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Personal Injury Law Blog

What are the signs of a traumatic brain injury?

If you’ve ever had a bad headache, you understand how uncomfortable it can be. You might be the type of person who has certain food allergies, which produce symptoms that include head discomfort. Some people suffer from migraine headaches throughout their lives. There are other types of situations and issues that can cause head pain to develop, such as illness or injury. Especially if you’ve recently been in a collision, for instance, it’s important to be able to recognize the signs of a traumatic brain injury (TBI).

While you might assume that, if you have injured your brain, you would know it right away, this is not always the case. In fact, a TBI isn’t always immediately apparent. Symptoms might experience a delay, and you might not realize there’s a problem until hours or even days or weeks after the trauma occurred.

TBIs often occur in motor vehicle collisions

There are any number of incidents that can result in a TBI, one of which is a motor vehicle collision. If your head hits the dashboard or window, or is violently shaken forward and back or side to side upon impact, it can cause a brain injury. If you were to suffer a severe or life-threatening injury, you might fall unconscious due to blunt force trauma and swelling in your brain.

However, it’s also possible that you’d still be awake and able to carry on a conversation while still having suffered a TBI. This is why it’s so important to closely monitor your condition in the hours and days that follow a car accident.

Symptoms that should raise concern about TBI

Being in a motor vehicle collision can leave you sore and distressed. It takes time to recover. As time passes, however, you should begin to feel a bit better each day. If you’re not feeling better, it’s important to determine why. The following list shows symptoms that suggest an underlying TBI, which would be reason to seek further medical treatment:

It’s always best to return to the hospital or your primary care physician to report such symptoms. If they rule out TBI, then they can perform tests and ask questions to help correctly diagnose what might be causing your symptoms. If you do have a TBI, the sooner you get treatment, the better.

Who pays for your medical bills if another driver caused your TBI?

Driver negligence is one of the most common causes of motor vehicle collisions in South Carolina. If the driver who hit you was distracted or intoxicated, and the evidence shows that his or her negligence was a direct cause of the collision that resulted in your TBI, there’s no reason you should have to carry the full financial burden of medical bills and other expenses associated with your condition.

Many recovering accident victims seek restitution in civil court by filing personal injury claims against those deemed responsible for their injuries.