The Unfortunate Mysteries Of Brain Injuries
Brian O Sutter
Accident Lawyers
Insurance Laws
Personal Injury
The human brain is an immense and complicated organ, one with well over a dozen specialized areas and which reacts poorly to any amount of tampering. It can change emotional states in an instant by being exposed to nothing more substantial than a spoken word, and a direct injury could potentially change a person’s personality forever.Banging Your Head
While sports, particularly football, tend to get all the media exposure when it comes to concussions and other brain injuries, the majority of all traumatic brain injuries reported in the United States come from car accidents. Your head doesn’t have to impact anything directly to cause a concussion: when your car suddenly decelerates from full speed to a full stop, the momentum transfers to your body. This momentum can swing your head around with real force, causing a whiplash injury to your neck and a less visible injury to your brain.
Whiplash can potentially cause lasting damage to your spinal cord, and while that’s a serious concern, the consequences of a brain injury can be long-lasting, debilitating, and worst of all, misdiagnosed. Between the sensitive nature of the brain and the obvious ethical problems that come with tampering with it, neurology and the study of brain damage is far behind our knowledge of other organs.
Cranial Mysteries
For the most part, if you suffer a brain injury it won’t amount to much more than a mild or moderate concussion. You may lose consciousness for a short period, possibly no more than a second, and afterwards you will feel dizzy, confused, or “senseless” for a period which may last anywhere between a few minutes to a few weeks.
A concussion may be so mild that it doesn’t so much as show up on a CAT or x-ray scan, and so the diagnosing doctor will have to go by your behavior rather than by any harder evidence. However, it’s possible for a lasting or permanent brain injury to pretend to be a harmless concussion. Even in the likelier case that a traumatic brain injury will leave some evidence behind, it’s not necessary to crack or damage the skull to cause severe brain damage. In fact, this ability to hide is the most dangerous trait of brain injuries.
Depending on what part of the brain is injured, there are dozens of possible effects. Damage to the frontal lobe can cause you to lose your inhibitions and your ability to think rationally. Damage to the amygdala can change or even remove your emotional reactions along with your ability to make decisions. If you take a hit to your temporal lobe, you may lose your ability to understand written or spoken languages. And the worst part of all? A brain injury can sometimes wait months or even years before surfacing.
Traumatic brain injuries are hard things to live through, but depending on how you got hit you may be entitled to certain payments made either by the responsible party or by his or her insurance provider. In either case, you may find it helpful to have a lawyer on retainer who is familiar with car crashes and other accidents which can cause brain injuries. Insurance adjusters are typically miserly with their payments, but with the possibility of a lawsuit on the table they often become more agreeable.
If you live, work, or were injured in southwest Florida, particularly near Port Charlotte or Fort Meyers, then please give All Injuries Law Firm a call to receive a free case review. If you need money for medical bills and lost wages, we will do our best to make sure you get fair compensation.