You are holding the phone, not the injury.

Sometimes the person reading this is not the injured one. You are a parent, a coach, an athletic trainer, a team manager, or the friend still answering their phone at nine at night. You are not the patient, but you are the one holding the phone, and what you do in the next day decides whether this athlete gets a dated exam this week or a story they tell themselves for a month. This entry is the handoff, written small enough to actually use.

The handoff is five things

Their name. A number that actually reaches them, or reaches you if they are a minor. One sentence on what happened and when. Where it hurts today, in their words, not yours. And which of the three rooms is the shorter drive. That is the whole handoff. Anything more is you managing their care, which is not your job and not this desk's.

Call the room first so nobody arrives at a closed door. Every Missouri Injury Clinic room closes from 12 to 2 every day, and O'Fallon runs Wednesday and Friday by appointment only. Then tell the injured person what you told the clinic. A handoff they did not hear about is not a handoff.

The one sentence you must say: head

If the head was involved in any way, a hit, a whip, a moment of blankness, say so in the first sentence of the call, and watch the athlete differently for the next two weeks. The CDC's HEADS UP materials for coaches and parents list the signs that are visible from the outside: appearing dazed, confusion about the assignment or the score, moving clumsily, answering slowly, losing consciousness even briefly, mood or behavior changes, and not recalling events before or after the hit (CDC, HEADS UP: Signs and Symptoms). You will see those before the athlete admits the ones they feel. The head hits entry has the four buckets and the emergency line.

The emergency line, for the adult holding the phone: Chest pain, a sudden severe headache, weakness or numbness on one side, trouble speaking, a loss of bowel or bladder control, or a head injury with vomiting or worsening confusion is an emergency room trip right now, not a call to a clinic. A head injury that is getting worse by the hour is 911, not a clinic, and not a wait-and-see.

The crash handoff

If an athlete was in a car crash, the handoff is the same five things, plus "car crash" in the first sentence, because the auto injury lane has its own timeline. Encourage the athlete, or the family, to write the five-line crash entry from the drive home on the day: date and place, mechanism, head, what changed, any paperwork that exists. That entry is the history they will give at the exam. It is not yours to write for them.

On paperwork: the record from a dated exam is a care document first. If a claim is ever part of the family's story, that dated record is what everyone will ask for, and that is the last thing this desk will say about it. Do not promise an outcome, a schedule, or a dollar figure on anyone else's behalf. Nobody here is a lawyer, and the clinic is a clinic.

What coaches get wrong, honestly

Three things, and they are all understandable. The first is letting the athlete decide. "Are you good?" is a question the culture has trained every athlete to answer yes to, and a coach who asks it is asking for the answer they want. Ask instead what they felt, where, and whether it has changed since, and decide from the answer. The second is the calendar: the tournament is Saturday, and an exam Thursday might produce a finding. An exam does not create an injury. It finds one before it finds you in the third quarter. The third is treating the athletic trainer's note as the exam. A trainer's note is valuable and it goes in the folder the athlete brings to the visit. It is not the dated clinical record with findings and a plan that the record entry describes.

What parents get wrong, just as honestly

Parents tend to either wait for the athlete to complain, which they will not, or to manage the care themselves: the heating pad, the brace from the drugstore, the week off. A week off without an exam is a week of guessing with a nicer name. The useful parent move is the boring one. Write down the date and what happened. Call the room. Drive. Sit in the waiting room. Ask the clinician the four questions from entry one: what did you find, what is the plan, what should change by the next visit, and what would make you send us somewhere else. Write the answers down next to the date.

Then step back

You are getting someone an exam, not managing their care. Once the handoff is made and the athlete has heard it, the entries belong to the athlete and the clinician. Your job becomes the calendar: make sure the dated visits in the plan are in the same calendar as practice, and notice if they start sliding. The comeback middle, as return to play puts it, is where athletes quietly quit the plan, and an adult who notices is worth more than an adult who manages.

The rooms, for the drive

O'Fallon, 2163 West Terra Lane, for St. Charles County and the west. Hazelwood, 14 Village Square Shop Ctr, for north county. Tesson Ferry, 11144 Tesson Ferry Road, Suite 200, for south county. Hours and phones are on the rooms entry. Pick the one you can actually drive to this week, and confirm hours on the call.