Suffering a blow to the head often leads to a mild traumatic brain injury, if not a severe traumatic brain injury. Severe injuries are typically simple to identify, because they cause visible symptoms in their victims that indicate an injury, such as loss of consciousness. Mild Traumatic brain Injuries, or TBIs, may go undiagnosed if the victim does not receive proper medical treatment soon after the injury. This means that a victim may not even realize they have a medical condition until it causes major complications in their personal and professional lives.
Mild TBIs can cause many symptoms, depending on the person. Some head injuries only amount to a big hangover, while others may produce symptoms that make it very difficult to communicate with others, perform simple tasks, or remain calm in the face of frustration.
If you or someone you love recently received a blow to the head, make sure that the victim receives a full medical examination from a professional. A full medical examination helps identify a mild TBI and treat it properly, giving the victim and those around them a better understanding of the symptoms they may face.
Difficulty with simple tasks
When a person suffers a mild TBI, they often find that they can no longer perform simple tasks, even those that they performed easily before the injury. This loss of skills is often very frustrating.
This frustration often compounds because the victim is more volatile, as a result of the injury. A mild TBI tends to scramble the connections in the brain, and skills or memories that were once easy to access may be difficult to find.
In addition, mild TBIs often cause victims to be much more irritable than they were previously. This may look like an emotional outburst of immaturity, but it is not. Outbursts and other volatile reactions may frighten or concern those around the victim, and with good reason, but it is important to remember that these are not conscious choices on the part of the victim, but the symptoms of a brain injury.
Communication problems
Just as mild TBI victims find it difficult to concentrate and focus on a task, they also may face great difficulty understanding what they read or the conversations they have with others. This is sometimes hard to understand, because the victim typically does not lose their understanding of vocabulary words, but does typically lose some of their ability to understand contextual meaning.
Just as someone who is learning a new language may misunderstand nuances in text and conversation in that language, mild TBI victims often cannot correctly interpret the intent of something they read or hear, making communication very difficult.
For many spouses, friends and colleagues, this poses a great challenge. More than a few families have fallen apart because of misunderstandings around a victim’s symptoms, and many mild TBI victims lose their jobs before they fully recover from the injury.
Protecting the victim’s rights
Do not hesitate to seek out the medical care that a victim needs if you or someone you love suffers from a mild TBI, or if you simply suspect a mild TBI occurred. Swift medical intervention can shorten the amount of time that the victim has to deal with the symptoms. The documentation from any and all medical care can serve as the basis for a strong personal injury claim to help cover the costs of medical care and other losses, keeping the rights of the victim secure while they do the hard work of recovery.