Many of the easily quantified personality traits a person had can be altered or changed as a result of a traumatic brain injury (TBI). Personality, memories, patience and temperament can be impaired or change entirely, effectively creating a new person.
Changes caused by traumatic brain injuries can destroy a victim's relationships, work performance, ability to earn an income, independence and general quality of life. Physically, the victim may appear unchanged. However, impatience from family members and business associates may only add to the victim's frustrations.
An experienced Clayton County brain injury lawyer at the Law Office of Shane Smith can pursue a Georgia personal injury claim.
Living with traumatic brain injury
Traumatic injury is sometimes referred to as the death of a person who is still living. Brain injury patient Jane Rosset wrote a 2011 op-ed in the New York Times explaining what she experiences living with traumatic injury. Some of the characteristics she described included:
- Memory loss
"Memories that connected different parts of my life fragmented and vanished. . . . When I see my pre-accident work, I am introduced to it as if for the first time. . . . I am sometimes fed my own resume by strangers in the street."
- Personality change
"People who love me grieve what they claim to experience as the loss of elements of my personality that I cannot recall having been part of me. Others tell me that I seem to have become an altogether different person."
- Confusion
"More than four and a half years post brain damage, memories still do not serenely knit back together as in those nifty 'How the Brain Heals' neurology cartoons. Shards of memories pierce my consciousness before fragmenting and melting into fresh half-syllables. Some memories hover in shadows. Others gouge and flee."
- Irritability
"I am told that I used to be a real 'people person.' Today, however, I can barely stand being around people. And I can get irritable in a nanosecond."
- Neuroplasticity
"The clinical word for what I am describing: diaschisis, sometimes said to be Greek for 'shocked throughout.' She explains that neuroplasticity lets me bypass damaged parts of my brain and forge new neuronal communication routes so I can access, or remember, sensory information that I received as a word, from another place from within my brain and in an entirely different format."
- Physical pain
"My cognitive problems are exacerbated by chronic physical pain from the damage to my nervous system. Glass-shard-wielding fire ants shred my body's meridians. . . . talking about my pain only makes it worse. As do hectic, high-sensory situations, mean people and the electric buzz of lights and computers."
"I broke my leg last year, and it took me and my physical therapist a week to realize it, because my broken leg was unremarkable compared to my chronic neuropathic pain."
- Depression
"It is no wonder suicide remains a significant cause of death among people with a traumatic brain injury diagnosis."
- Isolation
"Traumatic brain injuries destroy connections between and within people — so how are we to build a self-empowering community?"
- Shortage of adequate treatment
"The Defense Department says that, between 2000 and 2010, more than 200,000 service members suffered traumatic brain injuries. Domestic emergency rooms report approximately 1.7 million T.B.I. diagnoses (and 52,000 T.B.I.-related deaths) annually. But very few people with brain injuries receive any sort of treatment beyond acute care."
Shane Smith Law will aggressively pursue a brain injury case to get fair compensation for the victim. Call Clayton County brain injury lawyer Shane Smith to help you get the most compensation possible at (980) 246-2656 today.