Being hurt in a bicycle accident or motorcycle accident can be distressing enough. Add TBI, or traumatic brain injury, to the picture, and your life stands to change even more. Even relatively minor cases may mean months of hard work, recovery and lost income that require a lot of compensation.
The most serious cases of TBI could lead to ongoing behavioral and personality changes, strokes, communication deficits, cognitive deficits or even death. Here is a very broad overview of why outcomes with TBI are difficult to predict but almost always result in major life changes.
Coma
The injured person could be in a coma for days, weeks or even months after the accident. When this is the case, doctors can, at best, only guess at what the patient’s life after coming out the coma would be like. The person may never be able to live independently again. Or the person could, at some point, be able to live independently with a lot of built-in support.
The longer the coma, the more complicated the recovery tends to be. That said, people who were in relatively short comas can have some of the worst injuries and the most arduous recoveries.
Wait and see
Age, the location of the injury (or injuries) and whether previous trauma was present can be important factors affecting the outcome of a specific TBI patient. Even then, clear outcomes are usually not possible to predict. For example, a patient might seem to be doing well for a few months but then plateau and not improve much after that. On the other hand, someone could finally start to recover significantly, say, 10 years after an injury.
The brain is a complex organ, and any trauma to it can prove devastating. The uncertainty for the patients and their loved ones certainly is stressful, and an attorney can help get needed compensation so that those affected can focus more fully on recovery.