About
Built by a survivor, for grapplers.
Why this site exists
In July 2026 I spent about 24 hours in the hospital, where a CT angiogram found a dissection of my right internal carotid artery — a tear in the inner wall of one of the two main arteries feeding the brain — with a small pseudoaneurysm, a bulge where blood pushed into the injured wall. I got lucky. My brain MRI was clean. No stroke. It was caught before it became the worst day of my life instead of just a very bad one.
I went home with a baby aspirin, a follow-up scan on the calendar, and a list of restrictions. I chose to go further than my discharge instructions required: a full pause on training — no rolling, no drilling, no mat time — until imaging confirms the artery is healing. Not because I’m done with jiu-jitsu. The opposite. I still intend to earn my black belt and teach someday, and I’d rather lose a few months than lose the next twenty years.
Then I did what you probably did to land here: I searched. And what I found was thin and scattered. A handful of published case reports. One researcher’s collection of survivor stories spread across blog posts and YouTube interviews. A private Facebook group. All of it valuable — some of it made a scary month a lot less lonely — but none of it was the thing I actually needed at 2am: one public place that explains this injury in grappler’s terms, shows real cases side by side, and tells you what the road back has looked like for people like you. Nobody can even say how often this happens to us, because nobody is counting.
So this site is what I wanted to find. Plain-language explanations of carotid and vertebral artery dissection and why grappling puts specific forces on those vessels. A registry of anonymized cases, so patterns become visible — to grapplers, to coaches, and to the doctors treating us who may have never rolled a day in their lives. And honest accounts of recovery and return-to-training decisions, including the hard cases and the ones, like mine so far, that were caught in time.
One thing this site is not: an argument against jiu-jitsu. I love this sport. The goal is more informed grapplers, faster diagnoses, and more of us still on the mats at sixty.
If you’re having stroke symptoms right now — face drooping, arm weakness, slurred speech, sudden vision loss, sudden severe headache — stop reading and call 911. Nothing on this site is medical advice. I’m a grappler who lived through this, not a doctor.
Who runs it
I’m John — a jiu-jitsu practitioner and carotid dissection survivor. I built and run this site myself, and I maintain the registry personally.
Contact: john@bjjdissection.org for questions, corrections, story submissions, or if you’re a clinician or researcher interested in the registry data.
How the registry is moderated. Every submission is reviewed by a human — me — before anything appears on the site. Nothing auto-publishes. I edit only to remove identifying details or clarify terminology, never to change the medical substance of what someone reported. If a submission is ambiguous or seems off, I follow up before publishing (if contact info was provided) or leave it out. I don’t publish speculation about specific gyms, coaches, or training partners.
What “anonymized” means here. Published registry entries never include names, usernames, gym or team names, locations, or exact dates. The form has no location field at all. Ages appear in ranges and injury dates as month and year only. Free-text details that could identify someone — competition results, viral posts, unusually specific circumstances — are removed or generalized. If you include contact information with a submission, it’s used only to verify or clarify your entry and is never published or shared. You can request edits to or deletion of your entry at any time, no explanation needed.
What the registry is and isn’t. It’s self-reported data, collected to make an invisible injury visible. It can’t establish how common dissection is in grappling or prove what causes any individual case — that takes formal research, which I hope this data eventually helps motivate.
Medical disclaimer
This site is educational only. Nothing here is medical advice, and nothing here can tell you what is safe for your body. Every injury is different. Decisions about diagnosis, treatment, and returning to training belong to you and your own medical team.
If you think you may have a dissection or are having warning-sign symptoms right now, call emergency services now. Do not wait, and do not use this site instead of emergency care.
Privacy
The case registry is designed so that identifying information cannot be collected: no names, no birth dates, no exact injury dates, no gym names, and no location at all. Ages are ranges and dates are month-and-year only.
Every submission is human-reviewed before publication, and anything identifying in a free-text story is removed. A verification email, if provided, is never displayed, never exported with case data, and deleted on request. The full policy lives at privacy and disclaimer.