Summary: A traumatic brain injury can change your life forever because it’s often permanent. The long-term effects of TBI not only effects you physically, but emotionally, interpersonally, financially, and professionally.
When someone is slammed around or crushed by the impact of an accident, a traumatic brain injury (TBI) will sometimes result. Traumatic brain injuries are among the most serious injuries anyone can experience and a large majority of them happen on our nation’s roadways.
Motor vehicle TBIs are the leading cause of death for people age 5 to 24. Young adult males are more likely to be permanently brain-injured in a car accident than any other group of people on the road, suffering almost twice as many TBIs and three times as many TBI-related deaths as females.
Beyond car accidents, the other three top causes of TBIs can also involve harm someone else inflicts upon you: collisions with objects, assaults, and fall injuries. For example, imagine that your landlord fails to maintain a poorly-lit, crumbling stairwell and you fall down the stairs and suffer a brain injury. The landlord may be liable for the harmful situation they created on their property.
A long=term effects of TBI can change your life. Here are some of the long-term effects a person with a brain injury may experience.
The Physical Impact of a TBI
A TBI often occurs concurrently with other widespread damage across your body. You may have many types of injuries like broken bones, lacerations, organ damage, and more. On top of all this, you’re suffering a brain injury that limits your body’s ability to handle what’s happening.
People with TBIs typically experience loss of consciousness, nausea, vomiting, drowsiness, speech slurring, dizziness, and poor balance. Moderate to severe TBIs also create permanent physical mobility issues, sensory impairments, and deficits within the body’s critical systems.
Immediately after the accident or over the long term, you may develop problems with your vision, hearing, taste, and smell. For example, people with TBIs sometimes develop a long-term sensation of ringing in the ears along with an aversion to sound and touch.
Long-term cognitive impairments are also common with severe TBIs. Depending upon how exactly your brain was injured, you may have trouble focusing, interpreting other people’s speech, reading words, reacting appropriately to external stimuli, and remembering short-term or long-term events.
Interpersonal and Professional Harm From a TBI
Long-term effects of TBIs can also cause emotional disruptions that make it difficult for the injured person to resume normal daily interactions with people. Your personality may change and become unstable, which impacts your interpersonal relationships.
Psychologists sometimes report that patients experience a TBI-related personality disruption where they previously had a great relationship with their spouse but now have the unshakable feeling that they are married to a stranger. TBIs affect relationships in a wide variety of ways because people with brain damage are prone to heightened levels of fear, distrust, jealousy, and anger, plus a frustrating inability to recognize others’ emotions. Depression and anxiety are also common diagnoses after a TBI.
As you can imagine, these symptoms bleed over into other aspects of a person’s life, including one’s hobbies and job. A person who was extremely successful as a financial executive may find themselves struggling to add two numbers together after a TBI. This can destroy someone professionally and leave them despondent over the loss of a lifelong career.
Sometimes, the impacts are less obvious. A person may be able to function, but they struggle whereas before they did not. Mental or physical strain can cause debilitating headaches that effectively make it impossible to do tasks that were simple before.
Also, long-term effects of TBI’can often get missed in the ER. Emergency Room doctors are focused on things that present an immediate problem to health. If you are foggy and have a headache, they will likely rule out that you have a brain bleed, but often assume that post concussive problems can be handled by other caregivers after you are released. You may go home with a problem that was not diagnosed. It’s imperative that people follow up quickly with their family doctor so these issues can be addressed without delay. Studies consistently show that lengthy delay in treating TBI’s increase the length and severity of the effects.
How long-term effects of TBI Affects You Financially
A study by Northwestern University found that the lifetime financial cost of managing a TBI was between $85,000 and $3 million. Brain injuries that fall on the more costly end of the spectrum often involve long-term problems like chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a neurodegenerative disease that causes severe and irreparable brain damage, which can lead to an early death.
Think about it: What would you do if you or a loved one had a brain injury due to someone else’s negligence? Would you be able to afford hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical bills?
You’d understandably feel angry and want to find some kind of justice. Many people with TBIs and their families opt to start personal injury cases to investigate what happened and seek full and fair compensation.
At McCoy & Sparks, we’re here to help. We’ve represented countless people with TBI’s ranging from mild tbi to severe. We’ve obtained multi-million dollar jury verdicts on cases involving TBI’s, and settled several large value cases involving this type of injury. We have a medical consultant on staff to help us understand your injury, and have the experience in Court to get you full compensation. When someone suffers a TBI in Central Kentucky, we can help investigate the circumstances and determine who’s liable. Contact us today for a free case evaluation, or call us at 1-844-4KY-WINS.
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