This week was really eye opening. I've been chatting with some of my oldest friends. We all served together. Both are struggling with life. I'd just say it's a midlife crisis but these guys are normally hard chargers. One's a cop, the other a therapist. The thing I've noticed is that it's like they're having a collapse of their ability to maintain focus and one started abusing alcohol which was out of character and the other started abusing his phone (again, out of character). Another issue I noticed was the change in personality, nothing drastic but something was off. Digging a little deeper, I learned that both had really severe concussions that were never treated. They both shrugged it off when I mentioned it. "Hey bro, have you ever considered you're suffering from a mTBI?" Their reply, "Nah, it was like 15 years ago." And that was my point. One of buddies I'm talking about was literally blasted so hard he lost consciousness and lost hearing in one ear...TWICE! My other buddy was in a horrible car accident on the job avoiding a man that had a heart attack at the wheel. My buddy smashed his cruiser at full speed into a tree. I'm no doctor but I'm pretty sure that's room for concern for mTBI. Yet both medical systems never asked or followed up with them and they're in the dark about the long-term effects of mTBI on the brain. Just recently, the Concussion Legacy Foundation made a post about the first brain they studied of a police officer who committed suicide, was full of CTE, a deadly brain disease caused by untreated mTBIs. You don't need to be blasted off your feet of have a huge car crash to be concussed either. Small concussive blasts like grenades, Claymores, 84mm rockets, hard landings can accumulate over time. That reminds me of another encounter with a CANSOF guy who was running their demolition school for years and is now medically released because he has a brain tumour and cognitive issues (I think they're 100% correlated to his exposure to blasts).

To know that you are one of us... Your initiation will consist of you telling us in pictures or words, the last thing you ate. No cheating. The literal last thing that went in your mouth (I'm hoping it's food 😆) I'll go first... @Jason Lang @Carlos Zapata @Frank Bosse @Renzo Ruiz @Serena Foster @Donna Van Leusden Riguidel @Christopher Archuleta @Jon Audet @Mark-Anthony Stockless @Craig Mayville