As Stephanie Zavilla prepared to take her first run on a tubing hill in Grand County, she had no idea her life was about to change.

She was tubing with friends in 2016 when she collided with another person at the bottom of the hill. Zavilla was coming down fast and facing backward when she hit someone lingering in the stop zone. Her head hit the back of that person’s helmet, and the impact knocked Zavilla unconscious. She remembers opting out of wearing a helmet that day because there were not many others wearing them on the hill.

Zavilla spent the next three years searching for relief from the symptoms of her traumatic brain injury.

---

---

Initially, doctors attributed her symptoms to a bad concussion and instructed her to rest. Zavilla said she wasn’t able to do much physically and took several weeks off of work.

She called the first month after the injury “really difficult” and said she was experiencing extreme dizziness, headaches, memory problems and difficulties speaking.

---

---

“It would be either jumbled words or sounds, or it would be something that makes no sense, like completely out of context,” Zavilla said.

She said the worst symptoms improved or dissipated about a month after the injury, so she returned to work.

“It came to the point where I was like, ‘OK, I got to go back to work,’ and that was the decision,” Zavilla said.

She said the choice to return to work was the “kiss of death” for her injury.

As the director of sports performance at the Winter Park Competition Center, Zavilla helps athletes bounce back from mistakes, learn how to handle pressure and develop stress management skills. In addition to managing other elements of sports performance — such as psychology, nutrition and fitness — the team also handles the center’s return-to-sport program, which dictates how and when athletes can return to the snow after an injury.

In returning to work, Zavilla tried the slow approach, working only a few hours here and there.

However, the sudden death of a competition center staff member rocked Zavilla’s world again. Suddenly, she was helping athletes with mental health care as well as dealing with her own feelings of loss over a coworker and personal friend. She found herself working 9- to 10-hour days, which she described as “busy, long and chaotic.”

“I was thrown into a very stressful situation and got into things way too quickly, which put a lot of stress on my brain,” Zavilla said.

The stress only worsened her condition, leading to headaches, nausea, dizziness and memory problems ranging from not being able to recall key events in her life to not being able to remember the names of people.

“I could see who they were, I knew who they were, but I couldn’t connect the dots,” Zavilla said. “I would have really bad issues with balance. Like, trying to kick into my skis, I would stumble. I’d fall.”

Zavilla even developed a stutter from the stress. Once her condition worsened, she decided that it was time to seek medical help again. She visited multiple neurologists, who were quick to attribute her symptoms to migraines. But Zavilla felt like her symptoms were pointing to something else.

“It made me feel invalidated and unheard,” Zavilla said. “I started getting really frustrated.”

A year post-injury, she began experiencing “mini-seizures.”

“It basically felt like energy traveling from behind my left eye, where (the optic nerve) was bruised, across the top of my brain. I would get, like, one (seizure) a minute for several hours until I ran out of energy,” Zavilla said.

In addition to these other symptoms, Zavilla was dealing with mood swings, depression and problems with emotional regulation because of her injury.

“An underestimated symptom of concussion is that disruption to mood and emotion,” Zavilla said. “There were moments where I would feel like I was on top of the world — happy, laughing — and then crying the next moment. Or just feeling these waves of anger that were really disproportionate from the situation.”

It wasn’t until 2018 that she found help when she stumbled upon a company called Resilience Code and met Dr. Chad Prusmack. At the time, the clinic was piloting a program called Concussion Code, which aims to look at concussions in a more holistic way. Zavilla said they assessed everything in her life, from lifestyle to diet.

An MRI revealed several lesions on her brain, and she was diagnosed with post-concussion syndrome. Zavilla cried after hearing the diagnosis.

It was “the most overwhelming sense of relief that somebody was hearing me and validating the struggle that I had been through for the past three years,” Zavilla said about hearing her diagnosis for the first time. “It was an incredible emotional release.”

Soon after, the medical staff wanted Zavilla to begin treatment and asked if she’d be able to move to Denver, where the clinic was based. Since she was working in Winter Park and wasn’t able to relocate, Zavilla began driving down three times a week for therapy.

Just three months after beginning treatment, Zavilla felt like she had her life back.

“My memory started to come back. I wasn’t stumbling all over the place. I wasn’t stuttering — like all these things started to resolve, which was just the most incredible feeling,” Zavilla said.

Even though Zavilla has made tremendous progress, the brain injury still affects her everyday life. She still deals with memory issues, a seizure disorder and other symptoms.

“My memory is still relatively compromised at times, and I have a seizure disorder that I’ll have for the rest of my life,” Zavilla said. “You know, just some things that are kind of lingering reminders.”

Looking back on the injury, Zavilla said she used to question whether a helmet would’ve prevented the concussion. She said a conversation with a doctor made her realize that it might not have changed anything. Helmets do a great job at protecting the skull, but at the speed she was traveling, she likely would’ve still been concussed.

Zavilla has to keep a close eye on her health, what she eats and her stress levels. She also left the experience with a “lower threshold” for risk, but she is back to living and enjoying her life.

“I’m never gonna stop living my life and doing fun things, and those things require risk,” Zavilla said.

When it comes to sharing her story, Zavilla said she feels like she can use her position to help people make healthy choices.

“Concussions are a very serious, real thing that’s common and affects almost everybody. It’s important to take care of it, because we only get one brain, and it can affect you for the rest of your life and set you up for some struggles down the road,” Zavilla said. “Now when I share my story, I feel really great because I feel like I’m in this position where I can use what happened to me to help other people understand and hopefully make the choices that will set them up for success.”

She calls it the “silver lining of a not-so-great situation.”