![]() No obvious contusions, like you find in dementia pugilistica. Omalu picked up Webster’s brain, carried it slowly to the cutting board, and turned it upside down and on its side and then over again. Omalu had seen plenty of cases of brains destroyed within helmets. If you hit your head hard enough, the brain goes bashing against the walls of the skull. The brain is suspended in a kind of thick jelly inside the skull, and a helmet can’t keep it from sloshing around. Unlike boxers, football players wear helmets, but a helmet can’t fully protect the head from damaging impact. Surely someone in the history of football had thought to look for dementia pugilistica. If chronic bashing of the head could destroy a boxer’s brain, couldn’t it also destroy a football player’s brain? The condition’s clinical picture was somewhat like Webster’s: “Punch-drunk syndrome” was characterized by severe dementia-delusion, paranoia, explosive behavior, loss of memory-caused by repeated blows to the head. Specifically, he was thinking of dementia pugilistica-“punch-drunk syndrome,” they called it in boxers. He was thinking about football and brain trauma. With the electric saw, the pathologist Bennet Omalu carefully cut a cap out of the skull, pulled off the cap, and gently reached inside for the brain. He zapped himself into unconsciousness, just to get some sleep.Īnd now here he was in the morgue, dead at 50. He bought himself a taser and used it on his stomach or his thigh. He wrapped his hands with duct tape and stuck a pen in the tape so he could write thousands of letters. He got Super Glue, squirted each fallen tooth, and tried to stick them back in. He slept under bridges, in the Amtrak station, then in his truck. Then he wandered off, meandering through Pittsburgh. One day he peed in the oven, frightening his wife and kids. Plenty of guys had a hard time after retiring from football-you had to adjust to a new identity and a new schedule, like coming home from war. He had played in more games-220 of them-than any other player in Steelers history. ![]()
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