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Brain injuries can be the most insidious devastating types of injuries we see in our
practice.
The
person will look just fine
but may be
so impaired
that it is sometimes referred to as the death of a person who is still living.
Brain injuries can affect a person's thought processes, their memory, impulse control
and many other of functions that we need in daily life.
They personally look just fine to the casual observer
but
academic performance for a young person, job performance for an adult trying to work
marriage, family relationships, and the persons
entire personality may be seriously impacted.
Rates of depression,
alcohol abuse, drug abuse, and incarceration
are much higher for people with brain injuries than for the general population
an particularly if they don't have the resources and treatments and support systems they need.
It's awfully difficult for family members and employers and co-workers to know how to
react
to a person who looks okay but has a brain injury up that produces a loss of verbal
and behavioral inhibition,
short-term memory loss,
irritability,
and a whole raft of other things that may come with it.
The resulting effect can be absolutely is the absolute devastating.
I grew up seeing up close and personal
of the effects of a serious brain injury in one of my grandfathers.
He was a school teacher in the years after world war one
and had a serious brain injury in a train accident.
He wound up
recovered physically but was always
a very peculiar man.
He never return to teaching he spent the rest of his working life stacking the veneer
in a veneer mill
and
interacted with other people and in
unique
peculiar way.
The effects of that brain injury ripple through our family for three generations
--
over the past twenty five years perhaps partly, because of what I saw with my grandpa.
I've worked on a lot of brain injury cases
I worked with a lot of neurologist, neurosurgeons
neuropsychologist, rehabilitation specialist and so forth
trying to get a detailed explanation of exactly what was injured
often with the of the help of the more advanced scans that are now available
to have a picture of
the injury and some instances,
and to help the person get the resources they need, to have the support they need,
in order to live as full
a life as
they can
after a brain injury.