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Can You Fully Recover from a Brain Injury?

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Can you fully recover from a brain injury

Our bodies constantly adapt to our environment and work around the clock to fight off infections and illness. When you get a fever, you might feel miserable, but that clearly indicates your body’s attack systems are on the job. What your body can’t always protect you against is blunt force trauma. When struck with an object anywhere on your body, you can suffer internal injuries, and that is especially true when you’re struck in the skull and suffer a traumatic brain injury or TBI.

How serious are traumatic brain injuries? According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there were approximately 214,110 TBI-related hospitalizations and 69,473 TBI-related deaths across the country in 2020 and 2021. Being diagnosed with a TBI can be highly stressful. The first question you’ll ask is, “Can you fully recover from a brain injury?” Like the injury itself, that answer is complicated.

What is a TBI?

As Johns Hopkins Medicine reports, a TBI can be a closed brain injury or a penetrating injury. With a closed brain injury, the brain is rapidly shoved forward and then backward, but the skull isn’t broken. This type of injury often shows up in car accident victims. With a penetrating injury, there is a break in the skull, such as with broken glass or hitting the steering wheel.

A TBI is typically classified into three categories:

  • Mild
  • Moderate
  • Severe

With a mild TBI, you could experience a concussion and a few seconds of unconsciousness. A severe TBI can put you into a coma for more than six hours. No matter the level, you could be dealing with a wide array of simultaneous symptoms, including the following:

Cognitive Deficits

Cognitive deficits refer to how your brain processes information after the injury. A TBI can mean experiencing confusion, shortened attention span, memory problems, and amnesia. You can also start to struggle with solving problems, understanding abstract concepts, and with your sense of time and space.

Motor Deficits

A TBI can directly impact your motor abilities. That can lead to paralysis or weakness, poor balance, decreased endurance, tremors, problems with swallowing, and poor coordination.

Perceptual or Sensory Deficits

If you experience perceptual or sensory deficits after a TBI could mean changes in your hearing, vision, taste, smell, and touch. You can also experience a loss of sensation or a heightening of sensation.

Communication and Language Deficits

Patients diagnosed with TBI can also deal with difficulty with speaking, understanding speech, reading, or writing.

Additionally, you can experience impaired abilities to carry out basic living skills like dressing, bathing, and eating. There could also be ongoing issues with maintaining interpersonal relationships.

Traumatic Brain Injury Recovery Prospects

The good news is that medical professionals are well aware of all of these potential symptoms and have developed effective forms of therapy that can help with many of the challenges. How long will it take to recover? All of those therapies involve activating the neuroplasticity network in your brain.

The Cleveland Clinic explains neuroplasticity as “your brain’s ability to absorb information and evolve to manage new challenges.” With a traumatic brain injury, your neuroplasticity network is disrupted, which means you have to create new connections and pathways.

Think of the challenge as learning to ride a bike again. You might have first learned to ride a bike when you were 10. Twenty years later, if you take up riding again, it will take a few moments to remember what it means to balance, pedal, and brake. That is your brain recalling those functions. With TBI therapy, you’ll be put through exercises that help your brain relearn all the things you’ve lost because of the broken connections.

Your prescribed therapies include working out at a rehabilitation center and practicing at home. How long you are required to keep up with this therapy depends on the extent of your injuries.

Who Pays for Your Therapy?

Of course, with all of these therapies, there will be costs. Your medical insurance might have a cut-off. That means you might have to go out of pocket for your rehabilitation. There is also the consideration for lost work. If your brain injury prevents you from returning to your job while you recover, you deserve to be compensated for those lost wages. If you can’t return to work, you are also entitled to seek future earning losses.

Who pays for your therapy and lost wages? If your TBI was caused by another person’s negligence, then they should pay. That would apply to a car accident or slipping on a wet floor in the grocery store.  The attorneys at McCoy & Hiestand, PLC, can help you find compensation. We’re here to help you file your insurance claim or hold the accountable party liable in a civil trial. We have the experience and knowledge to help you with those options. Recovery from any brain injury is going to be a challenge. Financial burdens should not be part of the equation when you’re entitled to a remedy.

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