness, but later, his teammates told him he’d been talking and sitting up the entire time.

“It was almost like being drunk,” he said. “I was not with it. My mind and body weren’t communicating.”

Soon after that hit in college, Bouche visited a doctor. Jokingly, the physician told him he’d be dumb to keep playing. By then, Bouche knew his condition was no joke.

He hung up his pads and cleats at age 19, but the struggle with the effects of his career was just beginning.

Though it’s been getting a lot of attention in the past decade, CTE isn’t a new problem, said Dr. Ann McKee, one of the lead researchers with the Boston University CTE Center.

Doctors first started noticing the symptoms of CTE nearly 100 years ago, in people who were sustaining blows to the head regularly, especially boxers. They called it “punch drunk.”

It’s become more prevalent in football players recently, she said, because players are starting earlier in life, and the game is becoming more violent and aggressive.

McKee, an Appleton native who got her undergraduate degree at University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been on the forefront of the research, noticing the degradation of a boxer’s brain years ago, she said. She was fascinated by the patterns of CTE, and how it affected brains.

Later, she was asked to look at the brains of football players, and she noticed the same degradation of the brain tissue. So began her research on CTE, opening a brain bank through Boston University, and examining brains of those believed to have suffered from the disease during life. Her research, which received national publicity, shocked with its findings: Of 111 players’ brains studied, 110 studied showed signs of CTE.

That research has shown that CTE is a buildup of the tau protein in the brain, caused by repeated blows to the head, whether concussive or not. Sub-concussive hits can do the same amount of damage, McKee said, even if the person has never been diagnosed with a concussion. All it takes is a jostling of the brain inside of the skull. The tau protein is then released, and when it collects, it can cause the death of brain tissue.

And when the brain tissue starts to die, it can cause everything from forgetfulness to bouts of rage, and later maybe even dementia.

The problem of CTE isn’t a new one for the Bouche family, either. Jim Bouche, who left the Wausau East coaching job in 2007 and today is the principal of Lakeland Union High School in Minocqua, believes he probably had almost 10 concussions himself when he played, with two serious ones. His symptoms have never been as serious as his son’s, but he struggles with short-term memory loss, and he wonders if it’s a result of those hard hits.

After college, slowly but surely, other symptoms started to creep in for Drew Bouche.

Bouts of depression were debilitating. Migraines kept him home from work weekly. Anger would cloud his mind for no apparent reason.

“He was a lighthearted middle-schooler and high-schooler,” his father said. “His mother and I would agree, how he looks at things now is different.”

Drew had seen news coverage of CTE in 2009 and went through the checklist of symptoms.

“It listed a lot of symptoms that could be related and I went down the list and was like, check, check, check,” he said.

Bouche has thought about contacting the Boston University CTE Center and volunteering for tests, maybe even donating his brain after death. He went to see a local neurologist, who said he was likely the textbook example of CTE, but that there was no way to know. And there was no way to treat or cure it.

“The doctor said right away that he (couldn’t) give me a magic pill,” he said. “It’s just something we still don’t know a lot about, we’re still learning about, and the research is just now kicking in.”

He went to the neurologist a few times after that but hasn’t been back in years.

“I just kind of got to the point where I can’t be seeing a specialist for the rest of my life, when there’s nothing to be done,” he said.

Bouche struggles to focus at work as a graphic designer at the nationwide printing firm FASTSIGNS, and attends weekly counseling sessions to combat his anger and depression. When the occasional migraine happens, he swallows pills to kill the pain.

“I make it sound like I’m some type of horrible dude, but when you go from ’I’m just standing there’ to ’something triggers you and you’re angry about something stupid,’ it affects relationships, it affects friendships,” he said. “I’m still trying to figure out, in some cases, how to deal with mood swings.”

McKee echoed what Bouche’s doctor told him. Although she said that research may be bringing doctors closer to being able to diagnose CTE before death, there still isn’t a cure. It’s like Alzheimer’s disease, she said.

“We don’t have a treatment that halts or slows Alzheimer’s in its tracks,” she said. “A lot of time compassionate care, the following of patients and helping them with the tasks of daily living, giving them access to support groups and, most of all, suggesting a diagnosis (of) why they’re experiencing these symptoms can be comforting to patients.

“That’s all we can do right now.”

When Bouche was playing football, the rules were very different from today’s rules.

He said his dad was often frustrated with him for hitting players with his head - not for safety reasons, but because it wasn’t the most effective way to hit. Now, it’s mandated that players avoid hitting with their heads.

Today, the state athletic association mandates that a student-athlete who is injured during play gets taken out of the game, evaluated and allowed to return to play only after he or she has been cleared by a doctor, said Brett Schulz, director of athletic training for Sport and Spine Physical Therapy in Wausau, which often works with students after they’ve had a concussion. That approval can come anywhere from a week after the injury to months later, depending on recovery time and symptoms shown by the player.

Those new steps haven’t seemed to slow the tide of high school sports injuries. Bouche’s alma mater, Wausau East, reported six serious concussions and 18 serious injuries in the 2015 football season alone. The school declined to provide more recent figures to USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin.

New guidelines won’t prevent players from sustaining concussions, McKee said. Just because players aren’t hitting with their heads doesn’t mean their brains aren’t jostled when they fall hard to the ground, or when their helmets collide as they fall.

Bouche said he still will allow his son to play football, once Abram reaches middle school. He believes that the discipline and preparation that football takes, not only physically, but mentally, could be to his son’s benefit.

“It’s great practice for life,” he said.

Abram’s grandfather has talked to him about the sport, too. Jim Bouche and Abram’s grandmother have always emphasized the triple A’s - academics, arts and athletics.

Academics, he said, are important, because Abram will use his cognitive skills more than any other part of his body. Arts are important to develop music appreciation, design skills and creative-thinking skills. And athletics teaches the importance of learning teamwork.

Drew Bouche believes there’s also a difference between his sports career and Abram’s. Learning from his past, he’ll keep a close eye on his son, watching for any signs of concussions or brain injuries during and after games. And he said he will make these decisions alongside Abram’s mother.

“It’s going to be a very short leash,” he said. “He has one serious concussion, sorry, he’s done. Heck, it’ll be tough for me to not say ’You’re done’ after seeing stars for the first time.”

Despite the risk, Bouche said, there’s too much value to the game and too firm a family legacy of football to completely say no to his son’s requests to play.

“I want him to experience it.”

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Information from: Wausau Daily Herald Media, http://www.wausaudailyherald.com