If you recently experienced a car accident or suffered a blow to the head some other way, like playing a sport, you may have a very serious injury and not yet know it. Since there are often few direct visual indications of a head injury, it is an easy thing to overlook after an accident.
Furthermore, the symptoms of these injuries do not always present themselves immediately. In many cases, victims of mild traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) do not realize they are seriously injured until significantly after the injury takes place.
This does not mean that your injury is any less serious than another more obvious type of injury. In fact, you may suffer more harshly in some ways because your injury is invisible to your colleagues, friends, and family. While someone with a broken arm or leg is very obviously injured and may receive some deferential treatment, those who suffer brain injuries that don’t completely incapacitate them all at once sometimes find it difficult to explain the matter to their community.
If you believe that you recently suffered a mild TBI, it is crucial that you get proper medical care as soon as possible. The longer you wait to treat your injury, the more difficult it is to heal, and the longer your symptoms may last.
Your injury may affect many areas of your life
Mild TBIs are very serious, despite the “mild” in their name. If it is mild, that mostly means that your brain injury did not leave you in a coma or kill you outright.
Some of the symptoms are fairly easy to observe and correlate to a brain injury, such as ongoing nausea, persistent headaches, or even seizures.
However, many of the symptoms of a mild TBI are subtle and may remain undiagnosed until they have thoroughly dismantled your personal and professional life.
Mild TBIs can affect your cognitive abilities so you find it very difficult to think clearly and become overly irritable at slight frustrations. You may even experience some significant personality changes that you cannot explain or control.
It is also possible that you may lose your ability to understand conversational context, and constantly misinterpret what your colleagues and family mean when having conversations with them.
This confusion can even extend to your comprehension of handwriting, or your ability to write legibly at all. In a broader sense, you feel as though your whole brain is sluggish, as though your head is in a fog.
All or some of these factors can combine to derail your career and destroy your family if you are constantly fighting irritation and misunderstanding those who interact with you while finding it difficult to concentrate on even simple tasks.
To make matters even more dire, the symptoms may last up to a year. It is easy to see how such an injury can truly wreak havoc on every area of your life.
You don’t have to walk through this season alone
It is vital that you understand that you do not have to endure this difficult season alone. Apart from a supportive community, you should consider reaching out to an experienced personal injury attorney who can help you examine the details of your injury and determine if you deserve fair compensation.
The guidance of an experienced attorney can help you validate your injury to your employer and community while ensuring that your rights remain secure as your make a recovery. If you think you may have a Kentucky or Ohio brain injury claim, schedule a free consultation with a Covington or Cincinnati personal injury lawyer at The Lawrence Firm, PSC as soon as possible.