2009-02-01&02-03 我要捐出我的大脑（在线收听）

Ted Johnson does not hide in the sun anymore. His head, once as battered as the helmet he wore as a New England Patriots linebacker for ten seasons, no longer hurts every day. 

Get a nick there.

But it took three years to stop.

I got some championships out of it. But, I don't know, at the end of the day when you are in that doctor's room, you know, those rings aren't really worth it.

Super Bowl memories are only worth it, if you can remember them.

I almost forgot what I was like before. Before the hits, l couldn't remember, and I just lost myself for the last three years.

Johnson once laid such a hard hit. He cracked an opponent's helmet in two. But after too many such collisions, it was his suddenly solitary world that was facing fracture. Considering electric shock therapy as the last resort, Johnson happened to meet Chris Nowinski, a former football player at Harvard who turned to professional wrestling after college.

I was telling him, I just don't know what was wrong with me. He goes, well, I'm gonna tell you my symptoms and see if they match with, you know, see if you recognize any of them, mental fatigue, physical fatigue, irritability, the sleep disorder, the cognitive deficiencies, Do any of those match? I was like, all of them match.

I realized when I was visiting a lot of doctors, they weren't giving me very good answers about what was wrong with my head. So I got every original study ever done on multiple concussions and what it does to you. And I read everything, and I realized that there was a ton of evidence showing that concussion leads to depression. Multiple concussions can lead to Alzheimer's disease.

Nowinski led Johnson to Dr. Robert Cantu who diagnosed the linebacker's post-concussion syndrome but also warned him of a bigger threat, chronic traumatic encephalopathy also called CTE, which seems to cause early onset of Alzheimer's disease in athletes who suffered multiple concussions.

the really terrible thing is a lot of these people have this progressive even after they stop the activities that caused it.

The fact of the matter was that these guys were dying because they play sports, 10, 20 years before.

Chris Nowinski and Dr. Cantu joined to form the Sports Legacy Institute, which asks athletes to donate their brains upon death for research into CTE. Johnson was one of the first to agree.

My main reason feeling talking about this is to help those, you know, help the guys that were already retired and didn't know what's wrong that are getting divorced, going bankrupt, can't work, depressed, don't know what's wrong with them.

I see new stories everyday about guys, you know, falling on hard times or getting arrested doing crazy things as you think. And that used to be a guy who had it all together. And, you know, I'm wondering if concussions had played a role.

And some day, one of those guys could be Ted Johnson, better now, but still a great risk to get CTE.

I just get those thoughts out of my head. I've, you know, I've filled my quota for bad days in this lifetime in the last three years.