Brain Injuries Hurt In More Ways Than One
Brian O Sutter
Personal Injury
With most other injuries that are sustained in accidents, such as a car accident, or a slip and fall in a commercial space like a shopping mall, or amusement park, an injury to a single organ is straightforward. A broken arm means that there’s a loss of mobility in that limb, and recovery may require a cast, or even pins in the arm depending on the extent of the damage. However, everyone knows exactly what to expect from a broken arm, or liver damage, or a punctured lung.The brain, however, is an entirely different story. As the literal nerve center of the human body, multiple functions are regulated by this single organ, meaning that any injury to it can be difficult to predict because there isn’t just one possible side-effect. Some of the consequences a victim brain injury runs the risk of experiencing are:
Mobility Impairment
It is the brain that issues the “orders” to other limbs in the body to move when a person wishes to walk, run, text a message on the phone, or lift a fork to eat a meal. A brain injury can have a range of different effects on a person’s mobility. It may result in less precise movement, such as a loss of fine motor control in the hands, or it can result in partial or total paralysis of a limb, denying the use of legs or arms.
Speech Impairment
The brain is also where our ability to communicate is located. Depending on the type of injury, being able to speak to other people may be impaired by mobility, such as a loss of fine control over mouth movements, resulting in slurred speech. Or, the injury may directly affect the speech center, making it difficult for a person to think of and form words and coherent sentences, even though vocal cords, mouth, and tongue are unaffected.
Cognitive Impairment
The brain is also the center of memory, thought, reasoning, and deduction. So, once again, depending on where a brain injury is sustained, a person’s cognitive ability can be temporarily or permanently crippled. It’s not unusual, for example, for people that sustain a concussion to have no memory of events leading up to, and shortly after the concussion occurs.
However, permanent cognitive damage can do anything from cause amnesia, so a person has no memory of their identity, to an inability to retain short term memories, to even a reduction in the ability to focus and concentrate on one thing or hold concepts in the headlong enough to act on them, such as performing math functions, being able to understand how to play a musical instrument.
Emotional Impairment
A very unpredictable side-effect can be the crippling of emotional control. Brain injury victims can find themselves plagued with chronic depression that has no source, or even wild, uncontrollable mood swings, ranging from manic cheer to crippling anxiety in the space of minutes. It can make living a normal life nearly impossible.
This is why people who are the victims of such injuries due to negligence need special medical attention. If someone else’s negligence is the cause of the injury, talk to a traumatic brain injury attorney to find out the best way to proceed.