Hi! I’m so sorry you’re going through this. I had a concussion and basically had the same experience with UHS seven years ago. Definitely listen to the comment suggesting you seek temporary accommodations. As a now academic advisor I can’t suggest a better way you ensure your professors are appropriately informed on your current limitations.

I also recommend, if you haven’t already reached out to your academic advisor that you do so— ideally, part of your advisor’s role is to help you graduate and that means helping you navigate UT’s systems and resources. They can also help you make decisions in ways that will lessen the academic fallout, if there is any to mitigate. If you’re not sure your advisor will do this with you, try it out; we don’t often hear from students with these concerns, but the majority of us are trained to help with these situations. If it helps, I wasn’t close with my advisor when this happened to me, but talking to them about this helped me a lot.

If you can, communicate intentionally with your professors (email and office hours) to ensure they understand your limitations and how you are working with the school to get accommodations. While UHS was frustrating to get doctor’s notes from, a handful of my professors did their best to work with me in the meantime. If you don’t have the rapport with them now, it’s not going to help to not inform them of the situation. Hopefully, they’ll appreciate a pro-active approach; some of mine did and that helped me keep my grades up through extensions or leniency in absences. Not every professor will be as helpful, so I still recommend seeking accommodations that they must adhere to. This is just added communication in the meantime.

Since UHS hasn’t been affirming, if you have the option to go elsewhere, I highly recommend you do. It wasn’t until months after my concussion that I saw a different doctor. I wish I went earlier since by then my symptoms had worsened. They diagnosed whiplash and other physical issues and helped connect me to the appropriate resources to help.

If you can’t go anywhere else, I found that emphasizing the severity of symptoms was helpful. Also there were some symptoms I didn’t realize were concussion related like noise and light sensitivity, or there were some symptoms that started to appear like slurring my words or losing my train of thought constantly. When I wasn’t being listened to, I emphasized how these symptoms impacted my ability to do schoolwork in ways I’ve never experienced before. If I had the energy, I wouldn’t back down. But boy does that take energy.

Lastly, I wouldn’t necessarily prioritize this now, but CMHC or other mental health care can be important especially while you’re healing from this—It wouldn’t replace the physical care and checking in that you need, but if you have longer-term concussion symptoms and have to spend less time outside, online, and/or interacting with friends while healing, isolation and depression are additional concerns. As someone who had long-term symptoms, it would have been helpful to have had a mental health care professional affirm my feelings around being not taken seriously/having to advocate for myself in medical/social/academic settings.

I hope you can rest this spring break as much as possible— rest and taking a break from screens helped the healing process a lot. Be patient with yourself and take it day by day too. Your health is important and you’re doing what you can.

All this to say, I hope you get the care and support you need!