FOLLOWING his own experience recovering from post-concussion syndrome, Robbie Frawley launched his own podcast, Stories of Recovery over the weekend.

 Stories of Recovery was created to help other people with neurological conditions (concussion, stroke, TBI and chronic pain) in their recovery.

Growing up on a sheep and cattle farm just outside of Hamilton, Robbie, like many country kids, played a lot of contact sport.

Robbie experienced his fair share of concussions while playing everything from basketball to football, but it was after he received a concussion wakeboarding about eight years ago that the usual concussion symptoms of nausea, headaches, fatigue, vertigo, and cognitive fog didn’t go away like they had previously.

Robbie had developed post-concussion syndrome, where concussion symptoms persist beyond the normal course of recovery which would usually last around six weeks.

After months of continued a boom-bust cycle, where he would push through his symptoms only to be bedridden for the next week, Robbie sought help from his GP.

“My GP was onto it and referred me to the Grace McKellar Centre in Geelong, and they ran me through testing, diagnosing and strategies … through that whole process, I was always searching for what I could do to get better,” he said.

“I’ve learnt a lot during the past seven years about the brain, and the understanding is evolving more in the media about concussion as well.

“Historically, people have seen the brain as hardwired, and (looked at) neurological issues and said we can’t help you, we can only give you management strategies and you need to adapt to this new life - that’s a disempowering message, and it’s wrong, there’s decades of research that say that the brain is plastic.”

While Robbie’s recovery progressed over the next few years, he said he continued to operate well below his previous capacity and became frustrated at the lack of access to successful recovery stories.

“In the latter years of my recovery, I was hovering at 80 per cent, and I was looking for examples of people that had gotten better, and I just didn’t see that - I had no role model that had recovered,” he said.

“I’d seen a professional athlete that had recovered, and I was desperate to see how they had recovered, what did they do to recover day-to-day.

“It was quite frustrating; I knew this person had gotten better, and I wanted to know how and that was the first seed to creating this podcast.”

With the information not freely available, Robbie chased up any lead he could find.

He began to seek out people who had experienced and recovered from brain-related conditions; he would Google someone from a story he saw on the ABC and call them (and) his family and friends would cut out newspaper stories and pass them onto him.

“There were a couple of people like ex-Olympic rower, Sally Callie - I read about her in The Age about two years after my concussion - someone in my family had cut the article out for me … it’s so important to know there are other people with similar injuries and there are overlaps in the challenges and recovery profiles of people with these sorts of injuries,” he said.

Robbie started Stories of Recovery to help others who were still languishing and fearful about how they could recover.

By sharing other people’s stories of neuroplastic recovery, Robbie has been able to demonstrate that not only is it possible to recover from brain-related injuries, but point to examples of people who have succeeded in their recovery and what steps they’ve taken to get there.

“The target audience is very specific, it’s people who are recovering from a neurological condition and the message is ‘you can recover’ - the brain is constantly changing, healing, and growing new brain cells,” he said.

“There is hope and light at the end of the tunnel … I’m purely presenting the stories of people who have gone through these experiences and sharing their learning, and if something resonates, they can take it and try it for themselves and if it doesn’t, they can leave it.

“People must be well enough and have reached a point where they have confidence in their health and their ability to recover before they speak.”

The first episode of Stories of Recovery launched last Saturday, with the subsequent four episodes set to be released over the next four Saturdays. Stories of Recovery can be accessed wherever you get your podcasts or on the Stories of Recovery website with full transcripts at storiesofrecovery.buzzsprout.com.