Jul 1, 2016 3 min read

For two years, Caroline Curran had no idea whether she’d be able to finish high school, let alone earn a full college scholarship.

“I spent most of my life at doctor’s appointments around the Pittsburgh area. I had to retrain my vision, my vestibular system,” she said about maintaining her sense of balance and spatial orientation. “I had to learn to read again. It was really difficult.”

As a sophomore looking forward to playing on Peters Township High School’s varsity volleyball team, Curran inadvertently took a teammate’s kick to the head during a game in August 2013, causing severe whiplash and traumatic brain injury.

As this August approaches, Curran is looking forward to starting classes at University of Pittsburgh. After acing a rigorous interview process, she was selected to attend classes with her tuition paid as a 2016 Nordenberg Leadership Scholar.

Oh, and her major is engineering physics.

Fortunately for Curran – and to the immense relief of her parents, Tim and Cindy – her concussion symptoms abated by the time she started her senior year at Peters late last summer. Until then, she had to cope with her condition with, as she’ll put it, sheer persistence.

“Even though my mom had to pick me up from school almost every day, due to a headache or just cognitive fatigue, I had to wake up again the next day and just try again,” she recalled. “Every morning, I prayed to God that He’d give me the strength to overcome that, and that really helped.”

Still, traumatic brain injury carries a high level of uncertainty.

“It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, to just keep doing that every single day and not knowing when it would end,” Caroline said. “It’s not like a broken arm, where a doctor says, ‘Oh, you have however many months.’ It’s very gray. So that was the most difficult part.”

Continuing – and in her case, excelling – in school wasn’t smooth sailing, either.

“She had some wonderful teachers,” Cindy Curran said. “They were blessings in our lives. We couldn’t have asked for anything more.”

Perhaps Caroline could have asked for some easier classes. But despite her symptoms somewhat hindering her ability to learn, as she’ll admit, she opted for the likes of calculus and physics.

“With the extra work that I had to put in, I really found a love for those two classes,” she said. “So I guess my concussion did kind of push me toward that. I think it really opened my eyes to my true calling.”

And it didn’t hurt her grades: She graduated June 10 with an average above 5.0.

While she couldn’t return to volleyball, Caroline did return to sports, running the 100-meter high hurdles for her high school.

“I think track was kind of my savior,” she said. “It was an outlet for some of my frustrations with that injury. And I think it was really good for me to be able to be with my friends on my team and relieve some stress.”

As was the case with her schoolwork, Caroline did extremely well, qualifying for both the indoor and outdoor track state championships. And she plans to run for Pitt.

“It’s like a metaphor for the concussion,” she said about her chosen sport. “I’m jumping over these hurdles, and at the same time I’m fighting these symptoms.”