If you suffer from a traumatic brain injury (TBI), it can certainly seem like a long-term disability. Maybe you have extreme sensitivity to lights and sounds, so it’s hard to be in social situations and you can’t return to work. Or maybe you have trouble with your memory or physical issues, such as trouble balancing.
In some cases, your symptoms may fade with time. You need to take time to rest and recover as your brain heals, even after you get out of the hospital. Over the next few weeks, your brain could heal, and your traumatic brain injury may recover to a point that you can return to work. But it’s also possible that some of these symptoms will last. These symptoms could become long-term issues or could even last for the rest of your life, leading to a disability.
Why does this happen?
This happens because the brain can’t always heal correctly, especially if there is severe damage that leads to the death of brain cells. These neurons are with you from birth, and your brain generally can’t create any new ones. So severe damage can sometimes be addressed with new neural pathways and connections, but it may be impossible for your body to replace any brain cells that were lost in the accident.
As such, it becomes very hard even for medical professionals to predict how much healing you’ll see. A lot of the potential healing will happen over the first six months to a year. After that, it’s very common for things to plateau, and the healing rate will slow or stop entirely.
If this means that you’re now going to have long-term symptoms, you may never be able to return to work or you may need medical assistance in the future. In this sense, a brain injury can become a life-altering disability, and you must know what legal steps to take.
