A heavy bump to the head was all it took. Helen Tufui stumbled and whacked her head on the door frame as she sprinted down her hallway.
It was an accident at home that could happen to anyone – but the effects of that knock on the head continued to plague her for the months to come.
"It was like someone had hit a reset button in my brain, everything just immediately stopped in my head," she said.
It wasn't until a week later, while playing netball, that her symptoms were revealed. Nauseous, with a pounding headache and her vision disturbed, Tufui felt the full effects of her head injury. As a professional physiotherapist, she knew something wasn't right.
For the next nine months, those same symptoms kept cropping up, affecting her everyday life.
"It just really drags you down. You have no energy and simple tasks are really hard to face, let alone do," she said.
Along with the pain, fatigue was one of the worst symptoms. She was lethargic and even performing simple tasks was difficult for her.
Fortunately, there was a path to recovery, albeit unexpectedly. Sitting in her car at a traffic light one day, Tufui was prodding around her neck when she hit a spot that reproduced her headache symptoms.
Her professional physiotherapy knowledge made her think there could be a link between her neck and her symptoms. After a bit of research, her suspicions were confirmed.
"Everything just fell into place. I found that the upper neck was the cause of a lot of pain, for myself and many others," she said.
It was this discovery that led to the creation of The Headache Clinic. After training at the Watson Headache Institute in Australia,Tufui returned to Invercargill and established her business. In seven years, Tufui has grown The Headache Clinic to five locations across New Zealand with 13 staff.
"Being able to help people is an amazing feeling," she said. "Often when patients are coming to the clinic, they're exploring the last of their options to reduce or alleviate their headaches and migraines. "Providing effective treatment really is life-changing for them.
"These are people who have lived with headaches for 20-plus years, who are fatigued, unable to work and concentrate. So when you take that pain away, they're like a new person."