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Today is March 24th. At 3:00 this morning in Chicago a CTA train crashed into the end
of the line at O'Hare Airport. It actually went up partially up the escalator. Now, thank
God it was 3:00 in the morning and there were only 30 people potentially hurt. But each
time there is one of these crashes with a bus or a train, and especially a commuter
train, I get re concerned about how serious a risk there is of brain injury in such crashes.
The reason that crashes of things like subway cars, things like El cars, things like rental
car buses is that where in an automobile we get the protection of a seatbelt. We get the
protection of airbags. We get the protection of all those things that are designed to make
vehicles more safely. In a train, in a train car, especially one like a subway car where
all the seats aren't sitting straightforward, we don't have any of those protections. I
printed up a picture off the Internet today of what an, an El train car looks like, and
I, but using this picture I think I can demonstration the problem. In an automobile we have seatbelts,
we all sitting straight up, we have a seatbelt that keeps us as close to this position as
possible. Our shoulder is held, our waist is held. There's some twisting around the
seatbelt, but generally, we're protected. If it's a serious front-end crash, we're also
protected by the airbag that catches our face like a baseball glove would catch a baseball,
but in an, in a commuter train crash all, not all the seats are front and back, there
are no seatbelts and there're probably not, this morning at 3:00 a.m., but there are people
standing. Now, look at how this car is configured. When that crash occurs, people are going to
be driven forward in the car. Um, the train stops, it hits into fixed object and very,
very quickly all the momentum of the train stops. Everybody is, in that veh, in that
car is going to be thrown forward, and they have no protection, there's no airbag, there's
no seatbelt, and what's worse is that the rotation of their head on their body and the
rotation of the brain inside the head is not on the forward and backward axis that we are
genetically engineered to survive. Instead, that force is sidewise and any number of directions.
Further, there are nothing but hard objects to hit inside the car. You're not going to
hit the fro, the seatbelt. You're not going to hit the cushion of the seat in front of
you. You're not going to hit a padded dash. You're gonna be thrown, in all kinds of direction,
and almost everything that you can hit is going to be a hard object. When we talk about
brain injuries in these kinds of crashes, the news coverage is all going to be about
who died and who is seriously injured. The problem is the severity of the brain injuries,
the severity of the head injuries in these kind of crashes may not be apparent by the
time the CTA gets on the news at 10:00 and has a press conference. You're having a bunch
of people treated very quickly altogether at a hospital, and the kind of inquiry we
need to be done to know if there's going to be persisting problems with concussion and
brain injury after this, is going to involve a very detailed examination of how that brain
heals, how that brain recovers over the next few days. Anyone who is in that crash needs
to go back to the hospital tomorrow, regardless of what symptoms they had today, unless there's
no headache, no head pain, no confusion, no symptoms whatsoever. They need to be checked
out tomorrow. They need to be checked out the next day. They need to be treated like
an NFL quarterback would be treated if he had a concussion. Every day they need to be
evaluated, and what's most important is they need to be evaluated for a few of the key
symptoms that are likely to be there tomorrow. The most significant symptom is amnesia. If
there is amnesia, not for the crash itself, but if there's amnesia for the period of time
from five minutes after that crash until they're discharged from the hospital, so the first
few hours after the crash if there's amnesia for that period, that is the most significant
indicator of brain injury. There's a few other symptoms that are important: headache, but
you can head, get headache just from the sore neck, um, dizziness, balance, nausea. But
there's a vague symptom that is increasingly be found in the highest percentage of sport
concussion cases, which should also be considered in about, which is fogginess. It's just like
the brain. It's not just your eyes. It's just the brain is not really focusing on what's
happening. It's just a general feeling of lack of being completely in touch and things
just aren't quite as they should be. Today is Monday. It's less than ten hours after
that crash. Tomorrow on March 25th is when we can really determine if there are significant
brain injuries in this crash.