When my seventeen-year-old granddaughter was brain injured in a serious motor vehicle accident on a sunny Sunday morning a few years ago, I learned how important it is to try to prevent such injury, and how vital it can be from the first moments of the dreaded diagnosis to fight proactively for the best treatment available. The very words, “traumatic brain injury,” make something inside us curdle like bad food. What we don’t realize is the enormity of the statistics and the validity of our fears.

Every fifteen seconds someone in the U.S. suffers a traumatic brain injury. Every five minutes one of those inured dies, and another is permanently disabled. Every year, brain injury disables 20 times more people, mostly children and young adults, than spinal cord injury, CP, MS, and MD combined!

Most traumatic head injury in children is caused in sports or play situations. On playground equipment, in diving and swimming accidents, on ski slopes, hockey, basketball and soccer fields, as well as in simple falls around the home, children encounter blows to the head that can cause the brain to seriously vibrate or otherwise move on its stem. Swelling of the brain, bleeding into the brain and fractures to the skull put the child at great risk.

Bicycling, football, roller blading and skateboarding are responsible for a huge portion of the traumas to children’s heads, and it is general knowledge that protective and adequate helmets must be worn when children participate in these activities. Headgear for other sports is not a bad idea either, and certainly seat belt use and abstinence from drugs and alcohol while driving save thousands from more severe injury.

If my granddaughter had not been wearing a seatbelt she may not have survived. Educattion to prevent serious debilitation from head injury is vital. But if that nightmare moment ever comes, despite our best care, and we must hear that our loved one has TBI, we need to know that, according to the Brain Injury Foundation, only one in 20 brain-injured persons receives adequate rehabilitation. Lives are wasted, untold personal tragedies abound, and the economic drain on society catapults.

Patient advocates need to be relentless in the crucial early days, for example, insisting on accurate diagnosis and appropriate therapies, ensuring adequate continued treatment and preventing premature discharge. Parents should leave no stone unturned if an attending neurologist says “everything is fine now,” because, while the immediate threat to further damage, particularly swelling and cranial bleeding, may no longer be a factor, other health professionals know more about rehabbing the brain injured person.

Services and support systems for early and extended care are vital. Call Rehabilitation Centers and hospitals, ask about care for even what seems to be slight residual aftereffects. Explore the possibilities for needed help after discharge, for example with Occupational, Speech, Physical and other therapies. Call a local branch of The Brain Injury Foundation, and if you can, find an advocate, such as a lawyer-social work specialist who can guide family and patient intheir search for services that are or may become necessary. Teen-agers or older children may especially require counseling in the days, weeks and months following a brain injury, depending on the degree of severity. Such services are costly, and many families convince themselves, unnecessary, in order to avoid costly expenditures that worry about.

Err on the side of caution, and provide the utmost in care for the head-injured child. Educate yourself and keep your child’s opportunities maximized. And before such a horrific injury occurs, consider helmets, and safer sports activities. The human brain controls all our human activity, from cognitive to physiological to emotional and moral actvity. Safeguard it with your best efforts.

My granddaughter started college a few months after her injury, completed college, and is on her way to becoming a contributing member of society. Without adequate care, she may not have fared as well. Be prepared, and learn everything you can to protect your child’s future.

Ruzzel Walsh
AZ injury lawyer

Source: http://www.essortment.com/all/childheadinju_rfxb.htm